Coach Ro leads a group class through DROMs over in 608. Do you know why we spend so much time warming up before class? Coach David wrote an article about standardized warm-ups at CrossFit affiliates on his blog, Inside the Affiliate. Check it out! | Photo by Thomas H.

• Happy birthday to Greg A. and CrossFit Kiddos Siena S. and Taran R.! 

Need a break from group class, or want to maximize your rest day? Here are a few other options you can explore tonight instead!

Active Recovery at 6:30pm

This class is designed to give your muscles and mind a rest. For an hour you’ll be guided through a combination of soft tissue work, mobility techniques, and general restorative movement. This class is perfect as a rest day for the heavy hitters, or as a light day’s work for beginners, and those of us somewhere in the middle. This class is also great for non-CrossFitters who could use a little soft tissue love. Want to learn more? We wrote a detailed article about this class on Coach David’s blog, Inside The Affililiate, called “Running an Active Recovery Class.”

Pilates with KH (a.k.a. Cage) at 7:30pm

Have you ever been told by a coach or PT that you have a weak core? Are you not sure what “keep your ribcage down” means? Do you suffer from a tweaky lower back after lifting heavy weights? Help is on the way! The Pilates Method can be great “accessory work” for a Crossfitter, not only because it improves flexibility and strengthens the abdominal and back muscles, but mainly because it can help you figure out HOW to use these muscles properly. Come join Kristin Hoesl (KH) in CFSBK’s first ever weekly Pilates class. We’ll go over neutral pelvis, engaging the transversus abdominis (say WHAT?), stabilizing the rib cage, and finding good shoulder girdle positioning. So if any of this sounds intriguing to you, come drop in on!

Schedule: Tuesday nights at 7:30pm upstairs in the CFSBK Annex
Price: Individual classes and 5-packs can be purchased here, or you can use your regular CrossFit group class membership to attend 

Learn more about KH in our interview with her, called “‘Mad Abs, Yo!’ How Pilates Complements CrossFit, and Getting to Know Kristin H.“

Anti-Gravity at 7:30pm (or Sundays at 2pm)

Is your kip krap? Are you muscle-ups more like muscle downs? Are your pistols mere pop guns? Coaches Noah and Arturo have designed Anti-Gravity: an hour-long gymnastics strength, skill, and conditioning class.

The class will focus on the gymnastics skill and strength components that are most commonly demanded in CrossFit workouts, using a variety of skill exercises, progressions, weighted and strict practice, and other techniques to teach, develop, and perfect your bodyweight movements. Our goal is to improve not only skill, but gymnastic work capacity and muscular endurance. 

When: Tuesdays at 7:30PM and Sundays at 2PM 
Cost: This counts as a regular group class

Each class will consist of skill work, strength development, conditioning, and flexibility training. Every class will include dedicated strength work and a WOD, so its intention is to be a complete workout of the day on its own.

Email Noah [at] CrossFitSouthBrooklyn.com or Arturo [at] CrossFitSouthBrooklyn.com with any questions!

_____________________ 
Can We Reverse the Aging Process By Putting Young Blood into Old People? The Guardian 
An Open Letter to CrossFit HQ T Nation
Chest Dip ExRx 

Bench Press

Performance: Low Intensity: 65-70% x 7 x 4
Go a bit by feel and perform 4×7 at 65-70% of your 1RM. 

Fitness: 3 x 5 Linear Progression
Start light enough to add weight throughout the 8-week cycle. 
_____________________ 

Deadlift

Fitness and Performance: Work up to one heavy set of 10 using perfect form.
Aim for 60-70% of your 1RM. Dead start, no touch-and-go. 

Exposure 1/8
Post loads to comments.
_____________________ 

For Time:
500m Row
400m Run
30 Burpees 

Post time and Rx to comments.

CFSBK’s Swole Crew representing at CrossFit Virtuosity yesterday. There are only two events left in the Subway Series competition, one at CrossFit Long Island City, and the last one at home. You can still sign up here!

Did You See the Programming For Our Upcoming 8-Week Cycle? 

At CFSBK, we program 8-week cycles that culminate in a Crush Week—when we bias longer, higher volume or benchmark workouts and overlap elements that were programmed on particular day. In training weeks one to eight, we work off a basic distribution of lifts and skills (which you can learn more about in an article Coach David wrote for his blog, Inside the Affiliate, called “Effective Programming Strategies For CrossFit Affiliates” and in an article Coach Fox wrote, pasted below). The intention of these next eight weeks is to target particular movements while still biasing general fitness as the overarching goal of training. 

Training Cycle Dates: M 8/10 – Su 10/4
Crush Week: M 10/5 – S 10/11
Transition Week: Will be the first week of the following cycle, starting October 5, 2015

Cycle Goals:

• Add rep/set variety to barbell strength training
• Incorporate more gymnastics strength training
• One dedicated WOD day each week

Monday: Bench Press + Deadlift + WOD
Wednesday: Squat + WOD
Thursday: Snatch + Gymnastics Strength Bias EMOM + WOD
Saturday: WOD, no dedicated lift with a Clean and Jerk bias
Sunday: Squat + WOD 

Get even more details on the Current Programming Cycle tab, which can always be accessed in the left-hand column under Member Resources.

The Underlying Philosophy Behind Programming at CFSBK

By Chris Fox 

At CFSBK, we program for long-term health and fitness utilizing strength training, Olympic lifting, gymnastics, and mostly CrossFit-style couplet and triplet conditioning work. While some days look a bit different, a routine day at CrossFit South Brooklyn looks like this: DROMs, Warm Ups, Lifting, WOD prep, followed by a WOD. Let’s look at some of the reasons why we structure and program this way in terms of what each segment offers. 

DROMs: A general, light, dynamic warm up of joints and soft tissue will get your heart rate up a bit and help you enter a training mindset. It starts to get the sleep out of your eyes or the emails in your inbox out of your head. It also offers time for the QOD [LINK], which can lighten the mood and let you get to know a bit about the people you’ll be working hard with. 

Warm Ups: You need to be warmed up properly to move well and help prevent injury. Standardized warm ups move you through a wide range of motion, get you sweaty, and give you an opportunity to develop some strength in basic gymnastics and barbell movements you’ll regularly see in classes. Focused barbell drills review the positions and intentions of the lift you’ll be working on that day. We structure the drills so that you also get warm as you’re doing them.

Lifts: You need to be stronger, as strength is the physical adaptation with the greatest carryover to the rest of your training and to life in general. You may have noticed that we squat twice each week. We’ve been programming this way for years and for good reason. I can’t say it any better than Mark Rippetoe so here’s a quote from the man himself:

“There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that provides the level of central nervous activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.” 

We agree. 

The Olympic lifts train power, strength, coordination, flexibility, and overall athleticism. If you can throw a heavy weight overhead, catch it in a rock bottom overhead squat, then stand it up (PR bar slam optional), almost all of the other things we do will be easier. As far as the other lifts go, the bench is the best upper body strength developer and is simply fun. The press is another great upper body strength developer—it keeps the shoulder girdle healthy and works the muscles that stabilize your trunk extremely well. Every few cycles we’ll program an upper body gymnastics movement as a strength developer, as this allows us to have some fun and vary the stimulus a bit. The deadlift will get your back stronger like no other exercise can, and it’s almost always the lift where you’ll be able to move the most weight, automatically making it pretty cool. The average lifter should be able to deadlift more than they can squat. If that’s not the case for you, we recommend coming in on days when we’re pulling weights off the floor. 

WOD Prep and WOD: We discuss the intent of the WOD at the whiteboard, along with scaling options and strategies. The WOD is where we get our conditioning and develop the ability to work at high intensities for longer than a set of squats can take us. As stated above, we use mostly mixed modal couplets and triplets. Our conditioning tends to range from short, high intensity three- to seven-minute efforts, to medium intensity eight- 15-minute efforts on most days, with a lower intensity 20-minute-plus WOD thrown in once a week or so. 

Even when the total time is above 15 minutes, we’ll often use interval work so that intensity stays high, given that high intensity (anaerobic) training has positive carryovers to low intensity (aerobic) training and offers other benefits. High intensity training can develop and preserve muscle mass, whereas long slow distance training can cause you to lose it if used exclusively. High intensity training creates EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption), which sets your metabolism up to burn slightly more fat after exercise compared to endurance-type training—a boon if you’re looking to lose extra fat. Plus it’s time effective. If you can get the same or better benefit metabolically with shorter high intensity training, then the only reason to do the long slow stuff is if you don’t want to work that hard. 

Consider that maybe you don’t need more “cardio,” but actually need to work harder. I’d argue that hard work will also make you stronger in non-physical ways. We throw something like “Murph” at you a few times each year since we know you secretly love it and it’s cool to see that you haven’t lost your ability to go that long in spite of all your gainz. If we programmed hero type WODs all the time however, we’d likely have an oft-injured population with a narrow scope of fitness. Time and intensity have an inverse relationship in that the longer you work, the lower the intensity must be. By intensity, I mean power output. I know a marathon can be an intense experience, but you’re not working as hard on those miles as you would be while doing 800m repeats. Furthermore, the longer you go, the more reps you’re going to be doing and the more fatigued you’ll be. You don’t move better on the 69th deadlift compared to the 9th, trust me. Remember: we’re programming for our general population to be fit for the long term—not to crush a week’s worth of hero WODs followed by six weeks of PT. 

Cool Down: This portion is largely up to you, but you really don’t need us to babysit while you run, row an easy 1000 meters, or spend some quality time with a foam roller. 

To wrap up, CFSBK’s programming is designed to give you the most training value. We do these things because they are effective, not because they are in vogue or even because our members demand that we do things a certain way. We’ve withstood a few silly fitness trends in favor of what science and experience says works and will continue to do so, evolving as we learn. Training here is hard, it’s consistent, and it isn’t always exciting or sexy, but it works. We’re lucky to have so many of you who seem to agree and are willing to put in the hard work!

_____________________
How’d Crush Week go? What did you think of the programming last cycle? Give us your thoughts in the comments below, or through our online feedback form (always located in the left-hand column at the bottom of Member Resources). We love hearing from you!  

“Danny“

AMRAP 20 minutes:
30 Box Jumps 24/20
20 Push Presses 115/75
30 Pull-Ups

Scale load and volume as appropriate, but this should be a bit of a slog. If you can jump on the Rx’d box and do 5 reps at a time of the Rx’d push press and pull-ups, then Rx today. If not, scale some volume and or load and pull-up variant.

Post rounds and Rx to comments.
Compare to 2.2.2011

Check out Episode 2 of CrossFit’s “Road to Conviction” series! While incarcerated, Fletcher Tholin discovered CrossFit. Watch his rehabilitation in this eight-part series.

• Kids Club is CANCELED today, since Coach Janelle is out of town!

Good Luck to Our Subway Series Competitors!

The Subway Series is happening over at CrossFit Virtuosity today. Here are the CFSBKers that will be representing for us:

Pierre D.        
KLove
Brendan N.    
Alex N.          
Brad D.
Jason M.
Mare L.
Coach K HarpZ
Lauren S.
Coach Jess
Coach Whit

_________________
A Tribute to the Incredibly Swole Bro Who Plays Gaston at Disney World GQ 

Open Workout 12.4

AMRAP 12 Minutes:
150 Wall Balls 20/10, 14/9
90 Double-Unders
30 Muscle-Ups

Substitute chest-to-bar or kipping pull-ups for muscle-ups.

Post time and Rx to comments.
Compare to 11.10.14 and 5.29.14 

Coach Jeremy competed in the USAPL meet last weekend, and his bench press was an all-time competition PR (video above)! Here’s his report: “The meet went well overall. The 424# squat ties the best I’d ever done in competition, but it was way easier this time than the last time (2 years ago) and I weighed in much lighter at 178lb versus 196lb. The bench was an all-time competition (pause) bench PR. I had hit 325 2 years ago (at that heavier weight), getting 330 (150kg) was a longstanding goal, so I was really pumped to hit it. DL was blah.  It was late in the day and I was kinda done with the meet.  Hit my opener, the 451, but my 2nd attempt was ugly and I gave up on it quick and passed my third.” 

• Want to try something other than group class today? Check out Yoga for Athletes at 10am, Active Recovery at 11am and 12pm, or Open Gym from 2-4pm!
• Kids Club is CANCELED tomorrow, as Coach Janelle is out of town!
• Happy birthday, Simon H.!

Check Out Our Upcoming Training Cycle Template!

Training Cycle Dates: M 8/10 – Su 9/27
Crush Week: M 9/28 – S 10/4
Transition Week: Will be the first week of the following cycle, starting October 5, 2015

Cycle Goals:

• Add rep/set variety to barbell strength training
• Incorporate more gymnastics strength training
• One dedicated WOD day each week

Monday: Bench Press + Deadlift + WOD
Wednesday: Squat + WOD
Thursday: Snatch + Gymnastics Strength Bias EMOM + WOD
Saturday: WOD, no dedicated lift with a Clean and Jerk bias
Sunday: Squat + WOD 

Performance Bench Cycle

Weeks:
1 and 4: Low – 65-70%x7x4
2 and 5: Medium – 75-80%x5x4
3 and 6: High – 85-90%x3x4
7: Heavy 3
8: 1RM Test 

Fitness Bench Cycle

3×5 Linear Progression
Last exposure is a 1-3RM test 

Fitness and Performance Deadlift Cycle

Increasing loads through the 8-week cycle, warm up to one top set of:
1 – Heavy 10
2 – Heavy 8
3 – Heavy 5
4 – Heavy 5
5 – Heavy 5
6 – Heavy 3
7 – Heavy 3
8 – 1-3RM test 

Performance Squat Cycle

Back Squat first and then Front Squat. 4 total work sets of squats each squat day.
Low – 65-70%x7x2
Medium – 75-80%x5x2
High – 85-90%x3x2
15 Rotating Exposures (Wed-Low, Sun-Med, Wed-High)
Last exposure is a 1RM test 

Fitness Squat Cycle

Goal is to add weight each week.
Wednesday Front Squat
3×10 (start at about 75% of your best 3×5 from last cycle, or 60-70% of a 1RM)
3×10
3×8
3×8
3×5
3×5
Heavy Triple Test
Heavy Single Test

Sunday Back Squat
3×10 (start at about 75% of your best 3×5 from last cycle, or 60-70% of a 1RM)
3×10
3×8
3×8
3×5
3×5
Heavy Triple Test
Heavy Single Test

Want to learn more about CFSBK’s programming? Check out these articles:

• The Underlying Philosophy Behind Programming at CFSBK Chris Fox
• A New Dawn for CFSBK Programming: Fitness and Performance David Osorio
• Low Bar and High Bar Back Squats David Osorio  

_________________ 
Orphaned Kangaroo Finds Comfort in Teddy Bear CBS News 

Training Cycle Template

Training Cycle Dates: M 8/10 – Su 10/4
Crush Week: M 10/5 – S 10/11
Transition Week: Will be the first week of the following cycle, starting October 12, 2015

Cycle Goals:

• Add rep/set variety to barbell strength training
• Incorporate more gymnastics strength training
• One dedicated WOD day each week

Monday: Bench Press + Deadlift + WOD
Wednesday: Squat + WOD
Thursday: Snatch + Gymnastics Strength Bias EMOM + WOD
Saturday: WOD, no dedicated lift with a Clean and Jerk bias
Sunday: Squat + WOD 

Performance Bench Cycle

Weeks:
1 and 4: Low – 65-70%x7x4
2 and 5: Medium – 75-80%x5x4
3 and 6: High – 85-90%x3x4
7: Heavy 3
8: 1RM Test 

Fitness Bench Cycle

3×5 Linear Progression
Last exposure is a 1-3RM test 

Fitness and Performance Deadlift Cycle

Increasing loads through the 8-week cycle, warm up to one top set of:
1 – Heavy 10
2 – Heavy 8
3 – Heavy 5
4 – Heavy 5
5 – Heavy 5
6 – Heavy 3
7 – Heavy 3
8 – 1-3RM test 

Performance Squat Cycle

Back Squat first and then Front Squat. 4 total work sets of squats each squat day.
Low – 65-70%x7x2
Medium – 75-80%x5x2
High – 85-90%x3x2
15 Rotating Exposures (Wed-Low, Sun-Med, Wed-High)
Last exposure is a 1RM test 

Fitness Squat Cycle

Goal is to add weight each week.
Wednesday Front Squat
3×10 (start at about 75% of your best 3×5 from last cycle, or 60-70% of a 1RM)
3×10
3×8
3×8
3×5
3×5
Heavy Triple Test
Heavy Single Test

Sunday Back Squat
3×10 (start at about 75% of your best 3×5 from last cycle, or 60-70% of a 1RM)
3×10
3×8
3×8
3×5
3×5
Heavy Triple Test
Heavy Single Test

Want to learn more about CFSBK’s programming? Check out these articles:

• The Underlying Philosophy Behind Programming at CFSBK Chris Fox
• A New Dawn for CFSBK Programming: Fitness and Performance David Osorio
• Low Bar and High Bar Back Squats David Osorio