1/19/15

First day back in group exercise! I'm excited to workout with other people again. Now that I've set aside (i.e., given up on) strength goals for the foreseeable future (forever?), I'm ready to just go balls out with Crossfit. My one year plan is to first and foremost stay healthy, shed 40#, get back down to 200# and reevaluate. Ideally, I'll get sub-200 at some point, but one step at a time.

Warmup included bird dogs, a couple air squats, mountain climbers and half burpee things.

Squat

4x5x185

Did these in Nike Free's without knee sleeves. Felt fine. Was supposed to be 5x5 but ran out of time.

Was then supposed to superset
A. Front Squats - 4x6
B. Single leg RDL 4x10

Only did 2 sets because there simply wasn't enough time.

FS - 135, 155
SLRDL - 45x10, 6

Conditioning

12 minute AMRAP

7 power cleans
7 front rack lunges
7 box jumps

I dunno, a couple of rounds. I just did unweighted lunges because my legs and low back were dead. Did box jumps until third round. Then I did step ups.

Heaven almighty, this was so awful. I'm in terrible shape. Looking forward to shedding weight and feeling healthy again.

Gl, and good move rejoining a cf imo.

Yeah, if the goal right now is weightloss then cf group classes is going to be great. Good play. f the haters. You'll do great. That 40# should come off easily if you keep with it.

+1

Thanks, bros. Not concerned about any hate. The s&f forum seems much less critical of Crossfit nowadays anyway. We got syndr0m, btm, lucky Lloyd, and other deeply devoted Crossfit disciples.

As long as I avoid dumb **** occasionally programmed in Crossfit gyms, it's a great way to get lean and is significantly more fun than doing conditioning work alone. I'm excited to get back into it.

1/21/15

Warm ups included med ball cleans and the coach focused on me because I don't know how (nor do i have any desire to learn) how to clean a med ball. Lol Crossfit.

In any event, I'm otherwise liking this gym. They've got jerk blocks, a huge area for me to do oly or whatever I want, including a few platforms, a ghd, rowers, serviceable bars, and even a couple of metal plates. Plus, even though strength work is packed into the one hour setting and is hardly ideal, they have dedicated strength work every day throughout the week. It seems as if they might even have some discernable programming going on.

Wednesdays apparently are "midline"/recovery day. So basically Wednesdays are abs day. That's cool, I've been neglecting direct core work anyway.

5 rounds of:

30 seconds work/30 seconds rest:

Hang snatch (empty bar)
Rolling planks
One hand Farmer's carry 55# kb
Battle ropes
L sit

This should have been easy, but I'm fat, deconditioned, and my abs are weak, so it wasn't.

Diet had been pretty good so far.

RIP

I had forgotten about that medball clean ****. Nevermind anything positive I ever said about CF.

Still, good job getting back into it.

But seriously medball cleans are making me mad.

i looooved watching the guys at my old gym teach the medball clean. approached it with more seriousness than teaching a real clean.

Bleh. I've been swamped at work and chock full of excuses, but I made it in today finally. I'm annoyed that I only went twice last week, but I'll be better this week.

So it turns out the guy who taught me med ball cleans seems to know what he's talking about. He said they're running 10/20/life right now. Some program from something Carroll who was with Elite FTS or something? Never heard of it. He said he's programmed Wendler and conjugate method type stuff before but it's hard to offer it to the masses in an xfit setting.

They don't really focus much on oly movements because it's hard to teach and Crossfitters are always complaining about snapping their **** up with oly, so they focus on compounds - bench, dead, squat. Makes sense. I do appreciate the strength bias. Maybe I won't get too weak while trying to unfatten myself.

Diet's been ok-ish.

1/27/15

Warm ups included push ups, pec flies with a band ?, push ups, unweighted hip thrusts, and ring rows.

Bench

was supposed to be 5x1 @ rpe 5 and then 3x6 tng close grip, but I just wanted to work to a heavy single to see where I'm at since I haven't benched since April when I maxed at 240.

45 x whatever
95 x whatever
135x3
155x2
175x1
185x1
205x1
225x1
235x1

235 was definitely hard and somewhere near max, but I had more in me. Probably good for 245? I'll take it for a 9 month hiatus I guess. They bench once a week, so I guess I'll be benching more often.

Conditioning

12 - 1 strict push up burpees
1 - 12 strict pull ups

So, 12 burpees, 1 pull up, 11 burpees, 2 pull ups, 10, 3, etc.

Heaven almighty this was awful. It took me 20 minutes and I felt like I was hit by a truck when I was done. At the 7 pull up mark, I switched to ring rows. I'm way too fat right now to try and bang out high volume pull ups like that.

They had some accessory stuff like curls and db rows to do but I was gassed, so skipped it.

Yeah, there's just nothing good to say about med ball cleans. It's quintessential Crossfit stupidity.





If you don't learn how to med ball clean, how will you ever learn to clean . . . a med ball?

1/31/15

Dynamic warm-up

4 rounds:

450 meter row
5 thrusters 95#
10 strict push up burpees
50ish? meter walking lunges

23 minutes and change? Really hard. My heart rate was hovering around 100 about 40 minutes post workout.

Damn I'm in close to the same boat. Couple pounds heavier. When I moved back in June, I joined this small local gym that had great oly stuff, was open 24 hours and had almost zero people in it. Working out practically alone sucked ass and I lost all motivation. Haven't gone back to CF yet, but joined a Gold's which at least gets me around people again.

Anyway, glad to see you back at it

Yeah, H+F is becoming more accepting. Before everyone would just ridicule crossfit or aesthetics logs or anything that wasn't based on Ripp.

nice work pow! I really like that you've found a good place to workout and it seems like you are enjoying it. Good stuff

Glad to see you're getting back into it as well! Yeah, being alone in a gym is very boring. Doing conditioning work and pushing yourself not to quit is even more difficult imo. I'm happy I'm crossfitting again. I've been dialing in the diet too (with the occasional weekend slip up), so hopefully the scale starts going in the correct direction.

The dogmatic Ripp following was kind of weird, but H&F has seen the light and that there's many more ways to get fit/strong than getting fat on GOMAD and LP'ing the 3 main lifts to the exclusion of everything else. I think most normal 18 - 35 yo males (especially single ones) would much rather look like they even lift than anything else. I have the worst of both worlds. I'm fat and weak. Oh well. Working on it.

Yup. I noticed your motivation has dipped lately. Time to go back to crossfit. Maybe you can find a cute Curly 3 for you.

2/2/15

warmup - bird dogs, single leg RDL (unweighted), airsquats, plank things, etc.

Squat

45x10
135x3
185x3
210x3
225x3
235x3

3x3x165 (paused)

Was supposed to do 3x3 in the 70-80% range. That was fine. Then I was supposed to do 5x6 paused squats, but there simply wasn't enough time to do 8 sets in the 12 or so minutes they set aside for strength work.

Conditioning

Ascending ladder of power cleans @ 135 + box jumps
1,1,2,2, etc.

Finished 8 power cleans. Started doing step ups around round of 4 or 5? Hard, as usual. Looking forward to when my conditioning gets better.

2/5/15

warm ups with bird dogs, planks, good mornings, squats w/ a bar

Deadlift

135x3
225x3
275x3
3x3x315

ezpz

T'n'G Sumo DL

2x6x225

My first time really trying sumos. Felt very weird.

Conditioning

7 minute running clock in team of 3

1 partner rests
1 partner rows for calories
1 partner holds plank on slam balls

This was tough. We rowed like 140ish calories collectively. We basically rotated every minute.

Rest 3 minutes

5 minute running clock - in teams of 3, prowler push across the parking lot. It was a prowler with a 45# on it, so I dunno 105#?? It was about 15-20 seconds of work and about 40ish seconds rest. I think I did about 4 or 5 pushes? I felt terrible after this, like I was hit by a truck. It didn't help that my quads were sore from squatting on Monday. There was some accessory work they suggested afterwards, but I was dead. I still have a very long ways to go conditioning-wise.

2/8/15

Did a bunch of barbell complexes up to 155. Felt a weird pain in my mid-low back when I was squatting, so I quit.

Did 5 minutes of burpees - 50.

1 minute of burpees x 2 - rest 1:1 - 15, 12

Bleh.

Hope back is nothing.

Fun Miami anecdote: My sister was driving to work on Friday and a dude crashes into her stopped car in traffic, crumpling her right front quarter panel. He gets out of his car to look at the damage, she waves him to the side of the road. He gets back in his car and drives away. She got some photos of him and his car, but lol wtf. Florida, bro. Be safe.

Not surprising. The drivers down here are awful and what's worse, they're rude. This city is the runaway favorite for #1 in pedestrian traffic fatalities and car fatalities.

Funny Miami anecdote. This morning, I was driving to work on one of the busy city streets, probably going 20 mph in a 30 because it was raining. I had the green light, was driving along and some dip**** walked into my front quarter panel as I was driving. He yelled at me because how dare I, you know, drive where I'm supposed to. He's lucky I wasn't going faster because I probably would've clipped him and he would've been seriously hurt.

Basically, if Miami drivers were a Crossfit movement, they'd be medball cleans.

Amazing. FL#1

They found the guy who hit my sister's car. She googled his name, and he's a professor. In his CV:
"At Florida International University he has led workshops on ethics."

LOOOOL.

I think the best response to this news is:

What kind of professor? Please tell me he's a law professor.

Journalism. If you google that phrase you can find him, but would rather not backlink.

My sister works in commercial RE for a (very) rich guy who's friends with all the other richs there, so worst case for him is she causes this guy some politcal/job ****. She's being really nice, but she's a much tougher (and richer) person than me, so she probably has ****ed people over before for lessor offenses. Bc Miami. Idk. I am not sure I would be so nice to someone who hit and ran... that's your chance to do the right thing imo, though IANA journalism ethics expert.

I already did that before your post and found him.

Glad she found him. I would offer my expert legal advice for an appropriate course of action, but car accidents is not an area of law I've ever practiced in. She should probably just get his insurance info, tell her insurance, etc. and then do some Frank Underwood type stuff thereafter.