CrossFit Athletic Group

Ricky Carey joined us back in the Fieldhouse days as, in Erika Banet's words, a chunk of an 8th grader.

I really don't remember anything about him at that time to be honest and I might have my concussions to blame for that. But one thing Ricky confessed either last Summer or the one before is that he would always just to reps of whatever movement until he felt tired then move to the next thing regardless of where he was at. 50 squats? Eh, I'll give you maybe 35 then see where everyone else is at.

Fast forward 7.5(!) years, and I think we may put some good use to the Ricky Reps for movements. Here's how the 4:30 pm session did their first few rounds of strict pull-ups and push-ups.

The Ricky Style is loosely defined as follows: do an exercise until near-failure then move on. For everyone except Jay, we modified the first two stations of the workout as follows: 10 rounds, 5 strict pull-ups, 10 push-ups. Now within that we saw some do 5 strict pull-ups, some use small kips to assist the strict pull-up, some do active bar hangs, some do flexed bar hangs, and some did partial range of motion strict pull-ups (unfortunately the squats were not Ricky-style). How many reps or for how long? Who knows? Just see how that round is feeling. As for push-ups, start with 10 and stay with it for as long as possible. When you're struggling to finish your 5th one, time to move on.

Is it accurate and repeatable? Nope. Is that okay? Yup. Some workouts are tests and some are training. This one is obviously training.