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Crossfit Linda, take 1.

Crossfit Linda is called the three bars of death. I think it would kill me if I did it as specced.

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 reps of the triplet:
deadlift @ 150% body weight
bench press @ 100% body weight
clean @ 75% body weight

Those weights are a long way out of my reach right now. I did these instead:
deadlift @ 185#
bench press @ 85#
clean @ 85#

My time: 36:59. That’s my starting benchmark.

Here’s a guy doing it as specced in 14:20. Here’s vid of a woman doing it scaled down. She does deadlifts at the same weight I did them.

You can see from the variable scaling where I’m weak. I had to crank down the bench press far more than the others, because I just don’t have any chest strength despite working on it. At these weights, the workout was more cardiovascular than anything else. I was limited by grip on the deads, strength on the benches, and cardio on the cleans. I didn’t do squat cleans, by the way. I did power cleans, bar starting on the floor. I am working on only dropping under the bar when I actually need to; that is, when the weight is more than I can drive up with my hips and legs. 85# is light enough that I can make the bar float above my chin with just my legs.

On Friday I did a cruddy Crossfit Helen. Time was 1 minute longer than last time. I suppose that this is to be expected: I’ve been working on pure strength for the last few months, not metcon. So of course my metcon suffers. But bah. I hate it when I regress.

Deadlifts!

I’ve come to love deadlifts. They’re so simple: grab the bar and stand up. Yet they make your whole body work—that whole big posterior chain with all those big muscles, working hard.

I did them in the wave pattern. That works like this. You take your estimated 1 rep max and do 10 reps at 65% of that weight, more or less. Then do 6 reps at 75%, 4 at 85%, and 2 at 95%. Then repeat the set of 6, then the set of 10. The lightest set will feel light, but 10 reps is high volume on tired muscles. If you make your weight, that is, if you complete all the reps, then try bumping up the estimated 1RM next time.

There are lots of possible variations here, but the general idea is high volume at a lower weight, working up to a few reps near your max, then working back down again. I’ve found it very effective at improving my strength.

Today, my estimated 1RM was 265#, so my set of 2 reps was at 255#. That was, last time I tried it, my 1 rep max. In fact, the last time I tried to lift that, I failed. Today, I just ripped it off the floor. It was work, don’t want to gloss over that, but there was no doubt that weight was coming up.

After that, three rounds of 3 random-ish strength exercises: lat pull-downs, seated cable rows, kneeling pushups with strict form.

Also today: a tabata-interval-ish workout designed to improve my FGB weaknesses.

55# barbell clean
20” box jump
40 seconds on, 20 seconds rest for each exercise
Repeat rounds until dead.

That’s enough music!

Back to boring fitness.

Today I did a rehearsal round for Fight Gone Bad. The official event does have a category for women’s weights. I was staring right at it! Anyway, 55# for the SDHP and the push press; 14# for the wall balls. We set everything up for a single round of all five exercises.

I did the box jumps first, then the wall balls. This was a deliberate attempt to stack the exercises so the ones that I know hammer me hard are first, and I had to do the easier ones while sucking in oxygen from the wall balls.

Strangely, I’d never done 20” box jumps before. Don’t ask me why, just never done them at that height. I did a bunch of practice jumps. No problem. I pulled my knees up and had 6” of clearance. The thing I have to remember while doing them for real is that the jumps only count if you open your hips at the top. You have to really be landed on top of the box.

My wall balls suffer from catching the ball too low. I will need to work on that. They also suffer from OMG oxygen deficit now! syndrome. I need to do a lot of wall balls in between now and Sept 25.

The sumo deadlift high pulls were a snap. No kidding. Doing all those barbell cleans and very heavy kettlebell swings have prepped me good for that lift. It’ll be an aerobic workout, not a strength workout for me. And a little bit of endurance, too, by that third round.

The push-press was similarly no problem. I am goggled by how light 55# feels to me now. It didn’t used to! It used to feel impossible!

The thing I need to work on is aerobic capacity. I need to be able to keep moving steadily through these exercises. None of them are strength exercises, exactly. It’s all about maintaining intensity for five minutes straight.

The rest of the workout I used for wave pattern back squats. 10-6-4-2-6-10 reps, starting at 65% of your estimated 1 rep max, peaking with 2 reps at 95%, then back down again. My estimated 1RM was 175#, so I started at 115# and topped out at 165#. I made my weights! My squats are so very much better than they were when I started doing serious heavy squats that it isn’t funny. Everything’s better: depth, foot position, knees staying out, chest staying upright, on and on.

Next time I’ll do the workout assuming that my 1RM is 185#. My goal, of course, is to be able to back squat my husband. You never know when you’re going to need to carry your spouse around the house.

Project pushup proceeds.

Wave pattern benchpress, starting at 70# (10 reps) to a max of 105# (2 reps). The two reps at 105 were solid! The last time I did this, I did it at 95# max, so therefore my 1 rep max has taken a solid step forward. Yay! My Top Sekrit(tm) Goal is 175#, but that will take me a whle.

Inclined pushups against a Smith machine bar. Oof, tired chest. Inclined body-weight row. Dumbbell floor chest press at 30# each. Oof, even more tired chest. Overhead squats with the junior bar (10kg), just to wake up the legs. And 500m of rowing at a 2:06 pace. The goal was to beat a 2:10 pace, which I did so I am pleased.

Just an ordinary day pushing weights around.

Crossfit Diane, take 2.

I did the Crossfit Diane workout again today and my time was horrible. 25 minutes, 5 minutes slower than the first time. It was the shoulder presses. They took forever. I suspect my shoulders just haven’t recovered enough yet from Monday’s hammering.

As specced:
deadlift @ 225# men, 185# women
handstand pushups
21 - 15 - 9 reps each

As before, I did shoulder presses at 65# instead of the impossible handstand pushups.

Burly is the word of the day.

Sometimes I just utterly despair of losing any more weight. It comes off in bursts, but I can’t figure out what triggers the bursts. I’ll lose 5 pounds in a week then stay at the new lower weight for months and months. Then blam, another 5 pounds gone. But I’ve been stable for ages now, and it’s annoying me. I know that realistically I’ve gained a huge amount of muscle in that time, and that the measurements say my body fat percentage has swung down by a lot. But still. I want to fit into that next size down pair of jeans sitting in the drawer, waiting, with the decade of dust on them.

So yeah, muscles. My pectoral muscles are developing, thanks to those two weeks of intense bench press/fly work. If I were to flex while wearing a tank top, you’d see them. And the shoulder muscles and the biceps. It’s strange to feel bulk on my arms and shoulders. It’s a new sensation, while hard quads are something I’ve had before (back in my cycling days). All the product of working toward being able to do various bodyweight exercises— pullups, pushups— that would be way easier to do if the mass met the muscle halfway. Lose weight, gain muscle, meet in the middle with one, perfect pushup.

Climbed on Sunday morning with my husband. He did his first 5.10a climb! I did a range of climbs from a warmup 5.6 to 5.7s to 5.8s, with mixed success. I got stuck very near the top of a 5.7 climb that I otherwise rocketed up, which was annoying. Climbing: another sport where simply having less weight to haul up the wall would make things much easier for me.

Did assisted pullups yesterday, narrow grip palms in, and banged out quite a lot of reps. The particular grip engages the biceps as well as the lats, but I can get a huge range of motion that way. Chin all the way up and over! Also did barbell hang power cleans, working on form not max weight. Hmm, what else? Stretching, lunges, something like a TRX power pull but with a squat in it (touch the ground behind yourself with one hand, pull up and twist to touch as high up on the straps as you can). Also with the TRX: suspended planks. The sweat dripped from the end of my nose. The TRX still seems gimmicky to me, but so long as exercises done using it can hammer me as hard as they do, I’ll never say so out loud in front of it.