no worries jay you're a backpacker so what you have to do

Were those standard kettle bell swings or the overhead 'american' variety?

snatch - 125kg
Clean and Jerk - 155kg
in training but I have pretty much become a 77kg/85kg lifter now


Jay, in Leeds you also have Andy Bolton's gym which maybe a place you want to consider
good luck

very nice.. would be cool if you would post some vids

here is our latest camp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNp7NXAojZg

Overhead swings.

Todays WOD:



I didn't hang around for it since i didn't want to do thrusters with my knee pain. I posted on the crossfit injury boards about it.

Went down before the WOD to do some mobility work and practiced double unders. Got my first one w/ being able to carry on skipping afterwards then got 7 in a fashion of single, single, single, double repeat which felt good considering i couldn't even skip 4 weeks ago. Learning DUs though does seem like doing crossfit for the sakes of crossfit, not sure how they could overlap to much else.

Thursday is a rest/catch up/practice day every week at the gym so i'm going to do this WOD they did a while ago.

2011 CrossFit Games on ESPN2

what affiliate do you go to

he said Crossfit Leeds iirc earlier in the thread

Yea Leeds.

Thursday: bunch of mobility as per usual. Practised push press for 3 sets of 5 at 40kg, my strict press is at 3 x 5 x 47.5 so still a lot of room for improvement.

I wanted to do that WOD I posted but they put another option on the white board that a lot of UK affiliates were syncing together to do.

Start with 1 burpee then row as far as possible until the clock hits 1 minute, then do 2 burpees, back to rowing as far as possible, 3 burpees at 2 mins, back to rowing and so on. The goal is to row 2km before the burpees beat you by taking up your whole minute of time. If that happens you take your distance rowed. Only the gym owner of our affiliate completed it at dead on 13 minutes. Myself and a handful of others got 1600m, one person got 1850m. Going to revisit this workout in 2 months.

Today: Deadlift for warms up then 5 x 1 x 120kg.

The 2nd WOD contained a bunch of squat positions so I avoided them for my knees sake. The 1st WOD was 1 mil run, which i did in 5:58. That should have been 10 seconds faster with better splits but i've never done a timed mile before. I was surprised at how difficult it was to break 6 min/mile esp since I have a goal of a sub 18 3 mile. I also have the London Marathon in April and the gym record for the mile is a shockingly high 5:45 so will add in low intensity running to pick all these 3 off.

the burpee/row thing sounds fun... I think I would be able to do 400m or something like that

It was easily the worst I've felt from exercise in a long time. I was holding back being sick on the last set of burpees. For about 2 rounds before I finished I was in eyes closed just keep moving mode.

FWIW you need hold about a 1:45/500m pace with fast burpees to finish it. I think you'd get a lot more than 400m with the first 4 rounds alone you'd be rowing at least 2:20/500m pace for about 3.5 minutes so there's 760 metres, after that it gets exponentially harder every round though. I'm sure smileyEH, Jaysick, J Brown etc would have no trouble in finishing though.

Here's the run WOD and the following WOD i skipped out on:


SU = Single Unders but double the required amount. It was switched to being a partner WOD so it was 3 minutes rest (while your partner did the round) rather than 1 minute. Still 5 rounds each.

The gym's doing fight gone bad today but i had a long degen poker session so will be doing that thursday. Looking forward to doing a bench mark WOD.

Today's WOD:


First time doing sumo deadlifts. Weights (kg) were 40 60 80 100 100.

Scaled the WOD down to 90kg and single unders. This WOD was A LOT of fun. Loved doing touch and go deadlifts. It felt like I kept solid form throughout.

Surprisingly it was the press ups that slowed me down. For my rounds of press ups I did 15, 15, 8 and 7, 5 and 5 and 5, and then on my final round it was 4 3 3 and then just singles to get the last 5 out. I was star fished out on the floor waiting for my forearms to rejuvenate.

I'm getting more double unders now. I can go somewhat unbroken doing 3 x singles then double, repeat. My jumping style is inefficient I hear though, so will work on that once I can go unbroken.

I want to start greasing the groove on press ups, air squats, pull ups, lunges w/ weight overhead.

On top of that I still need to practice Olympic lifts. And more mobility stuff and more gymnastics stuff, handstand press ups and muscle ups are still milestones i'd like to get. All this makes it easy to spend 2 hours in the gym for a < 10 minute WOD but i enjoy being there, making progression and seeing what's happening.

is it common to refer to push ups as press ups?

in england.

Yes old chap, it's press up in the Queen's English.

Today's WOD:


Pretty easy WOD, we got 14 rounds + 2 burpees. Hard to get more rounds without being very good at pushing the kettlebell down from the top. I practiced power cleans rather than doing The Bear as I can't squat with my knee. It's getting worse and starting to hurt in general, i have a physio session on Monday w/ a physio for the Great British weight lifting squad, so hoping for better advice than 'lol what? just don't squat.'

If it doesn't hurt doing wall balls then it's Fight Gone Bad WOD tomorrow.

Do you read forging elite sarcasm? its pretty funny http://www.forgingelitesarcasm.com/

Yep. I absolutely love it.


The world’s most famous kip.

Did Fight Gone Bad got a measly 245 reps. Wall balls and Box Jumps are the stations to rack up points but being a super weak squatter meant the first round of wall balls killed me right away.

1 minute per station, 3 rounds, 1 minute rest between rounds:

Wall-ball: 20 pound ball, 10 ft target. (Reps)
Sumo deadlift high-pull: 75 pounds (Reps)
Box Jump: 20″ box (Reps)
Push-press: 75 pounds (Reps)
Row: calories (Calories)

Everything about this sucked. My clean practice is laughable, i'm reverse curling it every time. My thrusters suck because of bad wrist position, on my front squat set up i can't get all my fingers underneath the bar so i have to readjust everything on the way up in the press, my front squat sucks anyway because my knee sucks. The WOD sucked because i undoubtedly consumed more calories from alcohol than food in the previous 4 days and stupidly running 5 miles before the WOD helped my time suck.

Because of all that i switched to 20kg KBs and did more of a push press than a thruster.

All that aside i'm looking forward to tomorow's WOD:

I did a Krav Maga seminar at the gym on Saturday. It was extremely interesting. It was all based around defusing the situation as soon as possible and then getting away. We did lots of common preemptive moves and chokes or attacks for early in the fight. Then they taught us clear, control, counter moves for knife and gun situations. I'd be interested in doing more of it in the future. Obviously after only one seminar I don't imagine much of what was learnt would come intuitively to me in a high stress situation other than a fast 40 meter dash.

what is your clean and jerk max?

Super jelly as I've been itching too try cross fit for a while now(don't have near the right set ups at the various gyms I have acess too).
There's no way that 5:45 mile is correct for a crossfit gym!? I thought these workouts are big time cardio intensive?
My workouts this year had been cardio focused and I was right at 5minute miles before tweaking my knee and being annoyed at how far my weight had dropped...so back too SS and mixing in weird workouts similar too crossfit the best I can.

7kg female training bar.