Week in Preview – January 21st, 2019

“Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Intended Stimulus

You hear us throw this around a lot, and you may wonder what it means.  Many workouts are designed to get your heart rate up and be sprint, and many are designed to be longer conditioning workouts.  Since day 1 on crossfit.com the workout has been written in order to challenge the fittest people on earth, but to be scaleable so that anyone can get the same training stimulus.  That’s what we work toward everyday!

A great example was this past week when we asked you to scale Fran in order to get the intended stimulus of going 3-4 minutes.  That’s the workout window for that particular benchmark.  Many top athletes do it in under 3, or even under 2 minutes.  Sure you can do it with no time cap and go until you eventually finish, but it becomes a different workout at that point and uses different energy systems that we aren’t currently trying to train.

We have more opportunities for that in this coming week!  The week starts off with DT and ends with Fight Gone Bad.  These are classic benchmark WODs that have been around for years, and we want you to scale to get the intended stimulus.  How do we know what that is?  We look at the top athletes in the gym or around the world to get a standard and go from there.  That’s why we base DT of of your heavy hang power clean double.

When looking at DT, remember two things:

1. Ben Smith did Heavy DT @ 205 lbs in under 8 minutes
2. Matt Fraser did Double DT in under 12 minutes.

Baseline Nutrition

Check out our baseline nutrition this week with Johnny at West!  Thursday at 5:30!

The Week

Monday – DT

One of our favorite benchmarks around the gym!  Five rounds of 12 Deadlifts, 9 hang power cleans, and 6 push jerks.  The RX weights are 155/105, but we’re going to spend the first part of the class working up to a heavy double on hang power clean.  Based on that, we want you to scale your DT weight to 55-60%.  We’ve done it this way before and it’s the best way to get the intended stimulus out of the workout.  We’ll have a hard cap at 10 minutes!

Tuesday – Fuller Circle

Be sure to stretch your calves today!  All cardio with a 400 m run, 125 double unders, 2 k row, 125 double unders, and another 400 m run.  If you want to practice your doubles, pick a lower number or set time to work in.

Wednesday – Squat Day

For today’s WOD we have some strict strength work to prepare us for down the road.  Many call it “body armor” and that’s what Lt. Michael Murphy called his favorite workout, which consisted of a 1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, and another 1 mile run. Killed in action, Muphy’s favorite workout is now a hero WOD called Murph, which we perform every year on Memorial Day to remember all those who have lost their lives in combat.

Memorial Day comes at the end of May, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start preparing now.  The hardest part is always the push-ups, followed by the pull-ups.  These two movements, performed in today’s fashion, are a great start to your preparation.  You could perform 3-5 sets like this basically every day or every other day and it would only benefit you for life in general, and particularly prepare you for Murph.  Besides, it’s called Body Armor for a reason.