Welcome, Chip!

There are no group or teaser classes today for our Brutal Recess Seminar with Chip Conrad.

What is Brutal Recess?
Brutal Recess is accepting that freedom means responsibility, and to embrace our freedom of movement, our freedom of strength, we must embrace intensity. It’s the fun of accomplishment. We’ve stolen from all the great movement arts: fighting, dance, yoga and even child’s play and tumbling, and liberally sprinkled them into our workouts, usually in the workload or GPP phases. Get your heavy foundation lifting going and then challenge your stamina and range of motion.

Topics:
+ The philosophy and program design of Bodytribe Fitness
+ The Brutal Recess intense mobility concept
+ Getting weird with barbells
+ Unique kettlebell and dumbbell movements and drills

For more information, check out Chip's website, Physical Subculture

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Check out the Free Live coverage of the CrossFit/USAW Weightlifting open

Willie warms up his final exposure of Overhead Squats

Want to see all the pics from Fight Gone Bad 5? Check out the photo album here!

Remember there are NO Group or Teaser Classes tomorrow while we host Chip Conrad for Brutal Recess

COME ONE, COME ALL!!!
Please join Paulie's South Brooklyn Weightlifting Club for a few fun-filled hours of odd object lifting. Impress your friends and intimidate your enemies with your fantastic feats of strength. Try your hand at stone lifting or steel yourself for the perilous yoke walk. Do you think you can handle the 9' slosh pipe? Come down and find out!  For more information and to register, click here!

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CFSBK Interviews Chip Conrad
Part 2

4.  Mobility has recently (finally) become increasingly popular in the Crossfit community thanks to things like Kelly Starrett's Mobility WOD blog.  You've been including mobility complexes and movements into your training for years now and it's a big part of of the Brutal Recess seminar.  You've taken a rather integrated approach to the subject making it almost a workout unto itself.  Talk a little bit about why mobility is so key and its role in the Brutal Recess concept.

Training has gone from movement for the sake of movement (what children and only a handful of evolved adults do), which is, as mentioned, a tension release valve for the body, to a redundant, intense event that creates permanent and potentially dangerous stress in the body. That's right… our workouts are stressful, and not in the good way all the fitness literature is spewing at us.

What everyone is calling mobility now is simply moving the body through all of the possible full and healthy ranges of motion.  Most training doesn't do that, instead focusing on a handful of incomplete movements for high loads, repetitions or both. But just tacking on some obligatory bonus moves at the beginning or end of a workout doesn't quite complete the picture either.  Why not use the body as it should be used WITHIN the workout?  Slowly some factions of the CrossFit world are beginning to understand that there is much more to overall fitness than just workload/power. 

 5.  Lastly, I'm going to give you a variation on the desert island question.  Imagine you're stranded in a traditional globo gym. Forever.  You can only take one implement (i.e. Kettlebell, barbell, sandbag, etc), one training book and have one song to workout to.  Forever.  Pick 'em. 

Implement: Barbell if it is adjustable, sandbag if it is not.
Training book: a workout log.  Blank pages to ruminate on and contribute to.  Most of us know the basics… we have to trust ourselves to get creative from there.
Song: aw, come one… just one? The best I can do for now is to narrow it down to a top three list…

For Heaven's Sake by 16 Horsepower
Victim Support by Distance
Payback by Slayer

Check out Chip's Brutal Recess Seminat at CFSBK Tomororw.
Register Here

Ashley McCullough from Well+Good NYC tries CrossFit at CFSBK

Healthbeat Brooklyn Checks out CFSBK

USRowing comes to our gym to see how we incorporate rowing into our training methods

Time Out NY gives us a 6/6 on their Barf-o-Meter

US News and World Reports comes to CFSBK for an boredom-free workout

“Starting CrossFit South Brooklyn”  A CrossFit Journal Preview

The Inspirational Trainer, Jacinto Bonilla Part 1 and Part 2  CrossFit Journal Previews

We are huge in Europe. Exhibit A and Exhibit B

Teams of 2 complete the following for time:

Run 800 meters
160 KB swings 24/16 kg
Front Squat Rack Holds 225/155
Run 800 meters

Kettlebell starts when both partners are back from run
Swings can be broken up as desired
While one partner is on the KB the other holds the Front Squat rack
KB must stay on ground until partner has BB in rack position
10 Burpee penalty per team any time the BB is dropped
Burpees are to be completed after the swings and before the run
Time stops when both partners return from the run

Post partner, Rx and time to comments.

Caitlin C on the Wall Ball station

Check out Matt U's follow up write-up about Fight Gone Bad

A belated Congratulations to Julie E on her engagement!

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CFSBK Interviews Chip Conrad
Part 1
Chip Conrad, owner of Bodytribe Fitness in Sacramento, CA, might be the hardest working man in the strength biz.  In addition to being a gym/owner and trainer he's a musician, an author, a blogger and a competitive Olympic weightlifter and powerlifter.
A student of the late Mel Siff, Chip is well-versed in everything from the old-timey strongman lifts to clubbells and yoga infused mobility moves.  He also claims to know 75% of all Tom Waits songs and about 75% of the lyrics Sir-Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back." 
Somehow he does it all while maintaining a busy lecture schedule traveling across the country giving his Brutal Recess seminar.  Here, in an effort to help you all get to know Chip a little bit better before this weekend, is a short yet sweet interview with the man himself.  Enjoy! 
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Chip, your bio opens very similar to a lot of our members/trainers with 'i didn't grow up an athlete"  you were (and still are) a musician.  Now you are a competitive olympic lifter, powerlifter and sought after strength coach.  Fill in the blanks for us on how you got into the you to the world of physical culture?
 
21 years old… got into cross country skiing due to the need for a job.  Ski resorts hire a lot of folks.  I was one of them.

23 years old… skinny guy (about 127 pounds), wanting to get bigger. Skiing gave me some lungs, but I wanted some brawn.

About 24 years old… got certified as a trainer and was working at a gym.  Soon became fitness director.

28-ish… started questioning everything I thought I knew.  Wondering why an industry named 'fitness' wasn't really interested in anything of the sort.  Seemed built off aesthetic dreams and insecurity… ya know… sex and sex appeal.  Decided that ability, strength and… well… fitness, actually meant something, but it wasn't found in gyms at that time (still isn't in most of them).  Stumbled upon the underground world of strength athletics.  Pretty cool place, have been here ever since.

2. Crossfit has a very specific definition of fitness.  In your work you also talk about the importance of defining the term "fitness" and also offer a rather different definition.  Tell us a little about yours and how you arrived at it? 

Simple. My definition (fitness = the increase in the quality of life, or personal empowerment,  through movement) answers the question of "why is this important?"  It's the metaphysical (beyond physical) definition.  What most people list, including CrossFit, is the tenets of fitness, not actually what fitness means to anyone personally.  To embrace a passion means to define it, personally define it.  Then we begin our own philosophy, and that's how we take the first step of our journey.

Would a truly passionate musician explain music as a series of notes, harmony and rhythm? Would a brilliant scientist explain math as addition and subtraction? No, these are the tenets of those disciplines, but they sure don't DEFINE what they are.
 
 
3.  In Brutal Recess you stress the importance of various forms of play, something we as adults and athletes sometimes forget there is a critical need for.  Can you share a little about the Brutal Recess concept and what play brings to our time inside and outside of the gym?

A common chronology of our relationship to movement for us westerners:

Preteens: we enjoy recess and playtime, making up games, being silly and only dabbling a bit in the rules and structure of organized sport.  Movement, for the most part, is a tension release valve.

Teens:  For many, movement is limited to organized sport.  'Play' is now to win.  Fun is becoming less of an option, stress through competition is replacing the release of tension we enjoyed at an earlier age.

Young Adulthood.  Most folks have dropped movement at this point, unless they continue the path of rule-based competition.  Recess is gone, fun in movement has been replaced with obligation, if there is any at all.

Older Adulthood: Lack of movement has led to disease and decay of the wonderful machine that is our body.  This is not only a waste, but completely avoidable.  Keep the fun within movement, keep the concept of recess, and we have longevity in our bodies and minds!

Stay tuned for Pt 2 of the Chip Conrad interview!
"Brutal Recess" comes to CFSBK this Saturday, Oct 2nd
Sign up Here!

1-1-1-1-1
(E8/8) Max Effort

Post loads to comments.
compare to 8.28.10

3 Rounds NFT of:
10 Toes to Bars
:15 Piked Handstand hold
20 Pistols, alternating legs (10 each leg)

CrossFit babies!

Check out the review of CFSBK on WellandGoodNYC.com! Thanks, Ashley!

Check out Isaac G in his old Ska band circa 1996, Isaac Green and the Skalars

Want to learn a little more about Ben Bierkraft? Check out this interview on Metromix

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There are no Group classes or platform time this Saturday for Brutal Recess with Chip Conrad at CFSBK.
Theres still time to sign up! If you're interested, click here!