5 rep Back squat, definitely getting weaker.

So yesterday we found our 5 rep back squat max, and although it felt good, I only got up to 225#. This is not my best, not by far. One and a half years ago my five rep max was 250. After a year and a half, I would expect my strength to be going up, not down. So I must be doing something wrong, and I believe it's my diet. I'm must simply not be eating enough. I'm doing my damnedest, but it's just not working. In one day I'll have chicken, salmon, turkey, ham, and possibly steak. That's like a whole freakin' farm right there! The only thing that makes sense is I must not be eating enough.

I also think this because I do experience hunger a lot of the time. When this year started I joined a paleo diet challenge, and I've been doing a pretty good job of sticking with it. I've noticed I've been losing fat, and at a pretty high rate. Appearently, this comes at the price of losing strength.

The whole reason why I joined crossfit was for looks, I've always been pretty unabashed about this. I've never, ever, had a six pack, and I want one. I have a theory that if you've ever been muscly, strong, or ripped you can get back there fairly quickly. However, if you're like me and have never been muscly, strong, or ripped it is much, much harder to get there. I think this is why I see people who's only change is doing crossfit and they get a six pack, while I change what I eat, what I drink, how long I sleep, doing some form of massage every day and I still feel like I've got a way to go.

But back to my point: I joined crossfit because I wanted to look a certain way. Jerry has said a couple of times that you start working out for looks, then performance, then longevity. I am still in the looks category, especially since I'm so freaking close to my goal of having sweet, sweet abs. However, the fact that my lifts are going down substantially is really starting to annoy me. Now if you excuse me, I need to go eat some smoked salmon, an apple, and some almond butter.

Front squat failure

Today was find your 2 rep front squat max, and this was a bit of a disappointment for me. Last year I was able to get 225 with one rep of 245. This time I hit 205 and couldn't get one rep of 225. I feel like I'm getting weaker, and I'm not happy with this. At first I thought it was the fact that I was relearning how to do everything, how to squat with my abs engaged. But now, now I'm getting frustrated. I feel like my diet is pretty damn good, paleo with very few exceptions. I have worked my ass off in recovery and mobility, and yet I feel like I've hit a ceiling. Is this as good as it gets, after almost three years have I reached my limit? I have seen a lot of gains when it comes to technique, muscle ups come to mind, but when it comes to my max lifts it seems like nothing has changed, if not reversed. Sorry I'm just mad and am ranting a bit. Hopefully things will be better in the morning.

Saturday: finding my groove

So our workout on Saturday involved doing AMRAP of deadlifts for three minutes twice. There were other elements to the workout but this is what I'd like to talk about for now. My back is still a little jacked up from a workout a month ago at the superfit competition, even bending over to pick up a pen off the ground evicts a groan as I forget to keep a tight core and bend my back.

However, I was feeling good, just with a large dose of caution. So I decided to do deadlifts, but with a light weight, 165#. I worked on touch and go, and today it clicked. I think I've always been hesitant to scrape the bar against my shins, but after wearing tall socks and taping my shins underneath, it was enough to make me focus on everything else. I was able to keep a straight back and just throw my hips back and let the bar drop and come back up. I really started to feel like it was working my legs. I felt great afterward too, my back wasn't feeling it at all (although my legs and abs did).

This was important for me because I've finally figured out where I need to be with the deadlift, as well as figure out proper form for touch and go. I'll just have to go with the infidel weight and keep looking at form. I've always focused on form, but I didn't realize I needed to reduce the weight by so much. The weight might have been "light" but believe me, my glutes have not been this sore in a long, long time.

On a note about the abs, I've been adding GHD's to my post-wod work, and I think it's really working now. I started out at 20, and am now up to 35. I plan to add 5 reps each day until I'm up to 50, maybe more, we'll see.

Danger of doing kipping pull ups without sufficient strength

(UPDATE: if you've hurt your shoulder I've found something that can really help out.  It's simple and cheap, and it's hanging from a bar multiple times a day. Won't heal the labrum, but it can help out with a lot of other shoulder ailments.)

If you peruse the injury threads on the crossfit.com board you'll find a lot of shoulder injuries, specifically SLAP tears (tears in the labrum). A lot of them seem to come from kipping pull ups, and I've come across a possible explanation. There is an article explaining what a SLAP tear is and how it comes about, most notably:

In theory, SLAP lesions most likely occur in overhead athletes from a combination of these 2 previously described forces. The eccentric biceps activity during deceleration may serve to weaken the biceps-labrum complex, while the torsional peel back force may result in the posterosuperior detachment of the labral anchor.

As some one else pointed out, when you look at the kipping pull up with this knowledge you'll see:

Eccentric bicep loading = the negative part of the pull-up, the arms straightening at the bottom

Arm deceleration = the swing into the kip

Abduction and external rotation = the position of the arms at the apex/reversal point of the kip

Just imagine the "peel-back" force in the shoulders when they are forcefully wrenched back at the apex/reversal point of the kip. If you really think about it, the head of the humerus is trying to push out the front of the glenohumeral (shoulder) joint, the kipper is trying to RELAX their muscles at the bottom to get the most out of their kip, leaving all the strain on the LABRUM (think of it as a suction cup on the scapula that holds the humerus on the body, with the greatest forces on the top/superior and the front/anterior parts), and the resultant forces--over time (repetition)--TEAR the TOP part of the labrum from the FRONT to the BACK...this is therefore a SUPERIOR LABRUM ANTERIOR-POSTERIOR injury mechanism, almost perfectly designed (as evidenced by the orthopedic doctors making a ton of money off of people who do them).

Steven Low, writer of an awesome exercise blog, has chimed in on this subject matter as well. I have much respect for the man. Not only do I have a link to his blog in the margins, but his posts have really helped me in the past with my injuries (led me to find a DO for my hip, helped realize massage would fix the tendonitis, etc.). Concerning SLAP tears, he says:

The reason why you don't seen the top CF athletes getting slap lesions is because their shoulder mobility sucks. If your shoulder mobility sucks when you relax your shoulder muscles at the bottom of the pullup you have your muscles contracting against opening the shoulder all the way thus mitigating any forces on the biceps long head tendon. In addition, the muscles do help bar forces from the shoulder.

However, when you get people who are weak (e.g. women in general, or those with good shoulder mobility) they're the ones getting the primary forces distributed through the muscles into the other soft tissues such as the long head of the biceps. This is especially the case with learning the kipping pullups where there's going to be a lot of jerking down into the motion while learning it.

I would never ever ever ever recommending learning kipping before you at least have 3+ deadhang pullups. It's not just not a good idea putting trauma on the shoulder especially when it's easy to not do it right and jerking down into the movement which is much more dangerous than a smooth movement.

Jerking down from toes to bar can do the same thing for reference.

There's also another article here by Whole 9 that basically sends the same message of do dead hangs before working on the kip. Crossfit Virtuosity also recently mentions how important it is to have strict pull ups before you start kipping (and provides a great program to get strict pull ups).

This kind of concerns me because my shoulder mobility is pretty darn good, however I have a very smooth swing, without a jerk. I also wonder if butterfly exposes the shoulder in the same way (don't think so). But from now I will definitely make sure I'm keeping my shoulders engaged at the bottom of a kip, I already have a tear in my hip labrum, and I really don't want to add a shoulder one to the mix.

...I should also point out that, as far as I know, no one at CFOT has suffered a SLAP tear. This is further testament to the training and programming that Jerry lays out for us. The man knows his stuff.

(UPDATE #2: Turns out I have a tear in the back of my shoulder's labrum, not a slap tear, but a tear nontheless. I've decided to forego surgery and try prolotherapy to repair the damage naturally. For more about prolotherapy check out these two videos here and here.  I've started a vlog where I document what recovering from prolo is like:



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A Questioning of Faith

I'm not really happy with the title of this post, but I'm having trouble summing up my thoughts and feelings in just a few words. About a week ago I found a thread on the catalyst forums about the problems with Crossfit as a training program, and it's been very, very interesting. First off, one of the main problems pointed out is the programming and how rarely it is done with any purpose and doesn't improve one's strength. This really makes me appreciate Jerry's programming, with his use of the 5/3/1 periodization strength bias (if I'm understanding things correctly). Met-cons may be sexy, but working on strength is what produces a better athlete. There are many issues addressed in the thread and links to many other posts, and I'm not even done reading it yet, but here goes a summary of what the thread covers:

• There's little oversight for crossfit. My office mate could pay $1k for a cert and then open up a box of his own. He knows jack sh!t about exercise and would probably teach very poor technique to people who wouldn't know better. This would lead to injuries and would hurt a lot of people, as well as hurt the brand image of Crossfit.
  
• The acceptance of degradation of technique of complex lifts like the snatch for the sake of finishing WODs faster will lead to injuries as well.
  
• Kipping pull ups, SDHPs and American kettlebell swings are easy to do incorrectly and if done incorrectly they will cause severe shoulder injuries (SLAP tear, impingement, etc)
• Crossfit Headquarters is so close-minded they reject peer review and burn bridges with experts outside Crossfit (like Robb Wolfe and I think Riptoe), this makes it seem like Crossfit is snake oil
• Crossfit Endurance is not going to get someone to a 12-15min 5k
• The people who perform the best with Crossfit came in with an already strong base, no one's come in as a weakling, done crossfit, and become some one who can deadlift 500+ pounds, clean 350+ pounds, snatch 300+ pounds, and can run a 15min 5k
• Typical crossfit programming will not improve one's VO2Max

Now let me be clear, I don't necessarily agree with all that is being said on that thread, but I feel like it is something that should be looked at. For me it makes me appreciate Jerry Hill and his knowledge base even more. There's more that I would like to post but I've got to get going.

Hand stand push up work

So Monday's wod was 1 HSPU every 30 seconds for like 12? minutes. I was at first a bit bummed because it looked like I would have to modify by limiting my range of motion by having my head touch bumper plates instead of the floor. However, I noticed Uhle was done and was just hanging out, doing some extra work. I asked if he could spot me doing banded pushups and he said yes!

This was exciting because Danya says doing banded HSPUs really forces a tight core as well as you get full ROM. I didn't realize how much the band would help. I started out at the orange band, but then added 25# plates for my hands, increasing the range of motion. Then I did flat HSPU with the red band, but then I kind of hit a wall, so I went back to the orange band.

After that we did a workout with push press, and this is an exercise that has always given me trouble. With my weak abs my rib cage keeps poking out, thus arching my back unnaturally. However, this time around something kind of clicked, and my push press felt a lot, lot better. I guess working on the full ROM with the HSPU primed my shoulders to figure out the push press. If I can get a faster, better push press my fight gone bad score should go up dramatically.

The workout also featured box jumps, now that I've figured out how to do them plyometrically they are usually the easiest part of a workout, I just burn through them quickly and without pause.

The only downer from Monday was that I didn't have time to go in and do my interval work. This was partially due to it being so late at night (645) and partially due to me just forgetting about it. Once it becomes more of my routine I'll remember and do it with more regularity.

Post Superfit, where to go from here.

So I didn't do so hot with the superfit wods, now what? I asked for feedback and I got it, this is what I got:

1. My aerobic capacity is usually what slows me down first. This can be remedied with some interval training 2 times a week.
   
2. I'm not as strong as most of the competitors. Although CFOT is a strength bias, I should raise the weight and lower the volume on met-cons to increase my work capacity.
3. Core strength needs work. I should do something, L-sits, GHD, toes to bar, every time I come into the gym.

So I guess I'm going to have to change up my routine a bit. I guess I'll "cash out" each day with some GHD's. I did that for a while, and it really started to bring out my abs, guess I should start doing that again. The interval training should be interesting, as I def don't do any aerobic activity outside of xfit, at least not until spring starts and I'll start biking again to the gym. ...I've been thinking of joining Alexandria's Master swimming program for some time, perhaps this is the time???

On another note, I'm participating in my gym's paleo challenge. And although during the week it's not a challenge at all, during the past couple of weekends it has been quite a challenge. Two weekends ago I went skiing in snowshoe West Virginia (which was awesome) and the only food there was crap. Fortunately I brought my own food for breakfast, but lunch and dinner were tough. This past weekend was both my birthday and the Superbowl, and when your gf makes peanutbutter cupcakes for you, it's hard to not indulge.

However, I'm still making good progress. The other day I ran into Chriss and Andrea, my old coaches before they went and started Trident Crossfit, and they were amazed at how I looked, and I was wearing a jacket. Chriss kept gushing about how I'd changed, and I responded with, "Well, I'm doing this thing called Crossfit, and it's really helping me get into shape." I miss those two. Anyways, point is I'm still making progress. I remember about this time last year when Judy commented that I was really starting to look ripped (a product of getting massages), and I've gotten only leaner and leaner.

Going into crossfit my goal first and foremost was to get a six-pack, to look ridiculously shredded. As the years pass, I'm now becoming more concerned with performance. I want to be stronger and faster. However, I think ideally I'll be able to accomplish both. I'm always looking out to see if I'm going into Keytosis, and I still eat a lot of almond butter. Yet I still find myself hungry, not starving, but hungry. Still tweaking, but I think I'm in a great place right now with diet, I've even given up on adding sugar and cream to my coffee!!!! Never thought I'd drink coffee black, but then this paleo challenge came around and pow, I want to win!!