I showed up and was calm, but there were so many nervous people around that I started to get a little wound up. They had some real interesting lectures and demonstrations of exercises. Tonya Wagner was the demo girl (PS she's three months pregnant), and it was interesting to see that even she had some kinks in her movements. The opening lecture was given by Todd, and I thought he was awesome. While I didn't really learn anything mind-blowingly new, hearing about what makes crossfit awesome from different, new people was very interesting, made a lot of little things click. One thing I really liked was the talk about functional movements and what makes them awesome. You can have a guy be great at bicep curls and lat pull downs, but he might not be able to do 20 pull ups. You have a guy that can do 20 pull ups, and you know he'll be able to handle bicep curls and lat pull downs.
When we had Todd instructing the small group I was in, he made a really good point with regards to coaching. Simply telling someone to push their knees out might not be enough. We had just seen 20 min of demoing how the air squat should look like, and yet here's Matt* struggling to keep his knees out. He knows what he's suppose to do, and he trying
his damnedest to do it. Yet, he isn't doing it, so what can you do as a coach to help? We came up with the idea to place your hands on the outside of the knees and telling him to push against them. This tactile cue gives great feedback as well as forces him to establish that neural connection to the adductors.in the small group with Todd I was selected to be the demo for the overhead squat. So I grabbed the PVC Pipe, sucked in a breath, thought active shoulder, and lifted that pipe over my head. Before anything else happened, Todd asked the group if anything was wrong. First, my active shoulder could be more active, but second, and more importantly, I had an unnatural curve in my spine. Todd could tell I had an unnatural curve in my spine because my rib cage was poking out. This has happened with me for such a long time, and I've known about it for a while, but the way I was thinking about it made it hard to fix. Todd told me to use my abs to lock down my ribcage, and this made everything click. I did as I was told, kept my shoulder active, and then I squatted twice. After that, Todd looked around and asked if anyone saw something that I did incorrectly. There was a pause, and some one suggested that I didn't hit depth on the first one, but then there was another, long pause. Todd said that sometimes if you fix problems up front you don't have any afterward. In other words, my overhead squat was pretty much perfect.
We then worked on the strict press and it's variants, the push press and then the push jerk. These weren't as memorable, partially because it was in the middle of the day and partially because I didn't click with the other instructors like I did with Todd.
We ended the day with Fran, and I was not looking forward to it. I was already a bit worn out from the day of PVC work, and my grip just didn't feel very strong. I was tempted to scale back the weight, but I decided that I had to do it Rx'd, like I did the first time. It sucked, my mind just wasn't ready for it. I thought a couple times about just stopping, that's how bad I felt in the beginning/middle. When I got to the set of nines I had the resolve to finish, but I was only able to bang out 2 pull ups at a time. My time ended up being 8:50. If you've been following my blog, this is the first time my Fran time has ever gone up. My whole crossfit-way has been "every time I do Fran I will do it faster", so as I sat there, arms burning like nothing else, I was a bit... disheartened.
In the next heat I got to see Ben Smith, who got eighth in the 2010 games, do Fran. He almost never stopped, getting a time of 2:34. There were a couple other guys who got sub 3 times, and on one hand it was inspiring but on the other hand realizing how weak I am, after over two years, was a little discouraging. I've come so far, but I have so far to go from where I want to be.
* I don't think Matt was his real name, can't remember his name at all, actually.
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