Got Snatch?

So I've changed things up a bit with my class. I know I haven't been very vocal on the blog about my class, and that's mostly because I don't want to scare away any potential clients with the thought that I will write about their performance. But basically all has been quiet on the coaching front, I've found my routine and everything is going along quite smoothly.

However, I've been only getting a handful of people to show up. In looking for some way to spruce things up, I asked some clients last week if they would like me to start teaching the snatch and pretty much every one of them said it would be exciting. I love the Olympic lifts, one reason why I chose that as my first certification, even before my level one. So this is very exciting for me. It's strange to think that it's been two years since I attended that cert, starts to make me feel old.

I met up with Melissa to make sure I have all the tools ready, and I think i do. The snatch is, in my mind, the most difficult lift to master. It has been called ballet with a barbell, and I'm about to take on some peeps with two left feet.

Second most dangerous crossfit exercise

So earlier this month I talked about how the kipping motion (in both pull ups and toes to bar) is dangerous and can lead to a SLAP (or shoulder labrum) tear. Well, apparently there is another exercise that can lead to a shoulder injury is the sumo deadlift high pull, or SDHP. Basically, the SDHP is safe if you're not using your arms to lift the weight, but as soon as you get tired (and if you're trying to do this at 100% intensity then form will degrade rather quickly) you'll start to use your arms and it will cause an impingement and you'll hurt your supraspinatus. This is all explained beautifully here from Whole9. I highly recommend reading it. Makes me wonder about this years FGB and what I'll do.


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The need for a stregnth bias in crossfit (aka, beware the sexy metcon)

Came across an interesting thread on the crossfit message boards talking about how all the game competitors train with a strength bias, and it got me to thinking about crossfit programming. Programming a good strength and conditioning program, in my opinion, is one of the top three things you should look at in a crossfit gym (Programming, emphasis on technique, and personality).

And when you think about crossfit sans a strength bias, which looks like a bunch of random met-cons that have to be done at maximum intensity, it becomes appearent that you need something more. That something more, if you want to get much faster times and bigger lifts, is a strength bias. Sure Met-cons are cool, but as Whole9 says, beware of the sexy metcon.

I've heard of the 5/3/1 program, and because Jerry always has us finding our 5, 3, and 1 rep max I think that's what we do here at CFOT. For anyone who wants to know what it is exactly, I reccomend checking out this awesome article summerizing the program here.

It seems to me that a problem with crossfit.com programming is two fold: 1) a lack of periodization and 2) high intensity all the time for every workout.

First, you need to have programming with a plan, you just can't vomit up a triplet of random movements and do it for time. However, as far as I can tell the .com workouts seem to be exactly that, there's no rhyme or reason, no repetition. It's exciting, but you actually need to repeat movements periodically if you want to get better at them. Muscle confusion is great and all, but you actually want muscle adaptation to occur, you need it to occur to actually be stronger. If you squat every week, your squat will get stronger. Proper programming is cyclical with goals in mind, a beginning, middle, and an end. Because .com is suppose to be for everyone all the time, it has no beginning, middle or end. It's just a continuous stream of workouts that leave people in a puddle. Which leads me to my second point, intensity doesn't always have to be 100%.

"Simple answer is you can't go balls to the wall all the time. Well you can but then it becomes raisins against the wall."

One of the hallmarks of Crossfit.com is that you're suppose to do each workout as fast and as intense as possible, but as Crossfit One World says, intensity isn't always the answer. You'll open yourself up to injury and won't see much long term gains.

Point is, you need a stregnth bias in crossfit if you really want to see any real gains in you lifts as well as see improvement on your Fran time.

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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