Pick your poison: Grace

So it's first Friday, and this will be my fifth crossfit workout in a row. I didn't want to do a real long workout. I also wanted to try one that I haven't done before. I ended up on Grace. It seems to be a standard wod that a lot of people do, and I need to work on my clean and jerk.

I had a very hard time pushing myself in this wod, and the frustrating thing is I knew I was slacking and I couldn't figure out a way to really push myself. I worked on keeping my stomach small while cleaning, but I still could not find a way to keep a really tight core on the jerk. In a way, this Grace was like a skill wod.

As this picture shows, my back is severely arched during the jerk. I've felt/known about this since I first started xfitting, but haven't figured out how to fix it. I know the cause, or as least I assume I know the cause, to be my back muscles are way stronger than my abs, so the imbalance of strength caused my back to arch in this manner. Now that GHD's are helping with my stomach strength, and I'm working on engaging my abs during lifts, I hope that some balance will be restored. ...This should also really help me with the push press in fgb. Just looking at this picture makes my back hurt a little, I really do want the ability to control my abs and engage them throughout a workout.

My time was 9:34, and I'm a little disappointed with this time. I mean, I've clean and jerked 95#s 74 times in only two more minutes. I guess it's simply a lack of strength, who knows. But I'm going to do Grace again, and I swear it will be lower by a lot.