Two quick fitness links:
While geared more towards the needs of Oly lifters and CrossFitters than most people might need, KStar’s new Mobility Workout of the Day is pretty cool. I now know that my hip bone is connected to my foot bone. Ouch. It’s all performance art.
Also, it looks like there’s going to be a one day NYC MovNat clinic on October 9. I wish I could go, but there’s no way the schedule will allow it.
So, I’ve made one or two tweaks to the program below. I’ve taken the standing press out of Wednesday/Saturday. KB presses, bench presses, standing presses and pullups gets to be total overkill done back to back. Too hard on the shoulders. I’ve also been basically doing 5-10K runs on Thursday/Sunday and maybe a 5K after the KB work on Tuesday. All in all, it doesn’t seem to be as unreasonable as I thought as long as you very strictly take breaks when it’s getting to be too much.
I’ve spent Lent experimenting with Paleo and Primal diets, mostly by trying to stay as grain free as possible. I haven’t been entirely strict and some got by, but I’ve stuck with it as best I can. It’s worked really well in a couple of ways. I don’t get tired at work in the afternoon and my energy level has been very high. So far the main downside has been that it gets a bit gnarly and tense when you keep it very low carb and I have nasty Paleo breath. Primative man probably used bad breath to hunt. I think that’s the low carb. After Lent, I’ll probably reintroduce the occasional rice and corn and allow more dairy than I have been. Reintroducing yogurt has made this a lot easier.
kettlebells
I’m experimenting with a new program that tries to combine what some of the Primal Fitness guys do with the Max-Effort Black Box style templates. I’m jokingly calling it Primal Effort Black Box, even though it’s really not either, mostly because the whole thing is just my personal pile of rip-offs from various other plans I like
It looks something like this:
Monday – Off
Tuesday – Kettlebells. Something classic like 5X(1,2,3,4,5) clean and press ladders followed by swings or snatches and swings. If you want to mix it up, short metcons, like 4 X 400 with max swings or pullups after each round.
Wednesday – Lift heavy. Warm up and then something like 5X5 deadlifts, leg press (would be squat if not for bum knee), bench press, standing overhead press, pull-ups. I’ve subbed in hang power cleans for the leg press and farmer’s walks for the pull-ups.
Thursday – Cardio time. Anything from intervals like 4 X 400 to a 5K run, or comparable time on the bike or rower.
Friday – off
Saturday – Repeat lift heavy day. It’s also chance to break up the heavy days if the full body thing gets too long.
Sunday – How do you feel? Sore? Tired? Burnt out? If you feel bad, it’s a day for a long, slow walk over mixed terrrain. If not, take a random chance and roll the die:
1,2 – Kettlebells or short metcon
3,4 – Short Cardio Intervals – hill sprints, Tabata on the bike
5,6 – LSD: 5k to 10k run if totally fresh. long slow walk if you’re not.
Stretch and do mobility work like Z Health as often as possible.
This seems almost over-ambitious – like a stealth overkill program, but it’s just the ideal week. If you miss a day, you miss a day, your body gets rest. If you don’t feel like working out, miss a day. If you can’t get to the equipment, take a day off. If you’re traveling and can’t just hike around, take the day off. If you feel worse, take the week off. Or two.
Every fourth week, back off. Take weight off the the bar, reps off the kettlebells, walk around a bit. Recover.
The enjoyable fitness irony of the day is the inimitable Dutch Lowy posting a picture of his torn apart collarbone a day after his guide to shoulder injuries.
Back when my knee MRI came up, I posted a log of hang wringing stuff about never being able to run again. I packed up all the running kit. I gave Torch from CrossFit Brooklyn my unread copy of Born to Run.
Then, I healed up a bit, got a different medical opinion, and I spent a little while rebuilding my running. I’m back up to 15-20 miles a week and was seriously thinking about some more racing and distance trail running. I pretty much planned out a long slow distance program with some supplemental strength work.
But deep down inside, I know that running is terrible for you. It weakens you. It gives you relatively poor conditioning in return for hours of effort. In doses of more than a few miles, it’s just a sorry program to have. So in the end, my reaction to this was, “you know, you can have running back.” The happy old guys don’t do a lot of it. Ultimately, it’s just a painful combination of ego, podcasts and Central Park that keep me doing it at all. I can get in better shape following any number of programs, even one that incorporates occasional running as a part of other training.
So, I was at peace with this decision, tore open a box from Amazon and remember that I had ordered another stupid copy of Born to Run. Augh. My life…
So, by now, everyone knows the story. Finally got the runner’s knee checked out with an MRI and it’s game over. I’ve worn through the cartilage behind the knee and the lateral femoral condyle now rubs the knee cap under flexed load. That pretty much rules out a future of running, squats, lunges, deadlifts, O-lifting, and anything involving pylometrics. The alternative is to risk even further joint failure at some point down the road. I was basically advised to get a bike and enjoy the hip adductor machines.
The problem now that is that exercise is almost impossible for me without some sort of real, difficult goal. What kept me running the last eight years was the next big race. This year it would have been the New York Marathon in November. What kept me CrossFitting was the prospect of being able to do that marathon using it and CrossFit Endurance rather than trying to put in 50 miles a week. I don’t have too many regrets about what I’ve done. Despite being absolutely terrible at running, I got to do all the big NYC races, the Boston Marathon, the toughest trail half in the East, and enjoyed it all even when it was late in the race and no fun at all.
So, now I find it really hard to figure out what to do next. Being generally in shape or the vanity of a little bit more weight loss is just too abstract for me and it’s not getting me to want to work out. I made it to the gym once this week. I can do the entire stack on those hip machines for reps and the worst part is knowing that will only go downhill. I’m thinking about getting a bike and getting ready for a century ride or something similar, but the dilemma of trying a long endurance sport without CrossFit is frustrating. I’ve thought vaguely of going hiking next year, but that can’t be a regular thing. I’ve done pretty well by motivating myself with something difficult for the last eight years and don’t have that next goal right now.
Any ideas?
(Me in the back, knowing that I’m not going to get this muscle-up)
A week and a half ago, I went out to Park Slope for a Level One CrossFit instructors certification at CrossFit South Brooklyn. I have to say right up front that I didn’t have very high expectations. I wasn’t really looking for training in how to teach CrossFit to others. I wanted more information on programming and training for myself. The Level Ones have a bit of a bad reputation for having very high attendance and a 100% pass rate. In addition, the affiliate I work out at has a very good introductory program, Elements, which covers bodyweight exercise, powerlifting, Olympics lifts and metcons. So, what I was expecting was a weekend of “CultFit 101,” a bunch of propaganda, some references to exercise science which supports CrossFit’s worldview and some minor fitness celebrities rehashing what I did in Elements last year. High five. Here’s your paper. I was wrong. Well, it was propaganda, exercise science and some great CrossFitters covering a lot of what Elements did, but the quality of the presentation and coaching more than made up for any of the stuff that seemed basic and the “propaganda” was actually very balanced and comprehensive information.
My expectations point to a lot of what’s wrong with fitness in the Internet age. I joked that I started doing CrossFit in the first place because I’m willing to believe anything that I read on the Internet, but the net is actually what fuels interest in different fringe exercise specialties these days. It’s immediately possible to get more information than you want or need on any sports discipline. Non-CrossFit fringe sports example: Want to be an Ultrarunner? You can find blogs by Ultrarunners, training guides, race schedules and information on why Ultrarunning is both super awesome and super unhealthy and unawesome any time you want. You used to have to really work to find that sort of community. Now, I’d be willing to bet that most CrossFitters spend a comparable amount of time on the Net reading about CrossFit as opposed actually working out. That’s not the case with Ultrarunners. Most of them have no time to do anything except run, run, run and ice their legs. Poor Ultrarunners.
So, what’s wrong with that? Well, a lot of the information you get about exercise and health borders on hyperbole. People who do a particular exercise specialty get smug about it and in combination with the bully pulpit of the net, you have a lot of groups preaching and trying to prove that everyone not doing their system just sucks. There’s no place this is more prevalent or annoying than in the strength side of sport. In six months of just trying to get more out of going to the gym in less time, I’ve learned more about who hates my gym and why they are wrong than I’d ever care to know. I’ve read the arguments from both sides and ultimately a lot of that was just a waste of time. Given my life, if I were really worried that I couldn’t back squat 600 because my program sucks, I’d have deeper issues.
I’ve also found that a lot of the information on exercise is contradictory and junk. Take running. I’m a bad runner, despite fits of mileage which border on problematic, so I’m always looking for something to get me out of my 9 minute mile rut. Here’s what I’ve learned: A lot of long/slow distance running is a terrible way to get ready for distance races because you don’t recover. There’s no way to get ready for distance races without a lot of long/slow distance. Sprints are useless except for a few weeks to sharpen an endurance athlete. Sprints are most of what you should do in your program year round. Shoes are bad. More running shoe protects the runner. You should only land with your forefoot, midfoot or heel, but not your forefoot or heel. Running destroys the knees. Runners have stronger knees over the long haul. All of this is contradictory, and I’ve read all of it presented as valid advice within the last week. The sad thing is that each contradiction is probably true for someone. I like forefoot running, sprinting and not much shoe. Somewhere out there is a guy just like me who loves long/slow distance and heel striking in his Brooks Beast and he’s faster and less injured than I am. If I did what he did, I’d break my shins. Running is a fundamental human activity. Give me a pitchfork and a hockey mask and I can prove it. Nobody can agree even how to run.
The same goes for diet. If you try to follow athletic diet advice, you eventually get whiplash. Vegan? Zone? Paleo? Primal? Slow and organic? Dark Rage? I’ve met healthy people who’ve done all. The more diet advice I read, the more I just wonder if I’m allowed to eat basic stuff like carrots and yogurt. I can’t tell what system I’m on. I can’t even see the forest for the trees. I had candy, an energy bar and four cups of coffee yesterday afternoon and I read part of the Paleo Diet for Athletes on the subway without even a sense of irony. I had no carbs at breakfast, a salad at lunch with some stolen fries and I am still wondering about the mayo at dinner. Sadly for me, at some point someone told me that everything I ate was healthy. Even the mayo. I guess. Nothing in the diet seemed normal. It never does. I read so many blogs where the dietary advice is like “Ignore common sense, you want to eat something as close to Cave Bear heart as you can” that I can even argue that line. Poor bears.
So, anyway, back to the Cert. It was so reasonable. Chuck Carswell and Adrian Bozman did a lot of the presenting. I was expecting a lot of “here’s why were *&$&$$## right and they suck” in the weekend, but the presentation was smooth and professional. They went over the system, were totally open to hearing any questions or critiques, and were respectful of other people who train differently. They really focused on presenting CrossFit as a system which tries to balance a lot of different physical skills and activities in a way which benefits the total athlete. I was expecting more of the “Our dial goes to 11!” sort of presentation. #*&$#**# 11! Moth#&&#&# 11!”
For example, a common critique is that CrossFit doesn’t make you as strong as, say, power lifting. This can be accompanied by yelling on both sides. The presenters were perfectly willing to concede the point and then try to show that focusing exclusively on strength would impact other physical traits they thought you should develop. But unlike a lot of the online debates, that wasn’t a “powerlifters suck, they can’t run 10 yards” flamefest. It was more like “Yeah, power lifting is awesome and all, but if you really specialize in it, other areas might suffer a bit and our system doesn’t like that. Endurance is great, but endurance specialists tend to be weak in these strength areas.” They gave a lot of examples of this from real athletes they’ve trained and were very respectful of athletes in other disciplines. They keep hauling out the example of poor Mark Allen. He’s one of the greatest triathletes ever, but can’t jump that high and once got stuck under a 95 pound bench press. But it turns out that while they keep hauling him out, he’s a friend of CrossFit and knows that he gets used as the weak endurance guy punching bag. The presenters were also the first to point out that Mark Allen is just an amazing specialized athlete and none of them could do what he does.
Another common critique: Slop, that point where form breaks down. A lot of lifters think CrossFit encourages it. They didn’t encourage it. They were open to the idea that someone pushing it within the limits of safety might benefit from the extra effort even if form breaks down a bit, but again they were stickers about having it be within safe limits. As for slop in the cert itself? The demos, mostly by Jenn Hunter, were flawless. The form demanded by the instructors during actual training was very strict. Anyone expecting a room of rounded backs and elbows pointing at the floor would have been disappointed. This was actually really cool in my case. I’m prone to endlessly revisiting a chronic knee injury and a lot of the finer points of form which were covered in the squat, snatch, deadlift, push-press and clean drills have kept my knee safe over the last week. I didn’t get push press knee this week. Yet…
At some point, Chuck was asked about programming swimming and yoga on a rest day and his attitude was like “well, we say you should learn new sports, so yeah, jump in the pool.” Where was the angry workout cult?
If you mix training and the Internet, you hear a lot of noise. You’re much better off if you ignore the noise and just seek out the best information you can online and offline. Try things out. If something is working for you, it’s working for you. If something isn’t working, you have to question why. You might be doing something wrong. It might be doing something wrong to you. The process of finding ways around that is what constitutes the great lessons of training and your own development as an athlete. If you listen to all the “he said, she said, blah, blah, blah” flamewars, you’re missing the reality of the process for yourself. Likewise, if you just have a dogma instead of a program, you’re missing out on the possibility that you can learn from someone else. It’s important to have some sort of process for yourself, but that process isn’t one-size fits all. You have to find what works for you and improve on that.
In the end, I’m surprised that I learned so much about a balanced, rational approach to exercise at a CrossFit cert. Of all the things. We still did Fran, our dial went to 11, the music was loud, and it was still a lot of fun, but the message wasn’t adolescent. It was about doing things well and what you get and don’t get out of the program. All in all, it was an impressive and fun weekend.
The video series on the deadlift at:
http://extremehumanperformance.com/blog/tag/kent-johnson/
is really interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.
It’s still being posted, but as far as I can tell it’s all on YouTube.
The site itself has consistently good info.
About six months ago, I started working out at CrossFit NYC, a CrossFit affiliate in the Flatiron district. I promised myself that I’d give it six months and now that the period is coming up, I’m still enjoying it, and I’m happy I started, but I’m a bit on the fence about continuing for a couple of reasons. Since I said I’d give it six months, I was reluctant to review the program immediately before I saw what sort of results I got.
CrossFit is a general physical conditioning program. It’s not designed to offer sports-specific training, but rather to cover a lot of different “functional movements.” Some workouts involve Olympic Weightlifting and Powerlifting. Some include body weight exercises like pullups and pushups. So many pullups and pushups. So many. Still others involve metabolic conditioning drills built around swings or jumps. The most difficult combine all of these. Workouts are designed to be brief, very intense and to avoid specialization in a single aspect of athleticism. Its weightlifting tends to focus on compound movements like the clean and jerk or big lifts like the squat rather than things like isolated curls. Actually there are no curls and my biceps are just fine. Thanks for asking. The workout centers around warm-ups, skill work, and a programmed workout of the day that everyone does. If you can’t do the workout of the day, or WOD, you scale it down.
In practice, this means sometimes you get case of butt arms that you can’t raise above you head. It also means that if you’re as weak as I was before starting, you develop a lot more physical power than you had before CrossFit. On days you can get your arms above your head.
There are a lot of positive experiences I’ve had working out at CrossFit NYC. The coaching and community are really top-notch. That’s important: the workouts and their individual components can be difficult enough to be dangerous. Having good coaches and a lot of athletes who would qualify as good coaches working out with you helps mitigate some of that risk. If I were looking at another CrossFit affiliate, the quality of coaching would be a very serious concern to me. There are different levels of coaching in CrossFit and from what I’ve heard, it’s almost impossible not to pass the Level 1 instructor certification. Good way to build a community and generate training revenue to support that community, I suppose, but frankly, I’m uncoordinated and sloppy enough when I lift to need better supervision than the coaching you might get from someone who passed by attending. It’s really not you, it’s me. I have to point out that this hasn’t been a problem at CrossFit NYC or at any of the affiliates I’ve visited or worked out with since starting this program, I’ve only seen these complaints about other locations or trainers, second-hand on the net.
Another thing that’s good about the program is that the level of performance that’s expected is beyond what I would program for myself. As an example, I’ve done a couple of workouts recently that called for 100 pullups as part of the work. There’s no way I would even work towards being able to do something like that without a coached program. I’d consider 3 sets of 10 to be heroic. There’s a bit of a flip side to this in that you have to have the common sense to scale some efforts down and for me, personally, I’ve noticed that I tend to convince myself not to against the well-repeated advice of most of the CrossFit NYC coaches to “scale, scale, scale.”
So, the results? I’m a lot stronger overall, than when I began. I can prove it. I’ve lost about 10 pounds, but can still outeat any training program and wasn’t really looking to drop the extra pounds. The conditioning is such that I just did my best half-marathon on maybe one 5 K run a month and two sprint workouts a week. In that sense I’m satisfied and have only the program to thank for the results. On the fitness side, the only thing I really miss is long runs in Central Park.
I also have managed to reinjure my knee in exactly the same way that running damages it, so no luck there. I was originally hoping to do CrossFit to get around running overuse injuries and seem to have just traded that for the reality that a bad knee doing too many squats and push presses also gets injured. This also seems to come down to a scaling and programming question and that’s where I start to wonder generically about some parts of CrossFit’s programming.
One disappointment I had was that the workout wasn’t the easy option that I thought it would be. It would be so nice to join a gym, go in on my lunch break, warm-up, do a 12 minute metabolic conditioning workout, and head out in under a half-hour. That’s what the program appears to allow from the outside. But given the need for coaching, that’s fairly impossible for the staff unless they constantly worked the floor. So, there are only a certain number of classes to attend in the day, and a lot of waiting around for classes to start, getting signed in, warming up with groups, cooling down. It basically ends up being an hour workout, plus the commute and waiting around time. All well and good, but that’s a lot of time to spend on a general physical conditioning program.
This leads me to one negative side-effect of the program: people like it enough that it sometimes gets treated as the be all and end all of fitness and sport. CrossFit is not shy about calling itself an elite program and taking other gyms to task. If you’re spending that much time looking at websites about your workout, hanging around your gym, thinking about your workout, buying products related to your workout, eating the food your workout says you should eat, getting drinks with the people you work out with, writing blog entries about your workout, etc., two things happen.
Firstly, your general physical program suddenly becomes the overall thing that you emphasize at the expense of other sport and activity, be it for for a lack of time or a diminishing interest. This is not a critique of others, it’s happened to me along the way. I should again point out this is a problem that CrossFit NYC is very good about countering — the staff constantly encourages athletes to have CrossFit carry over into other activities and actively seeks out and encourages this. It’s taken me a while to get to the point where I now see it as a tool to help my endurance work, not as a means unto itself.
Secondly, people doing CrossFit seem to push it as the best possible program for everything from lifting to endurance sports to military training at the exclusion of programs which work for other people and in some cases seemingly on not much more than faith in the program and brand. When the debate is just about generic fitness, it’s pretty easy to understand and ignore. People have been arguing about their programs since Ogg first chased Grog around the plains with a club and CrossFit has a lot of strong points to fall back on. It’s easy to go “ok, ok, who cares?” When you hear the occasional CrossFit enthusiast push CrossFit as a solution to poverty, AIDS, war, cancer and myopia in adult clownfish, you’re into eye-rolling territory.
I am exaggerating here a bit… but when you find me wandering down the streets of Santa Cruz wearing nothing but Vibram Five Fingers, Board Shorts and a watch cap, remind me that I was concerned about this at one time and then ask me how my Fran time is coming along.
On the fitness side of things, CrossFit does have a point — done properly it gets people into great shape, possibly the greatest shape of their life. However, it’s not the only thing that might do that. I know a lot of people who are fantastic athletes, no CrossFit in sight. The tendency to propose monolithic solutions combined with people’s tendency to discuss it on the bully pulpit of the Internet can make it sound like a cult at times. Us vs. them comparisions about your gym are all well and good, but there are some very fit and fast thems out there that you should respect and learn from. Given the amount of material CrossFit has absorbed from other disciplines, I’d say that on balance the program itself has done that.
And perhaps in the end, it’s impossible for CrossFit to be the be all and end all of conditioning programs because it isn’t tailored to the individual. Everyone does the same workout of the day. It leaves the responsibility to work on their weakness up to the individual athlete. I’m fairly certain most CrossFitters would argue that’s entirely positive. Perhaps it is, if you understand that process and are treating it as a foundation. A truly elite ahtlete might need a lot more programming and attention to detail.
All of this is turning into a negative critique and it wasn’t meant to be. I really do like the program, results, coaches, athletes and the gym itself. It’s fun. Great, painful fun. I am not an elite athlete, so I’m less worried about programming and personal planning than I am with scaling back on WODs to the point where I don’t screw up my knee. I would definitely recommend the program with the warning that it might not be for everyone, no matter what some people might claim. We’ll see where this goes.
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