I used to be called Curtains, but some jerk hacked my account so now I'm curtainz.

I started Crossfit in July 2012. Had no intention of getting much better at it but seemed like a fun thing to investigate, since every other attempt to exercise regularly failed miserably. Note that I have absolutely no history of regular athletic activity. For a while I kinda just went thru the motions, going to maybe 3-4 classes per week. Had some shoulder injury thing that killed me from Oct-Dec or so, and basically was doing ok, but no illusions of grandeur.

BUT IN APRIL 2013 my girlfriend moved in with me and suddenly I had lots more time. I started going 5-6 times per week minimum, and started improving lots! Now I am completely and totally obsessed and have made pretty big gains in the past few months

Here are my crossfit stats:

1. I basically eat whatever I want, but for the most part I'm reasonable. Why do I do this? Because I continue to get better at what seems like an acceptable rate, so until this improvement stalls, I'm not going to start eating paleo or whatever. It seems like whatever I'm doing is working fine for now.

2. I take very few rest days. I basically listen to my body. If it feels super sore I don't work out. This is almost never the case. I attribute it to my super stressfree lifestyle, ability to always get lots of sleep, not working much, the fact that my gym programs responsibly and etc etc. Most days off only happen due to chance (ie I'm traveling or something). I think the proof is the fact that I almost never have an "off" day, where my output is much lower than usual. It actually happened only twice that I can recall. One time it was severe when I back squatted after a metcon from the day before that involved like a billion airsquats. Somehow despite having a BS PR of 290 lbs at that time, I had trouble doing 255. Normally I never have the slightest trouble squatting 5-10 lbs less than whatever my PR is.

The second time I was just kinda sore from taking two classes the previous day...and had trouble with muscle-ups. Those were basically the only two times I ever noticed any effect from soreness.

3. I want to get better but also want to have fun. I love metcons, I would cry without being able to do them on a regular basis because I like trying to get high scores!

That is all. My strength used to be my strength, because I was bad at all the bodyweight movements and didn't have amazing cardio, however for a random person I think my strength was ok. Now I think it's the reverse.....my strength is my limiting factor, and if I can fix that I'll be a lot better at Crossfit. Also I suck at Olympic lifts and have like no training at them, which I'm about to fix by getting weekly private lessons at them and stuff.

In an upcoming post I will put all my weightlifting stats or other useful information. (ie things I am good/things I suck at).

Oh also annoying unsolicited advice about the following things:

1. What I should eat
2. How it's super important that I take more rest days
3. How bad Crossfit is

Will annoy me. Just a heads up!

Here are all my awesome stats. I expect some of these to go up real soon since the Crossfit Total is in 10 days, especially the Deadlift

My weight: 175 lbs
My age: 34 years old

Back Squat: 305 lbs
DeadLift: 375 lbs
Strict Press: 155 lbs (Have been v close to 160 lbs, but couldn't quite do it. Today for some reason had a lot of trouble doing 155 lbs but got it on the second attempt. This is the one of the 3 lifts that I don't expect to get a PR for on the Total)
Front Squat: 275 lbs
Bench Press: 205 lbs (I suck at Bench Press and we never do it. However my original shoulder injury came from bench press so I am kinda scared of it. We did it few months ago for a cycle of four weeks and I was surprisingly not good compared to my other lifts)


That's it for now. I'd list my clean+jerk/snatch PR's but they are huge jokes because I have no training in that crap. Ok they are 135 for snatch and like I've never even tried to clean more than 175 lbs, but I did it when I tried. Going to fix this ASAP since obv oly lifting is super important.

I am pretty good (comparatively to other people at my gym) at a bunch of the bodyweight crossfit movements.

I can do handstand pushups decently....at least 10 strict in a row, but never counted how many. I'm sure it's more than 10...probably under 20.

I finally learned how to do muscleups after like a year of trying. And just a few days ago finished a 5 minute EMOM where I did 2 muscle-ups every minute. Felt like king of the world! So I am finally getting the hang of those.

Umm what else....Oh I am naturally talented at pistols it seems, or single legged squats. Can do lots of them pretty easily. Probably like 100 or so in 3 or 4 minutes?


Here are all the things I suck at bad:

1. Oly Lifts
2. Rowing
3. Hinging (workouts that involve high volume of deadlifts cause me trouble...but they are pretty rare. Doesn't matter how light the weight is...something is off with my form. Will work on correcting this soon).
4. SITUPS!!! I SUCK AT SITUPS!!! I can do them, but they are slow, and my abs start to hurt after too many, and they continue to hurt for 3-4 days if I do an excessive amount of them. It's pretty embarrassing, but they are so rare in Crossfit that it's hard to justify obsessing over it too much. But in any case, I'm going to go to the other room right now and do as many situps as possible in 2 minutes.

That's all for now

You're doing it all wrong. Thread sucks.

Welcome to having an H&F blog. If you ever need any injury advice (from your shoulder comment), ask cha.

here's my unsolicited crossfit advice,
1. don't kip anything
2. don't do sumo DL high pull
3. don't bound on box jumps
4. don't buy reebok ****
5. do linear strength progressions for main lifts
6. profit

100 pistols is kind of sick...

Here is tomorrow's workout:

CONDITIONING:

“Nicole” – AMRAP in 20 minutes of: 400m Run, Max Pull-ups.

We actually did this like 3 weeks ago and I got an 87.

The problem we have is that it's more than 400m (more like 405 I've been told), it's on city streets so you have to dodge people and babies, and you have to go up and down a flight of stairs each time, so it's much harder than Nicole in a gym where you can just run normally.

Last time I had 6 rounds of the run and my pullups each time were:

22, 16, 13, 10, 11, 15 for a total of 87

This time I would like to figure out a way to get 100+. First key would be if I could somehow get in 7 rounds of the run....but I don't know if this is feasible given that I like to break after each run to ensure I can do as many pullups as possible. Probably the more realistic ideal is to just do 2-3 more pullups each round. In Round 1 I'm going to try to do as close to 30 as possible, and of course I'll be kipping all over the place. I clearly pushed myself harder on the last round the last time I did this, getting 15 while I only got 10/11 the previous two rounds so it feels like I should be able to do it.

Also a note that I'm completely and totally obsessed with my score. Not only with beating my own score, but also comparing my score to everyone else and trying to win by getting a higher score than everyone else. I'm sure this is totally against the Crossfit spirit but whatever, it helps me do better and it's just how my personality works. In any case there are lots of good people on a regular day, but on the weekends when it's just one 20 person class or so, I have been on a good streak of having the top score.

On a weekday....it varies depending on the workout. I could be as high as top 3, but for something I suck at like rowing, I won't be in the top 20 (out of maybe 60-100 guys or so?). But tomorrow I must achieve 100 pullups, although not sure whether I'm a favorite to do so. No one in our gym did it last time, but a lot of the big champions did strict pullups instead of kipping.

Oh yeah and before this we are doing some snatch skill work but I need a hell of a lot more than we do in this class. It's like we do an EMOM where we do 2 snatches on the minute for 8 minutes, and they don't want us to do too much weight so I generally just do about 105-115 lbs.



Here's a copy of the whiteboard the last time I did this workout:

http://crossfitcc.com/wp-content/upl...10/nicole.jpeg

I'm the GregS in the 8 am class.

I have no shoulder problems anymore, haven't for months. Actually that's a lie they were slightly sore when I did some stupid ass bear crawls, but after 24-36 hours were back to 100%.

kipping all day long because must beat everyone's score.

All the other stuff I never do.....well dunno what linear strength progression stuff is. I'll start bounding on box jumps once I'm on pace to be world crossfit chapmion.

You seem pretty strong, will definitely follow. You could check out the "So You Think You Can Bench" video series by Dave Tate on youtube if you're iffy on your bench form; I watch it every six months or so to try and integrate some form cues.

I'll probably follow this because I think I remember you from some sitngo threads from like 10 years ago.

Any thoughts on trying to work up to a BW press? I feel like that's a pretty cool goal, and you're not that far off.

ETA: Pretty sure everyone here is going to lol at all the kipping

ETA2: Linear progression is adding weight progressively each workout a la SS or GSLP; seems like it would be hard to fit into XFit metcons but wtf do I know.

Somehow I don't care about a bodyweight press. It will either happen naturally throughout time or it won't. It feels like my form in Oly movements and etc is much more important. We basically never do Bench Press at Crossfit. Last time we did it was the first time in like 10 months, and we did it over 4 weeks, one day per week.

Oh if I wasn't clear, it's that I basically benched a few times in 12 months. That might have something to do with sucking at it? I still improved a little bit due to better overall strength, but it was surprisingly small how much I improved.

If you're interested in Oly lifing, freddbird, dwarrior, I think evoken, and a bunch of other posters are all pretty good at it iirc; I'd read their logs/pick their brains.

ETA: If you want to get good at benching, bench more and pay attention to technique; it's pretty much that simple.

Honest question, do you want to get better at crossfit, or do you want to just use crossfit as a means of working out often?

If it's the latter, then power to you, rock on.

If it's the former, however, I recommend to stop doing crossfit, ironically.

Btw warning once again:

I am basically going to ignore all advice that suddenly tells me to do things COMPLETELY differently than I've been doing them for the last 12 months and from what the coaches at my gym tell me to do. I know that this advice is going to come flowing through this thread 24/7, so I apologize in advance! I have gotten in MUCH MUCH MUCH better shape over this time and see no need to suddenly make drastic changes/focus on how wrong everything I am doing is. This is my preemptive warning based on reading everyone else's workout blogs and why I was hesitant to make one to begin with.

Both. If I stop doing crossfit I'll basically stop working out because then it will become extremely boring and this is why I didn't do it at all for 30 years of my life, so that's a bad idea.

Ok cool. I realized I poorly phrased it (I should've made the answers mutually exclusive), but you provided enough info anyway. Keep up the good work.

I'm going to get private coaching with a guy who is v v good at Oly Lifting. Like weighs 145-150 lbs and snatches like 220+ lbs/ back squats 400+ lbs and etc etc. I'm assuming that's very good no?

Also I love you all

No idea. I'm olytarded, but I'm sure a bunch of the solid oly lifters on here would provide cues/tips on form if you posted form check videos, although that may be less of a factor as you apparently have a world class coach.

One other guy at my gym qualified for Nationals or whatever, I think he got a silver medal When I did elements (intro to crossfit basically) it was just me and him, so I felt like a huge newb. Within a year he became a Oly lifting coach.

Just did 2 minutes of situps: Grand Total = 54 lol

I try to practice situps and go intentionally slow so I can find a pace that won't cause me too much pain later in the workout if it's one with 8 billion situps. Like we did this workout Barbara which is basically 5 rounds of:

20 pullups
30 pushups
40 situps
50 squats
mandatory 3 minute rest

In this one I just went all out and realized that despite getting better at all other crossfit things, it seems that I still suck at situps. I don't think it's common for situps to be the limiting factor in this workout, but it was for me. I just get super sore after a while, probably what I need to do is just go slower on them and not exert myself too much. I was absolutely killed by the 3rd round of situps, and my abs were sore for four days. It's a big mystery to me, but in the meantime I just try to do occasional ab stuff at home so I suck slightly less at them.

Oh also the gym I go to is Crossfit Center City in Philadelphia. IMO it's a very good Crossfit gym, mainly because I've dropped in on a bunch of others, and it seems clearly the best of the ones I've been to. (although I liked all the other ones too!)

Oh and in a few weeks I'm running a half-marathon. Not training for it at all because running is unbelievably boring, but a friend is coming into town and running the full marathon with his gf and I figured I'd do something active that day too. Haven't run further than 3 miles in like my entire life (ran 5 once when I was maybe 10 years old). I'll be fine though

Am sane enough to know that running a full marathon without specific training is probably not the brightest idea though.

Moving this here because I don't want to fully tard up Yugo's log, he does a good job of that himself.

For me, yes it works. Give it a shot. If it doesn't work, then don't do it. I wouldn't do it before a large metcon, but for 1RM testing (like your upcoming xfit total) I find it helps.

I also reserve the right to give unsolicited form advice on any squat/deadlift/press videos you post here.