Fitness: 3×5 Across
Add 5lbs from last weeks Squats.
Performance: 5/3/1 (3 week)
70%x3
80%x3
90%x3+
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Squat e8/12
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5 Intervals of:
Row 250 meters
Go hard each round and rest about 2:00 between efforts. Try to keep your times as consistent as possible.
Post times to comments.
compare to 1.28.12
Nick Hoenemeyer (black ARC kit) uses CrossFit to help him with cycling road races with the ARC Racing Team. Nick has been racing for 5 years.
- Baseball tonight! The CFSBK Calveras play at 6:15pm at the Red Hook Ball Fields. Come on down too root on the team and enjoy a summer game.
- Check out mover and shaker Kenji Summers‘ Vine about packing exercise related equipment (including the old skull and bones). Kenji is the founder of The Passport Project and was presenting at the PACK THIS! seminar.
- All the dirty details for Memorial Day Murph will be explained tomorrow. That being said, we still need volunteers to help on the grill. Please email info(AT)CrossFitSouthBrooklyn.com to sign up and help out!
Trouble Shooting your Linear Progression
Fitness programming often follows a Linear Progression (LP) which uses the tried and true method of slowly adding a little weight each time you train to systematically increase your strength. This method is optimal for novice lifters but sometimes needs to be tinkered with with things get sticky. Below we’ll discuss some things to consider when figuring out what you should be lifting on an LP.
“Novice Trainee”
First off, by novice I mean anyone who can sustain adding a little weight every single time they perform a particular barbell lift. On average, this can be performed for anywhere from 3-6 months of sequential consistent training in that specific lift and rep scheme. Others can sustain an LP much longer if they started very conservatively and/or train the particular lift with less frequency. With the exception of the Back Squat, we usually see each lifts only once per week and often rotated in and out of training waves. This allows many folks to train an LP in that lift for even longer periods of time and develop a series of accumulated exposures that they add on to over many months.
Any seasoned lifter will tell you this is the golden age of your strength training journey. Things are ordered and predicable, the gains are consistent and managemable. It’s ideal to spend as long as you can in the novice phase before moving on to more advanced programming. Milk an LP for all you can!
Missing Reps
If you could simply add a little weight to your lifts each week forever we’d all be 2,000lb deadlifters and throwing small cars for fun. Eventually you’ll hit a wall and start missing reps. Here are a few things to consider regarding failed reps:
Did I start too heavy?
You should get through at LEAST 4-5+ full waves on a particular movement. That means you consistently hit all your exposures through several waves where we use that lift. Sometimes I see folks straight out of Foundations or just a couple months into things start to grind out or even miss reps very eary in their first training career. This means they got too greedy with weight or perhaps just don’t understand how novice strength training works yet. If this is you, then pull back. WAY back to something that forces you to swallow your pride a little. In the beginning there should be some effort involved in moving the barbell, but the bar speed should remain quick and everything should be as perfect and under control. You shouldn’t grind or be particularly intimidated by the weights at first. Starting light gives you lots of running room to ingrain the mechanics, get lots of practice in and slowly get really strong.
Did I reset this lift?
Sometimes you’ve got to take 3 steps back in order to take 5 steps forward later on. If you’ve been at it for a while and finally are starting to approach failure on your lifts you can reset your numbers by 10-15% of the missed weight. Often if we pull back to weights we’ve done before we can barrel past the weights that stopped us initially. Additionally, you can further extend your LP by performing the same weight for 2 exposures instead of one. For example Pressing 100x5x3 for 2 weeks and then the following week starting a 105x5x3 for another 2 week rotation. This might be exactly what you need to keep the weights moving up over an extended period of time while getting really good at performing the exercise.
Are things getting wonky?
A downfall of the LP is that pesky motor control and tightness issues don’t often get better as the weight goes up. In the beginning, everything will feel a little awkward and you won’t move as well as the person half your size moving twice as much weight next to you. However, if you start light enough the motor learning portion will happen when the weights are easy enough to handle AND you’ll begin to loosen up to the movement in the process. Unfortunately, some issues are harder to trouble shoot out and become more and more pronounced as the weight increases. If your knees cave in a little at 100lbs, they’re probably going to touch each other at 150lbs. In the grand scheme of things, technique issues need to be prioritized above moving more weight, plain and simple. We often get performance hungry and want to see those numbers move up and up even if positions are starting to drift and compromises are made in order to finish each rep. This is no bueno. What you’re actually doing is reinforcing problematic positions and digging yourself deeper into a hole that leads to frustration and injury. We’ve had troubled movers stay at the same light weights until they demonstrated enough control and consistency to gradually move up in load. This can be a frustrating position to be in for a lifter hungry to get stronger but a necessary modification in terms of long term health and saftey. Sorry bro.
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All Smiles: Allison Truscheit CrossFit Games
Chemin Vert
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