Angie take 4.

The Crossfit Angie: the number 100. 100x pullups, pushups, situps, and squats. My time last time: 20:30. My time this time, with the same modifications: 16:55. I like that improvement!

Also today: kettlebell snatches, 12kg bell, alternating arms with the exchange performed between the legs, at the bottom of the swing, instead of at the top of the swing. Nice variation.

Tabata This!

I’ve done this twice before, but I can never manage to remember my numbers for it. Here’s the Crossfit Tabata This:

pullups
pushups
situps
squats
20 seconds on, 10 seconds resting
for 8 rounds total
count reps for each round, record total & round with the lowest reps

As per usual: jumping pull-ups, kneeling pushups because I am a wuss. Everything improved this time. Everything: lowest rep count, total rep count, for every exercise. Also, better consistency. For most of them, I improved by a count of 1 rep per round, and for some of them 2 reps per round. Biggest improvement was in the squats, which have always been my strongest exercise of these.

I always feel like cardio is my worst fitness problem. It’s always holding me back. But I guess it’s still getting better every time even though it never feels like it.

Also in today’s workout: stretching and kettlebells. I did windmills with the 12kg bell. And then I did a rather nasty interval workout with the 20kg bell:

do one good hard-style swing
swing and shift grip to hold the bell at chest level
squat with the weight held in front
repeat for 10 secs, then rest for 10 secs
repeat for 20 sec on, 20 sec rest
then again for 30 sec on/off
repeat the 20 second round
then repeat the 10 second round
then collapse and rest and do it again

I managed to get in 2 reps of swing/swing/squat in each 10 second round. This was shockingly cardio-riffic, thanks to that heavy heavy bell. (But the squat would have been boring with a lighter kettlebell, alas.)

Crossfit Barbara, take 3.

See my writeups of previous attempts for my usual mods to scale down the exercise to my level of wimpiness. This time, kneeling pushups, so the benchmark time to use was 19:22. Today’s time? 14:45. Oh yeah!

I love to think about the totals for Barbara:
60 body rows
90 pushups
120 situps
150 squats

Also today:

Lunges while holding 2 12kg bells in the rack position. Fast walking on a 16deg inclined treadmill, which let my heart rate recover after those lunges, which were nasty.

12kg Turkish get-ups, this time just straight get-ups with no breakdowns of the moves. And I did the best TGUs I’ve ever done. Oh yeah! They’ll get even better before I’m done.

Tabata intervals swinging a 16kg bell.

Plank variants, with my hands braced on a pair of really heavy bells so I could move my feet around.

Crossfit Helen, take 2.

Helen
3 rounds for time
400m run
21 kettlebell swings @ 24kg
12 pull-ups

Last time I did this in 17:23. This time, slower, gah! 17:40. I was completely surprised, since I did a lot of running at 5.5mph, including most of the last round. I wonder if it was transit across the gym floor to the place where I did the jumping pullups. I felt strong. Oh well. (Note that the kettlebell swings in the video I linked to display some very bad form. You should not be using your arms and shoulders to lift the bell like that. Ugh.)

I will find consolation in reflecting on the heavy weightlifting I did in the rest of the session.

deadlifts @ 205#, new personal best
back squats @ 135#, new personal best
bench press @ 105#, repeat of existing personal best, 3 reps this time!

I also did lat pulldowns on a cable machine. Some day. Some day. A bodyweight pullup. I dream.

Crossfit Kelly, take 2.

Kelly as specced:
5 rounds for time
400m run
30 box jumps
30 wall balls, 20#

The box jump height isn’t specified; I did a 12” jump. Also, a 14# ball. And three rounds.Yes, I am a wuss, and these are the same mods as on my first try back in June. (I ran a quarter mile each time, though, and that’s very slightly longer than 400m!) On the first try my time was 26 minutes something or other. I shaved off a minute today, for a time of 25:15. All of my improvements were in the running portion: I maintained 5.5mph for a while on the run! This is so vastly much better than before that I’m boggled.

Wall balls still slaughter me, though. The whole thing was one huge cardio burn. My heart rate was at 180 when I got onto the treadmill for the last round.

The rest of the hour was TRX stuff that was hard enough that my hands are still shaking an hour later.

Crossfit Annie, take 2

Crossfit Annie is one of the simplest Crossfit workouts there is. To recap:

50/40/30/20/10 reps, done for time
double-under rope jumps
situps

My substitution was to do twice the number of regular rope jumps instead of double unders. (I still can’t do them reliably enough. Woes.) So in total, 300 rope jumps and 150 situps.

My time on my first attempt was 14:53. This time I did it in 12:51. Two minutes faster, woot! And really, it was all about cardio fitness, because my muscles did not fail until the very last round of situps.

The rest of the hour was spent doing two reps of a 9-exercise circuit. Each exercise is repeated continously for 1 minute.

single leg hamstring curls, 30 secs per leg
kneeling pushups, hands on dumbbells for instability and depth
ab crunches on a balance ball
bicep curls, 20# bar (or something really light like that)
single leg box squats, 30 secs per leg
Smith machine body row
stiff-legged deadlifts with 2 30# dumbbells
Arnold shoulder press, 10# per hand
extended plank, sort of, with arms stretched overhead gripping the bar used for the rows

My abs were toast, and those crunches were hard. Welcome back to work after a week off, oh muscles of mine.

Crossfit Fran, take 5, I think.

Today I did Crossfit nasty girl workout Fran, which, as you know, Bob, consists of
thrusters (65# women, 95# men)
pull-ups
21 - 15 - 9 reps each

My mods: 45# thrusters, jumping pull-ups.
My time this attempt: 8:04.

Last attempt my time was 10:31, with the same modifications. So! I do continue to improve! And I definitely consider Fran to be a reasonable fitness benchmark. My heartrate peaked at 178 and never dipped below 163 while doing this.

Barbara, take 2

Crossfit Barbara, as specced:
20 pullups
30 pushups
40 situps
50 squats
rest 3 minutes
repeat all for 5 rounds

My mods: 3 rounds not 5, inclined rows instead of pullups. This time I did full-length on-my-toes pushups. My time: 20:40-something. This is 1:20 slower than last time, but last time I did kneeling pushups. I also note that I did not rest 3 minutes between rounds.

My pushups have no depth to speak of. Bleah. They remain a sore trial to me.

Fear of burpees.

I was just reading some Crossfit propaganda about the brutality of the Filthy Fifty and how mental weakness will defeat you, yadda yadda. At first I was thinking, oh what testosterone-soaked silliness. Every strenuous workout requires a certain amount of pushing through discomfort. If they were easy, they wouldn’t be improving our fitness. Then I realized that though I don’t like the word “brutal” there, I do think mental weakness does defeat people. It nearly defeated me.

One of the things that slowed me down in my last attempt at a scaled Filthy Fifty was entirely mental. Fear of Burpees. Even before I started the clock and did my first box jump, I was thinking ahead to the evil burpee. Do that workout once and you’ll learn to fear the burpee too. They’re second to last, at a time when you’re already thrashed and keeping yourself going through sheer contrariness. And they’re not easy even when you’re fresh. I still can’t do them properly. (Part of an overall pushup weakness that will remain until I lose all the weight I need to lose.)

It’s so easy to stop and say you can’t do them at all.

Heck with that. Call it an enemy and defeat it. Snarl at it. Yell at it. Refuse to give in while other people are watching. Whatever it takes to keep moving. For me, it’s the stopwatch. If I’m being timed, if I’m competing against myself, that’s it. I’m throwing myself into those burpees.

Last time I did 6 sets of 5 burpees. 5, then rest. Another 5, then rest. Somebody asked me in the middle of this if I was okay. “Yeah,” I said, “just breathing for a minute.” This time I pushed and did 5 sets of 6, just breathing for a minute between sets because that was all was capable of doing. But still, I hesitated before I started the very first set, because I was scared of the first burpee. A moment of mental weakness.

Next time, I’m going to fling myself into them. They didn’t kill me the first two times, after all. And I know how to tell when I really do need to stop and breathe.

Filthy Fifty (almost), take 2.

To recap, this is the Crossfit Filthy Fifty, aka the Chuck Norris:

50 reps of each, done for time:

Just as I did the first time, I did 30 reps of each instead of the specced 50, for a Dirty Thirty. My time? 23:06! That’s 12 minutes faster than my first try!

I was half-way through at only 8 minutes. Then the burpees did me in. Oh, god, burpees. I made up the time on the box jumps (way faster), the kettlebell swings, and the walking lunges. And the push-presses were practically a rest phase for me. I should do the specced 45# next time.

I think my heart rate was around 170 the whole time. It was still up half an hour later.

ETA: Bah. I should be doing tuck jumps to sub for double-unders. Though probably I should just practice the double-unders.

Crossfit Helen, take 1.

Helen
3 rounds for time
400m run
21 kettlebell swings @ 55#
12 pull-ups

My modifications: jumping pull-ups. And I did proper Russian-style kettlebell swings with a 24kg bell, but not the weird Crossfit-style use-your-shoulders swings. Pretty close to specced, really.

My time was 17:23. I could have gone faster on the pull-ups. I had something left at the end, which was silly of me. The point is to blow it all out! My running is also improving; I did the first round at 5mph, which is faster than I’ve been jogging. Slow improvements!

Anyway, I like Helen. It seems like a well-rounded workout.

Today I also did overhead squats for the first time. We started with a lightweight bar, but this wasn’t letting me get my hands as far apart as they should be. So I switched to the bare 45# bar and squatted with that. The weight was no trouble. It was all about balance and learning the form. By the third set it was feeling good!

In other news, my jeans are starting to look like clown pants they’re so baggy. But the next size down isn’t quite right yet. Woes. Also, in the bathroom mirror while fiddling with my hair, I realized I had visible lats. Bogglement! I gotta get rid of this body fat. Underneath it all I’m starting to have some real muscle.

Crossfit Elizabeth, take 1.

Elizabeth, as specced:
21/15/9 reps
135# clean (115# for women)
ring dips

As usual, I scaled down. This is how:
2x 12kg kettlebell cleans
dips with toes on the floor taking some bodyweight, using TRX straps because the gym doesn’t have rings

My time: 5:49. The cleans were too easy. I should have done it with 2x 16kg bells instead. I had been worried about form getting in the way of hefting the higher weight around. But my kettlebell clean form is improving vastly every time I repeat the exercise, and I can handle the weight so… I should do it heavier.

Here’s another way to scale it. I think using the ball like that makes the clean much more like the specced barbell clean. The kettlebell clean is a very different exercise. I wonder if we should find a different way to scale this one, a way that stays closer to the spirit. Or why not try a real barbell clean, just with less weight?

Also on the agenda today: 200 rope-jumps, 60 wall-balls with a pathetically light ball, 60 “choppers” with the same ball, more KB swings, KB windmills, blah blah blah. The usual.

Barbara, take 1

Crossfit Barbara, as specced:
20 pullups
30 pushups
40 situps
50 squats
rest 3 minutes
repeat all for 5 rounds

My modifications to scale it all down: inclined rows instead of pullups, kneeling pushups, 3 rounds instead of 5. I completed 3 rounds in 19:22. I finished strong, banging out the last 50 squats without a break.

Man, oh man, my situps are much stronger than they were when I got started on this. The gating factor on the situps was cardio, of all things— I wasn’t breathing properly. I’m going to have to slow down and pay attention to breathing the next time I do them.

Then I did some exercises targeted at grip strength improvement, which I report here as promised. I did 3 sets of each of these exercises:

wrist curls, palm down, 15lb barbell
wrist curls, palm up, 20lb barbell
10 swings of a 16kg kettlebell, two-handed, holding the ends of a towel looped through the handle
10-second static hangs from a pullup bar

By the end of that, my grip was exhausted and the hangs were very difficult. And as always, my bodyweight complicates the problem. I was slipping off the bar at the end of the ten seconds each time.

Crossfit Kelly, take 1.

Kelly as specced:
5 rounds for time
Run 400m
30 box jumps
30 wall balls, 20lbs

I did 3 rounds of 400m run, 30 box jumps at 1 foot, 30 wall balls with a 10lb ball. 26:05 or something like that— just over 26 minutes, anyway. This was my first try at this exercise, so that’s my baseline. I usually find that my second try at any named Crossfit exercise is drastically faster. Sometimes that’s because of general fitness improvements. Mostly it’s because I get better at simple aspects of performing each exercise. My box jumps could become more efficient, for instance. I bet most of the improvement will come from running more and walking less, because I’ll have a better idea of how to pace myself.

Afterwards, I did high-rep low-weight exercises. 40 reps each of bench press with the bare bar (45lbs), leg press with some trivial weight, inclined rows, leg extensions, leg curls. Then second rounds of the bench, leg press, and rows, and we ran out of time.

Crossfit Annie

The Annie is a simple workout that requires only a jumprope.

50/40/30/20/10 reps, done for time
double-unders
situps

Double-unders are rope jumps where the rope passes under your feet twice per jump. You need to jump higher and swing the rope faster to manage it. I cannot do them consistently yet, so I did 2x the specified number of jumps for each round. So 100 jumps + 50 situps in the first round, 80 jumps + 40 situps in the second, and so on.

My time: 14:53.

This was my first time doing Annie, so that time is a new baseline to improve upon. The improvement will come from faster situps with fewer breaks, I suspect. I wasn’t wiped out afterwards like I often am after named workouts— I should have pushed harder.

Today I also did deadlifts again, maxing out at 135lbs. I can do more, but we’re working on making my form perfect.