Muscle-Up Work

Fitness
Perform 10-15 transitions on the low rings.

Focus on achieving the correct positions throughout and not just getting from A to B.
Watch these 2 short videos before coming to class: Video 1 Video 2

Performance
Every other minute on the minute x 7:
3/2/1 Strict Muscle-Ups

Use a false grip and be sure to start with extended elbows.

Post work to comments.

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In teams of three with one person working at a time, partners alternate full rounds…

30 total rounds for time of:
12 KB Swings 32/24kg
6 Burpee Box Jumps 24/20″

Post times to comments.

Lauren B. after cranking out a set of Deadlifts in 16.4. Isn’t it weirdly satifying to bail a Deadlift? | Photo by Thomas H.

• Schedule Change: Today’s 11am Active Recovery class is cancelled, but you can still get your AR in on Sunday at 11am!

Inka H. Is Back!

Our beloved Inka H. is back in Brooklyn for a hot minute and available to do some bodywork at CFSBK. Many members can attest to her magic! Here’s what she’d like you to know:

“I left Brooklyn about 2 years ago to study some of the most cutting edge techniques in bodywork, and I am excited to be in NY for a short time to offer some bodywork to my old CFSBK fam!  I have been fortunate to study the KMI method of Structural Integration (AKA Rolfing) with Tom Myers, Nerve and Artery Manipulation with Kirsten Schumaker, Anatomy in Motion (AIM), and advanced biomechanics and visceral work with Liz Gaggini.

I’ll be offering sessions April 2nd through the 5th, and April 11th at the gym . Please email me directly for times and to set up appointments: inka.hodes [at] gmail [dot] com. First sessions are typically 1.5 hours ($140 per session).”

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Crazed Heavy-Metal Drummer Accompanies “I’m a Little Teapot” Boing Boing

Coach Fox congratulates Brad D. on finishing 16.2. And we congratulate everyone who competed in the Open!

This Week at CFSBK in Review

1. Tomorrow’s’s 11am Active Recovery class is cancelled, but you can still get your AR in on Sunday at noon!

2. Brooklyn-based filmmaker Jessie Auritt is making a docmentary called Supergirl, the coming of age story of an 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl who is a world record holding powerlifter. The Supergirl team is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds they need to finish the film.

3. We caught you up on the CFSBK Classifieds. And speaking of which, Paul A. is looking for a place to sublet from May through August and perhaps even a long-term lease. Let’s help him out!

4. In the lastest installment of Underneath the Hoodie, Kate Reece profiled the wonderful Whitney Hubbard. Ever think, “Damn, Whitney is a good coach?” Read and find out why she’s such a good coach.

5. Sign up now for the Common Hands Farm CSA. No dillydallying!

6. In its first year, the CFSBK Open Intramural Team Competition was a total success. Go here to read the final recap.

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Yesterday’s Whiteboard: Snatch | Push Presses, Pull-Ups, Double-Unders
Exercise Makes Our Muscles Work Better With Age NY Times

Snatch

Every other minute on the minute for 15 minutes (8 total reps):
1 Snatch

Work up to a max for the day.

Post loads to comments.

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5 Rounds for Time:
10 Push Presses 95/65
10 Pull-Ups
25 Double-Unders

Scale weight as appropriate so the Push Presses are light enough to be done unbroken. Scale volume or degree of difficulty (Ring Rows, or Banded or Jumping Pull-Ups) with the same intention. The sub for Dubs is 10-15 attempts + makes, or 50 Single-Unders if your Doubles are a work in progress.

Post times to comments.

CFSBK Open Intramural Team Competition: Final Results

The run up to Open Workout 16.5 was shrouded in secrecy. After Your Pace Or Mine? had punched, kicked, and eye-gouged their way into a one-point lead by Week 4 over The Little Lebowski’s Urban Achievers, both team captains denied the media access to their practices and locker rooms.

Sources close to the team have indicated that Urban Achievers captain Duane Roggendorff banned the soothing California soft rock of The Eagles from his locker room and repeatedly held mandatory screenings of The Big Lebowski until his players ran out of the room screaming “Mr. Treehorn treats objects like women, man!” And according to another source, Your Pace captain Michael Crumsho reportedly took his team members’ smartphones away while gruffly muttering “Smartphones weaken knees,” although that sounds like Mick from Rocky to me (probably shouldn’t trust that source).

The Open Intramural Team Competition was decadent and depraved, if you consider ending in a tie to be decadent and depraved, which I absolutely do. There’s an old saying in sports: “A tie is like kissing your sister.” It’s a pretty weird saying when you think about it, unless you’re this dude from Yahoo Answers who thinks the tie is a necktie. In that case, it’s extremely weird. Anyway, both teams brought their best in Open Workout 16.5. Your Pace posted an excellent score of 18 points, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the Urban Achievers backboard-shattering 15 points, their best score of the competiton. After rounding, both teams finished with 21 points. You are encouraged to suggest comical tie-breakers in the comments. 

Around the rest of the league, All Castro Oiled Up successfully defended their claim to 3rd place. You guys can stop being oiled up now. No, seriously. Please stop. It’s worrying everyone. The Sore Winners weren’t far behind in 4th place and were nearly disqualified after rumors swirled that Barbara K. was using PEDs (turned out it was PEZ, the candy). In the battle for 5th, Blue Steel prevailed over It’s My Open. The lesson here is that trash talking kind of works but not really.

This inaugural season was a complete success. Thanks to everyone who competed, captained, cheered, and made it fun.

Current Ranking – Team – Overall Average (Week 5 Points)

1. Your Pace or Mine?: 21 (18)

1. The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers: 21 (15)

3. All Castro Oiled Up: 25 (22)

4. Sore Winners: 28 (21)

5. Blue Steel: 30 (26)

6. It’s My Open and I’ll WOD If I Want To: 31 (30)

Open Leaderboards

Wondering how you stacked up against your fellow CFSBKers in the Open? Here are all of our leaderboards!

• Overall Leaderboard
• Men’s Leaderboard
• Women’s Leaderboard
• Men’s Masters Leaderboard (40-44)
• Women’s Masters Leaderboard (40-44)
• Men’s Masters Leaderboard (45+)
• Women’s Masters Leaderboard (45+)

(NOTE: There are technically a few divisions between 45 and 60; however, in the latter two, we only had a couple of competitors in each division. We combined everyone 45+ to make it easier to view.)

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Yesterday’s Whiteboard: Row/Front Squats
The Deranged True Story of Heavy Metal Parking Lot Deadspin
Exercise Slows Brain Aging By 10 Years Time

Row/Front Squat

Every 5 minutes:
In 3 minutes…
20 Calorie Row
7 Front Squats, as heavy as possible

Row the 20 calories hard and get right to the Front Squats. Work up to a max 7-rep Front Squat for the day.

Post times and loads to comments..

Do you love veggies as much as Coach David does? Read on to find out how you can acquire the veggies!

• Did you catch Adrian Bozman repping CFSBK during 16.4?
  
• Schedule Change: This Saturday’s 11am Active Recovery class is cancelled, but you can still get your AR in on Sunday at 11am!

Common Hands Farm CSA: Sign Up Today!

Happy Spring! Getting fit and eating well starts now. We have your direct hook-up to fresh produce grown upstate, and its time to sign up to reserve your membership today!

In its fifth year, Common Hands will deliver CSA shares right next door to 575 Degraw (Brooklyn Boulders) on Tuesdays from 6 to 8:30pm.

What is a CSA Share?

It is a membership to a farm where you get an exclusive deal on fresh organically grown vegetables delivered straight from the farm to you! Once you pay the upfront membership fee (payment plans available) you receive a weekly delivery from the farm starting in June through November.

Why Should You Join?

Beyond receiving freshly harvested and health-giving food, grown cleanly with no pesticides or herbicides, you are also putting your money where your mouth is, and supporting the local food economy. This is food from real farmers, and by buying a share you are supporting small organic farms. We grow food for you, period. We are not a distributor or large conventional farm with lots of employees, but real down to earth people. On our farm, a team of less than ten people work to grow food for upwards of 200 members each year… and we care what you eat!

We offer Full and Half Vegetable Shares that can be paired with the optional Full or Half Fruit & Egg Share. A Full Share picks up weekly, while the Half Share picks up bi-weekly. Veg shares are $615 for a weekly (“full”) share or $375 for an every-other-week (“half”) share. Fruit and eggs can be purchased in addition to Veg Shares and are bundled together: a full share is $280 and a half share is $140. Pending interest, Flower Shares may be available as well.

Remember, your pick-up location is just down the block at Brooklyn Boulders!

Go to CommonHandsCSA.com for details or click here to sign up directly!  Questions? Email the farm at commonhandsfarm [at] gmail [dot] com, or the gym’s CSA coordinator, Michele, at mignyc [at] gmail [dot] com.

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Chris Spealler on the “Chest Up” Cue Instagram
The “Not Face” is a Universal Part of Language Science Daily

Video of the Week: A T-Rex did the Open. Hilarity ensued!

• Team Captains: please submit your team score to the intramural spreadsheet by 12pm tomorrow.

Chasing Rx: When To Scale and When To Go Heavier

An interview with David Osorio and Jess Fox, edited by Kate Reece

Editor’s Note: As we reflect on this year’s Open and approach the end of our current 8-week programming cycle, now is a good time to revisit this piece we published last year. It was originally posted on 3.17.15. Enjoy!

If you don’t know why workouts are named after women, Greg Glassman, the founder and President of CrossFit, explained it like this: “I thought that anything that left you flat on your back, looking up at the sky asking ‘What just happened to me?’ deserved a female’s name. Workouts are just like storms, they wreak havoc on towns.” 

Regardless of whether you welcome or abhor that feeling of being wrecked (particularly when it doesn’t happen in your bedroom), we all know what it’s like to approach a nasty WOD from the mindset of wanting it to be over before it even starts. But sometimes, the desire to cruise through a workout can cause us to take shortcuts, maybe not go as heavy as we could, and ultimately sacrifice our long-term strength goals on the altar of feeling like a beast in the moment. Hopefully, we all do want to get stronger. In that case, it’s important to realize that the lifting segments of group classes are not your only opportunities to achieve your goal. You should aim to get stronger through the conditioning portion of class as well.

Maintaining excellent technique should always be your priority, but if you want to close in on the Rx-ed loads for a WOD, you need to gradually increase your base numbers—which might involve surrendering a bit of the metabolic stimulus of some workouts. (“Rx” refers to the prescribed, standard weights for a workout, or those scary numbers written after each weighted movement on the blog and whiteboard.) Simply put: you need to lift heavier and go slower so that you can eventually lift heavier and go faster. 

I sat down (i.e. emailed a lot) with Coach David and Coach Jess to ask them everything you wanted to know (but were too scared to ask) about chasing Rx in workouts. The bottom line: don’t be complacent about the weights you choose for any given workout. Getting stronger is a process. Here are David and Jess’s experiences with exactly that.

CFSBK: When did you start Rx-ing all the WODs? What did your journey look like to get there?

David: When I started CrossFit, I was self-teaching myself the movements, so I did what I could and then practiced the movements that I didn’t know how to do yet. It took me about a year before I was doing almost everything Rx-ed. I definitely was biasing a heavier weight and slower times in the beginning, which helped me develop the requisite strength to be able to eventually move the Rx-ed weights faster. I still occasionally scale some of the weightlifting loads in WODs when appropriate 

Jess: I’d say the first things I could Rx fairly quickly were workouts with deadlifts, double-unders, box jumps, and kettlebell swings. I knew my road to Rx-ing weights in the Olympic lifts would take some time, and honestly we weren’t doing as much of those when I started. So, I chose to target kipping pull-ups as my first big goal, since they tend to come up in so many WODs—and what girl doesn’t want to do pull-ups! My road to getting them meant practicing them EVERY time I was in the gym. I started out with thick green-band but over the course of a few months, I was able to get my rhythm down enough to get a few unassisted kipping pull-ups in spurts. They weren’t consistent enough though so I always resorted back to the band for workouts.  

However, that changed when I visited my other “home” CrossFit in Ohio. The WOD was “Cindy” and although I knew that I could get a few rounds Rx-ed, I still set up a band. During the workout, when I started to slow down on pull-ups, I reached for the band. The coach there stopped me and just told me it was okay to move a little slower. Sure, I didn’t get a high number of rounds but it allowed me to continue to work on that skill and it gave me a baseline for “Cindy” Rx-ed. After that experience, I got rid of the band. That didn’t mean I did every pull-up workout Rx-ed right away though. Until I got better at them, scaled volume was my friend. 

CFSBK: If I’m moving fast and getting a good workout in the WODs, why should I worry about what weight I’m doing? 

David: The balancing act between performing workouts with their intended metabolic stimulus, versus going heavier or sticking to a calisthenics version that slows you down considerably, can be somewhat nuanced. Ideally, you want to be able to keep moving at a somewhat reasonable pace. If you’re shuffling your feet, looking at the pull-up bar for a minute, you’re probably not getting the most out of your time on either end. But if you’re not at the Rx-ed weights and want to start pushing toward them, you’ll just have to accept that you’re going to be slower and the workout probably won’t be as spicy. In my opinion, that’s fine. Recently, I told a member that would have rather her go with a heavier dumbbell and get capped versus going lighter and getting a good time. As long as you can perform about 3/4 of the workout before getting capped, you should be fine. If you want to get stronger in the WODs, you’re always going to have to bias a little heavier and slower, technique permitting. 

Jess: As CrossFitters, we’re all a little Type A and want to move fast through workouts. However, our training should include different stimuli and heavier weights—higher skilled movements can provide that. As I mentioned before, it took a little nudging from coaches, and a little/lot of swallowing my WOD pride to not scale those pull-ups in “Cindy.” Looking back though, I’m so grateful for that intervention. Not just because it was my first Rx-ed “Cindy,” but because I didn’t really realize that I had the strength and skill to do it. I see this a lot with push-ups in workouts as well. Though I see many of you work your strict push-ups like a boss in our warm-ups and even start a workout with strict pushups, as soon as the going gets tough, the knees drop down. Sometimes you just have to gut it out (provided your movement is technically sound), knowing that you might need to scale volume and accepting that you might be the last person to finish.   

CFSBK: How do I know when to go heavier during WODs?

David: When you feel like you “own” a weight that is below Rx-ed, then it’s time to bump it up. Don’t get complacent with certain loads. For example, if you’re a guy and you always do 65-pound thrusters, even if it still feels difficult, you need to start gradually adding five to 10 pounds to push your strength and comfort level with the movement and load. If you always swing the 16 kg kettlebell, start voyaging out to heavier territory. As long as you feel confident in your technique, which might mean going a bit slower or breaking up reps more, then the weights or your modification should feel heavy.

Jess: This is where logging your workouts comes into play. Early on in your CrossFit life, you will and should start lighter than you think. Use the warm-up time to pick a load that you know you’ll be able to move consistently well through. Then, take note of how that felt in your logbook so that you know what to aim for next time. Also, listen to the advice your coaches give you. I think we do a pretty good job of talking about the intention of the workout and providing scaling options or percentage markers to help guide you in determining an appropriate weight. If it’s ever not clear, just ask! 

CFSBK: If I want to set a goal to get to Rx or heavier weights (and I know I should!), what should my battle plan or strategy be?

David: As Jess mentioned, make sure you’re logging and writing down both qualitative and quantitative data! You’ll never remember to go heavier on that barbell if you can’t refer back to previous experiences. Focus on writing notes specific to how heavy things felt and if you think you could have gone a bit heavier and kept your technique together. You’ll have to dip into loads or movements that intimidate you a little if you want to get better.

Jess: Be consistent in your practice. If it’s barbell lifts, then aim to make each rep at lighter weights perfect and slowly increase the weights from week to week or from WOD to WOD.  If you did the past three thruster workouts at 75 pounds and flew through them, then go for 80 next time. If you’re training a skill, then lay out a specific plan to help you get there.  Also, tell a buddy and have them help keep you accountable, or better yet, have them join you! Note though, that skill is singular. Don’t be the person that has a list of 10 skillz and can never really devote enough time to any one of them. 

CFSBK: Any parting thoughts?

David: Use your coaches as a resource! We want you to improve and always will let you know how a movement looks and whether you should scale up or back down. Let us know you’re trying to get stronger and we can give you some thoughts about how to modify your workout intelligently.

Jess: Know that for most of us, this stuff doesn’t come naturally and that some of us might never hit Rx-ed weights. We’re now in the CrossFit Open season, so now you can compare your WOD scores to people around the world. But just remember that ultimately you’re competing with yourself. In the beginning, focus on establishing your baseline. Keep a good logbook, set realistic goals, set time aside to practice, and then use your training to beat yourself. 

(An important caveat: Rx is not an advisable goal for all athletes. It can serve as a point of reference to make the process of choosing your weights easier, and enables our coaches to help you scale appropriately at the whiteboard.)

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Yesterday’s Whiteboard: Rack Jerk | Split Squats, Ice Cream Makers, Run
In Everybody’s Corner, a Boxing Gym for All NY Times