Ok everyone, tomorrow is the big day – our Grand (Re)Opening of our brand new facility. We want to show this place off to as many FishHawk (and surrounding area) residents as possible, but us coaches can only do so much. Its up to you guys to brag your socks off about how awesome CrossFit For Glory is get people in here. We’ve got a simple timeline of events going down and there is something for everyone – kids, high schoolers, and adults. We will also have Dr’s Scott and Noorani on hand with some FREE health screenings, chair massages, and general health and fitness info. Here are the times for different demo’s:
10am – Doors Open
11am – Adult CrossFit – this is a time for you to WOD alongside your friends!
12pm – Our CrossFit Kids program will be up and running and we will need as many kids to come have fun as possible. Parents of kids who did the program last summer – bring your young ones!!
1pm – We will have some of our high schoolers put on a demo of what the high school weightlifting program looks like and talk about the goals for this new venture.
2pm – Doors Close
In summary, it’s going to be awesome and you’ll earn a FREE CFG Car Decal if you bring someone new! See you there.
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So in traditional Friday fashion, we will be doing a benchmark. But in the interest of keeping with the CrossFit mantra of being “constantly varied,” we will be doing something a bit different today. As opposed to a named girl benchmark, we will be doing a “total.” Basically – how much weight can you total for the movements of the day. Without further ado:
“Weightlifting Total”
Snatch
Clean and Jerk
More than anything, for most of you guys this will be a tremendous learning opportunity in a few different ways:
1) How to approach a day like this
2) How to approach a miss
3) How to structure your warm-ups and attempts (yes, they are different)
Numbers 1&2 are things that take a decent amount of time with a barbell to develop. Basically you need more experience. Just like we don’t coach all of you the same way, your approach to a max lift day and how you each handle a miss will be quite individual, but I will attempt to lay out a framework that you can start to build off of.
1) How To Approach a Max Lift – everything, and I mean everything, about how you approach the bar (called your routine) needs to be the same every single time. If that means you roll the bar back and forth 13 times, do a handstand walk, chalk the left hand 3 times and the right 14 times, click your heels together, sing a lullaby, and then lift the bar, that is A-OK with me. So long as that is your routine for a lift every.single.time. This serves as a way to create a habit. Doing this time after time will provide the comfort necessary to keep your confidence level high.
2) How to approach a miss – this is a bit more tricky and takes even more experience. At the very least you need to rely on your coaches to be watching you so they can tell you what you did wrong, allowing you the opportunity to link what you felt to what they tell you you did incorrectly. If the miss was caused by a technical error (most common, especially among novice lifters, which everyone at CFG is), or even 12 technical errors, you need to focus on fixing one. Yes, just ONE. Trying to fix 12 things will cause you to fix exactly NONE of them. If the miss was caused because you tried too much weight, then you need to go down. How do you know? Well, read on to the next one…
3) How to structure your warm-ups and attempts (yes, they are different) – few things cause me more frustration as a coach than talking a class through a proper warm-up protocol only to have them let it go in one ear and right out the other. Man, I sound like my parents more and more every day! Anyhow, as I said above – warm-ups and “attempts” are two entirely different animals. Trust that a lengthy post on this is brewing, but I want to give you a few ground rules to work with tomorrow.
- Your first warm-up set should not be 50% or greater. I’m looking at you, gents! Mr. Load-Up-45s-on-each-side-even-though-my-1RM-is-less-than-200lb. Basically unless you are planning to get more than 270lb overhead, your first lift should NEVER be 135 guys.
- Your first few warm-up weights/sets should be done with multiple reps
- Your rest times should increase as your weights increase. Even if you’re not feeling physically exhausted, trust me when I tell you that your central nervous system needs time to recover. By the time you are making maximal attempts, your rest should be around 2+ minutes.
- If you miss a maximal (or sub-max) lift twice or more, go DOWN in weight (approx 10%), then work your way back up. Don’t continue to bang your head against the wall by trying a lift ten times because you “almost had it man.” Missing is contagious.
- Focus on going up by percentages rather than weight. Use the fractional plates…they make a difference.
- How much you go up is dependent on how you are feeling that day and how well you executed your previous lift. In general, the closer that you get to your “max” the smaller your jumps in weight will be.
- One PR is enough per day.
- ONE PR IS ENOUGH PER DAY!
So, what would one of my lifting sessions look like? I’ll show you in percentages:
- 3 x 35%
- 3 x 50%
- 3 x 60%
- 2 x 67%
- 2 x 75%
- 1 x 82%
- 1 x 90%
- 1 x 94 %
- 1 x 98%
- 1 x 102%
When is the last time you hit almost 20 lifts in a 1RM session? If you really bug us, I think your coaches tomorrow would love to lift alongside you guys…
