Some cleans and Front Squats

https://vimeo.com/79889032

These lifts were a couple of weeks ago. I was attempting to use the jerk boxes for a 'tall' position with no counter movement in the clean. What I discovered was that all that additional front squatting was quite fatiguing.

Next are the power cleans. I established a conservative 3RM in the power clean several months ago (~75k) and have tried to add a kilo every 2-4 cleaning sessions (every other week). I was hoping to get to 100k x 3 before the end of the year, but so far I am only at 89k, and 90 is later this week I believe. So, I have time to get close (93-95k) but not quite make it. 

The last part of the video is the front squat. I feel like my feet are too externally rotated, and I need to work on bringing the toes in and using my hips better. I have tweaked the set up (turned the feet in) on cleans, snatches and front squats, and I am working on doing all of them pretty much the same. At the Don McCauley workshop, one of the assistant coaches suggested that my starting stance for cleans and snatches was too narrow, but they didn't offer much guidance on what they thought should determine the starting stance width. 

Shortly after this video I did 220 x 5 (was having a good day) and it went really easily. Last week I did 230 x 5 and it was definitely pretty tough, but no form breakdown except my thoracic and elbows. If I can front squat 100kg for five, I better be able to power clean it soon. 

A few more weeks along

   I been working more on the o lifts, as I stated in my last post. Things feel like they are going along pretty nicely.

   I have been working triples in the front squat and in the power clean twice a week, and doing light cleans on the minute the other days, as well as strict presses. It would make more sense to work more on push presses, but I have a terrible strict press and I want to raise it badly.

   The video above is a work set of light cleans (135#), followed by my first sets of a power clean and split jerk. As you can see in the video my feet are turning out on both sides. Maybe that's some flexibility lost, maybe that's something I can cue myself out of. In the third set you can see that I am talking to someone off camera, and he's telling me my feet are out. The next set I willed my feet straight and the jerk was much more stable. I think that's 80kg. The next lift was high hang snatches, with 52kgs. I was doing doubles from the tall with considerably more weight the prior week. Next week I may try some lifts from blocks instead of from a hang and see how that feels. The final video is my 3RM front squat set, which is at 250#. This is up from the 225 starting point. I went 235, 240 (tough), 245 (only hit 2) to 250 this week (fuck it).

   While I am pleased that I hit my target 3RM this week, I am little bummed to think that a 3RM is probably comparable to ~90% of 1RM, ie 250x3=275x1, a lift I have already accomplished. I will be doing full cleans and snatches next week or the week after, and I will be doing very heavy jerks from behind the neck soon too, which should give me a great opportunity to work on that stability.

Well, I been doing a lot of squats. I was having some issues with my shoulder, so I decided to pursue something simple, like a 5x5 type program with just squatting.

There were months when I worked on strict press, push presses and bench, but never for long stretches of time. I did do a lot of work on pull ups, and made some solid progress on dips. Glute-Ham raises and hip thrusts were done extensively as well.

When I started, I was about 180lbs, I weighed in at 194 the other day. My previous best back squat had been 325, and I think I did 295-305 for seven once. I started last summer at about 235 as a peak set amongst lighter ones. A few weeks in to this training I discovered the Texas Method as promulgated by 70'sBig.com and began following it pretty closely. I made a few mistakes early on, and as such, I would advise you to buy the e-book before embarking on a similar journey, it's totally worth it.

Once I got in to the TM groove, I think I started with about 275x5 as my 5RM. The first cycle I walked that all the way up to about 315. So that was 5 pounds a week for about 8 weeks. Then I started to have trouble, so I took a month off. Big mistake. Don't do that.

Once I started back up, I had to regain some lost ground, and I think I began with 285x5, but jumped by tens for the first 2-3 weeks. I think I took it all the way up to 330x5, 335x5. Something like that. My 5RM went up about 60lbs in a year. I did 350x3, and 365x1 before deciding after about 15 months I needed to switch it up a little.

Last week was my first week back at weightlifting. I set a 3RM of 225 in the front squat, and I have been practicing 3RM power cleans for a few weeks already. I got stuck once or twice at 85-86kgs, but I feel like I did really well in the video above with 87. My old Tall Snatch PR was 66kgs, and I did 67kgs with about 5 minutes of warm. For clarity, I have been wide stance, chuck taylor wearing, going to parallel power-lifter back squatting, and NOTHING else for almost a year and half. And I hit a snatch related PR on my first day back. No one to blame but strength for that one. My jerks are way shaky, and I know it's going to be a bumpy road when I start doing more full cleans and snatches, but so far so good! I am looking forward to front squatting over 250x3 in less than a month.

Dan John and several other coaches have mentioned the idea that if you can front squat it for a triple, you should be able to clean it. So, if I can power clean 90 for a triple, and front squat 110+ for the same, I should be squat cleaning 100-110 very soon, and maybe I can snatch 80+ soon too. Yay!

Don't go against millions of years of evolution

Recently a friend on facebook shared a link to this article series: 

Five Movements

It's hosted by my good friends Dallas and Melissa of Whole 9, but it features guest spots from some great coaches. There's a short bio for many of them, but suffice it to say that several (Dan John, Eric Cressey, Greg Everett, Michael Rutherford) have either decades of experience or several published works or both. There's some heavy hitters in there!

I shared this piece on the Full Circle facebook page and it received not a single comment. Not one. To be honest, this troubled me quite a bit. Not only are there several awesome contributors, but it's not every day that you can glean this much info (give me your top five, GO!) in this short a period of time (I said five, not six!), from such a collection of diverse but unquestionably highly qualified experts. 

So here I am, thinking this article is totally profound, what if I had read this in 2000? It's helping me be self-reflective about our programming for group training, and how what I want for my clients aligns with or conflicts with the demands of a group setting or teaching to the Crossfit. I am doing some soul searching, but what about my clients? What about our 300+ followers on Facebook? In particular, what about those 30-45 year old, overweight and de-conditioned members who have recently (6 days to 6 months ago) decided to make a change for the better and to improve their lives. What are they thinking about this incredible nugget of gold.

NOTHING. WE BELIEVE IN NOTHZING LEBOWSKI. WE COME BACK AND CUT OFF YOUR JOHNSON. Yeah and squish it.  (you get the picture)

They are not considering it at all, and if so they are not saying it. Perhaps this is why they pay me. I know for a fact in many ways it is. But I have to call all my members out and say this unequivocally: We aim to empower our members. As such, sitting on your ass and letting others do all the thinking for you, or worse yet, assuming no thinking at all is necessary is NOT ACCEPTABLE. If you aren't asking how to make things better, it is no mystery to me why things are not getting better. 

As a coach, there is in fact very little I can actually do for you, especially if you are part of a group. You must take account for yourself, and you must start asking yourself some tough questions if you want to actualize all the potential that I SEE IN YOU EVERY DAY. The article above is a great start. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

THE STATS

There are 6 experts in each article, all are allowed 5 movements to suggest as indispensable. You can look at it two ways; how many times does a movement appear absolutely, or relative to how often it could come up. Either divide by 60 to see relative to the total, or divide by 12 to see how many experts couldn't exclude it. 

Lets examine some of the top contenders:

The deadlift

Appears six times (if you count Dan John's swing/dl hinge category). Take away, hip hinging is fundamental to most powerful extension based movements, and the harder, faster and longer you can do it the better at life you are.

Any Squat

Appears seven times. There are some back, some front and some overheads (almost equally distributed). The experts are undecided as to which squat is the best if you can only choose one, but most agree you should choose one and do it.

Clean

Appears 5 times
Take the deadlift and make it explosive. Accomplish a functional task. 

Press (includes loaded overhead presses and horizontal presses of any kind)

4 times
You have to push stuff. Simple.

Pull Ups

5 times
Can't climb and you can push if you don't have the pulls. Always important for balance and health, in some sports equal to or greater than the push.

Rows/Horizontal Pulls

4 times

See above.

Sprinting or Sled drag, carry or push (farmer's walk, prowler etc)

Appearing six times (excluding walking, crawling).
You gotta work son. And you gotta travel distance fast. This to me is the real eye opener for some. In a evolutionary sense, someone whose sprint capacity declines or doesn't exist is prey. EASY PREY.

Turkish Get Up

4 times
Sometimes I think of the TGU as a novelty, but whatever it's true functionality really is, the skills and strengths learned in it's practice are real. 

These seven movements comprise 41 out of a possible 60 selections. One interpretation of this data is that 12 eminent experts agree that 68.3% of your training time should be spend on these 7 domains. Special mention goes out to Airdyne, Lunges and jumping. If you expand your search to those, you rise to over 80%. 

One extrapolation I will offer is that if you combine crawling, sprinting, drags/pushes/carries and the Airdyne, what you have is a high intensity, full body locomotion domain that is most likely presumed to be high intensity interval training oriented. This broader category encompasses by far the largest single group at approximately 12 results, ie NO COACH could live without something from this domain. It might appear like 20% of training time, but what it really is is 100% of respondents had to include it, and many included more than one, such as both sprinting and swimming.

I am getting at two things. The first is that a good student of physical culture should not be satisfied to leave any stone unturned. If you have the opportunity to compare your performance in these domains to normative data (and if you come to Full Circle you have that opportunity every day) and find it to be substantially below average, you make an earnest effort to address this as quickly as possible. If you can't squat, sprint, press overhead or do a pull up, YOU ARE BROKEN AND YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. These primal movement patterns listed above are what got us from family bands in Africa to mining asteroids, and if you can't perform them you are the part of the herd that is soon to be 'thinned'. Whether it be Zombie outbreak, alien invasion or Russians coming up through Mexico you must have these basic skills to not only survive but thrive. 

I am saying this because I love you. "I can't run", "My doctor told me not to go overhead", "Squats are bad for my knees", "Pull ups are hard" are all inexcusable answers. So you can't do a pull up now? NOT A BIG DEAL. We'll work on it. Not willing to work on it? GTFO. That goes for every domain on this list. Not running is not accepted. Running poorly, and being willing to work on it is.

First rule of Zombieland: Cardio.

Beating a Dead Horse

I would like to preface this post by stating unequivocally that I think Steve Maxwell is one of the baddest mother fuckers in America. I am not sure if I have all my facts perfectly straight, but I think it's pretty spot on when I say he was the first American BJJ black belt. One of the first guys to adopt KB training over ten years ago. A collegiate wrestler. His son Zach just fought and beat Kron Gracie at the ADCC trials. Basically most of the things that I think are cool, Maxwell excelled at a decade ago, or more. Here's some pics:

That being said... He just posted a statement against Crossfit on his blog. I run a Crossfit. So I read it. He is one of my heroes after all. The gist of my response is that he failed to state anything new, and made some broad generalizations that aren't necessarily wrong in many cases, but far from true across the board. I think it's helpful to understand that ALL Crossfit affiliates are different, and attempting to describe 'Crossfit' will always require either clarification or always risk being generalized and thus lacking specificity, accuracy or legitimacy. At the article's worst points, he makes statements without support that I think show an unclear explanation of his premise at best, and perhaps some incomplete or biased logic. I have copied and pasted the headlines he used, and I will address the issues discussed therein. For a primmer on this topic, consult Mike Boyle and Gray Cooke from like 4 years ago HERE.

Notice below that most of the material is kinda SOS, DD.

Here's the Steve Maxwell article: Blog

The use of high-rep Olympic lifts for time

I agree with this one in principal at first. If you wish to be an olympic lifter, you need to train very low rep sets. The bulgarians are famous for the ME every day approach and the Russians have Prilepin's chart. No denying the evidence and the crowd are all suggesting mostly 3 or less reps with rests of 45-300 seconds between sets. If you're goal is to use the O lifts for power development more broadly as an athlete, then you can interpret 'the rules' a little more loosely. HOWEVER, one of Steve's principal arguments is that the O lifts are not best for developing power and do not transfer well for athletes. Furthermore that they are not safe in general (citation?) and that Olympic lifting specialists get injured all the time (citation?). If the O-lifts are such shit, what does it matter how many reps I do?

Where the logic really falls apart is when we then read that Maxwell suggests KB's instead, which are in one sentence 'designed' for high reps, and in another also highly technical and at risk for causing injury. Two thoughts: KB's where designed for marketplace weighing, and why is the movement not dangerous but the implement? How are KB's inherently safer than barbells? This coming from an RKC (me). By the end of this section, I have to admit I lose track of where he stands. But I will say this: MOVEMENT MATTERS. Not implements. Your body doesn't know or care what you are lifting. Just how heavy it is, how fast you move how many times etc. The O lifts are really hard. 90% of people who do them suck terribly, and should not be doing them for more than 3 reps, and this includes almost ALL Crossfitters. Sorry guys. Practice harder.

If you are going to argue that explosive lifting for high reps is safe (girevoy sport) than you have to allow for Grace.

Making exercise into a competitive event

This does suck some times too. It's a double-edged sword, with pros and cons. Crossfit WORKS because it's empirical and participants share results, and inherently this leads to competition, which pushes everyone to do better. If you compete every single day, if you NEVER have training days, only competition days, your career will last months. That's it. After that you will start to get worse or hurt. That's not Crossfit's fault. That's the culture of a gym. Coaches have to make it clear that there are differences. If you went in to a BJJ gym and every single person treated every roll like Mundials, that would suck too. But it's not BJJ's fault. Selling a martial art that incorporates non-cooperative sparring as more effective is a delicate balance between death matches every night and chi hugging at opposite extremes. But it can be done. In judo and in Crossfit.

The use of kipping pull-ups and other joint-harmful gymnastic-type exercises

This argument is structured very similar to the Olympic lifting one. Again there's no citation of the claim that gymnasts get hurt a lot. This is then extrapolated to say that if competitive gymnasts get hurt, then regular trainees should not do kips. Furthermore, women and weak people do kips because of their inability to do real pull ups (harsh).

This could all be true. I think that the kipping pull up is very similar to the push press, and isn't much more inherently dangerous except that the weight is fixed at an intensity (BW) that's usually too high for beginners. If you can't do deadhangs, it's inherently unwise to try and do kips. Why do a power movement when you can't handle the slow lift equivalent? This is just logical progression.

WOD (Workout of the day)

Steve argues that there's no rhyme or reason to the selection of training. I believe he intended to refer specifically to HQ, and to be honest I can't really argue for or against this point. At the affiliate level this changes a great deal from gym to gym.

At our facility, we try to overcome some of the obstacles that Maxwell points out. We have multiple levels of classes, an entry program prior to them, and we are offering more and more specialty classes (barbell, yoga etc). These classes all have their own 5-10 week long periodized cycles.

CrossFit encourages over training

Yeah. If you aren't super fit, you can't train hard 3 days in a row. Lip service is paid to scaling and progression, but it's up to coaches in gyms to make it happen. We all work under different constraints to get this done. In a group setting, you do the best you can to make sure that a client is doing the right intensity, and training the right frequency and finally give them a sense of whether they need to go 50%, 70% or 100% on any given day or as a rule. And it's an art form that takes years to figure out, and every client will be different. It's a tough job.

CrossFit is no way to prepare for specific sports

Duh.

CrossFit is primarily a social phenomenon

Huh? I don't think most people acknowledge a desire to join a cult either. To argue that the social interaction that takes place at a Crossfit is a problem is strange to me. Team sports have social elements. BJJ is highly social. When you care about something, you make friends, you talk shop, and you form bonds. I don't get this one on the positive side, but I do get it on the Kool-aid warning negative side. There is a kool-aid problem. If you don't make your own decisions, and you don't want your coaches to think critically, you are beyond help. And you won't be reading Steve's blog anyways. So that's just a nod to his readers who already think that anyways. I have seen gyms that make poor decisions on behalf of their clients because that's what everyone else (HQ, the games competitors, whomever) is doing. That does suck.

CrossFit's Greg Glassman is obese and unfit

Bela Karolyi never made it as a female gymnast, and was apparently a giant douchebag. That didn't stop him from coaching some of the most successful female gymnasts of all time (thank you Rhadi Ferguson, PhD and also black belt for that analogy).

Glassman is a highly divisive figure. He's not fit from anything I can tell. But he's good at communicating, and he's led a group of people that have mustered 2500 gyms, with 50-200 members each, doing KBs, o lifts and handstands, where before there were almost none. Think about that... a quarter of a million people exposed to snatches, and the idea that you can try do gymnastics after 16. Is it perfect? Is it pretty?

Neither was UFC 1, but it got Americans thinking about grappling again, and it led them away from TKD in droves.

Aren't you just a little bit skeptical about why all these dudes who sell competing products are all trying to make broad, generalized and unsupported claims about why something someone else is doing is all wrong and dangerous and stupid? Especially when they only have their facts sorta straight? On the balance, Crossfit fucking rocks. But buyer beware. SHOP AROUND. Would you buy the first house or car a salesperson showed you, without asking for an inspection or appraisal? Do your homework. If you want to do Crossfit, just make sure the affiliate your going to is what you want. And if you're happy, healthy and making progress, then tell the haters to fuck off.