CrossFit Athletic Group

3 rounds

100 double unders

50 dumbbell snatches

25 pull-ups

That workout is designed to be a medium-duration workout. Somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes at the most. And yet we had times in the high 20's, 30's, and 40's today. I am not mad or concerned about this at all. Here's some notes.

A specialty. The core of CrossFit is constantly varied functional movements at a high intensity. That can be analyzed over the course of a few workout cycles, or within a single workout, itself. But what we saw today were elements even more signature to CrossFit: double unders as a conditioning piece, high-rep Olympic lifts, and high-rep kipping pull-ups. Those three things don't exist in that context anywhere else in the world, let alone in the fitness community; double-unders came form boxers who want to develop elasticity in their calves and a rhythm to their movement, pull-ups came from the gymnastics community as a way to build upper-body strength, compensating from the lack of time spent swinging from the trees, and barbell/dumbbell snatches were invented (by the Greeks?) as a way to develop power. 3x50 double unders, 3x5 snatches, 3x10 pull-ups looked a lot more mornal in the fitness community before CrossFit came around, but the idea of blending them together and adding a shiteload of volume is unique to CrossFit, and specifically Coach Glassman. It should not come as a surprise that our best time of the day came from a girl who has been doing CrossFit since she was a freshman in high school.

Scaling. Football has, in my opinion, the best ratio of games-to-practices of any sport. For every 1 game played, a team will go through 5-6 practices. This is how we approach our workouts, and I credit Jarrod Bell from CrossFit BMW in Detroit for helping me see the value in this approach to CrossFit. On most occasions I would scale this workout to either a team workout consisting of 1) one partner doing pull-ups and dumbbell snatch while the other practice double unders, or 2) mush all the numbers together and split them up however you want. But today I thought it would be best to just throw you guys to the wolves and see how things go. For the most of you, things didn't particularly go. This is okay. It is worth repeating that the CrossFit stimulus is designed to exceed the capacities of the fittest human beings on the planet over time. The NCAA didn't adjust the rim to 9-feet for me, and crossfit.com won't adjust the number of double unders for you. It's good to see that sometimes. Most of the time we are going to scale because there are things we want to practice. This time we didn't.

And what weaknesses were exposed? Honestly, way more mental than physical. 4 different people tried to claim in was the jump rope's fault (for reference, it is literally never the jump rope's fault), Mr. Carey of all people had a meltdown, Mrs. Carey said a swear word, Sammy B, Erica, and Woorden got frustrated, and, most alarming of all, Calan never smiled. As a whole, we are mentally fragile in workouts out of our comfort zone.

Any outliers? As much as we can rip on him for run-on sentences, Mr. Gjon was the star of the day in my opinon. Both his words spoken to himself and to others, as well as his body language told me that he was mentally in a good place today, which is especially impressive considering his head is under water on all three movements. I would say he was 30-something minutes better than when he started. He definitely was not the only one, but he stood out. Whenever I see a coach or player doing something better than me, I try and immitate it. I think downloading some of Mr. Gjon's mid-workout demeanor would help all of us, myself included.

Back to practice. High volume is how we improve on a skill; nobody got better at free throws by shooting 1 a day. But high volume also runs a higher risk of over-use injury (for lack of a better term, because over-use isn't technically a thing). Free throws are lower-velocity and are easier to get away with doing tons of reps, kipping pull-ups are not. So while we definitely need to work on what's going though our heads during workouts, I'd prefer to find a way to do it in lower-volume settings if possible. So we'll see how we can work that in.