Thrusters… Love 'em and hate 'em. It's a brilliant movement. As Toni said, if you'd have to choose only one movement you would be able to do all your life (well okay, kind of a theoretical question) it would be thruster. Today was all about this movement. Took some lighter triples push presses for starters, then jumped on the metcon I stole from Rich Froning's youtube channel. I believe I posted his performance on the blog some time ago. It looked a bit more solid and faster than mine =)
I studied some overhead mobility stuff from Chad Vaughn who is a bad ass olympic lifter, currently influencing in crossfit circles. I'm following his tips and clues in Instagram, he's got some pretty awesome stuff there, go find him under the name "olychad". Just yesterday he posted a video of a guy he's been coaching that recently squat jerked 155kg. Same guy couldn't squat jerk an empty bar 6 months ago. That's incredible mobility work being done in the past months. Today I did some of his things for starters.
Strength. Push press 7x3 (60, 65, 70, 72.5, 75, 70, 70kg). Took a couple of sets push press triples to kick this training day. Even though I had a thorough warm-up and my joints should have been very well prepared, my left shoulder was stiff as hell. That was weird and caused some pain in the extreme position. At least it didn't feel that natural. Range of motion was all the way there but the feeling was awkward. The weights were not that heavy this time. I usually do emom training at 70-75kg so tradition strength triples should be around 80kg.
This was a good activation to my shoulders anyway and prepared them well for the upcoming metcon that I knew would gonna be rough. It does look like a nasty one on the paper, at least to my eye, and it certainly was such.
Metcon. Time 9.34
- 25-20-25-10-5, thrusters, 42.5kg
- 50-40-30-20-10, double unders
Oh man, it was definitely the thrusters that made me hurt. Shoulders were toasted during and after the workout. All in all I got this workout done better than I thought beforehand. My thrusters went unbroken in the first round, 12/8 on the second, 10/5 on the third and unbroken on the last 2 rounds.
Double unders were practically unbroken all the way. Only on the round of 40 reps I stumbled on the rope after 36 reps. In the workout, I lost a lot of time recovering my shoulders. My goal was to go as much unbroken as possible. And I needed those rest periods for my shoulders. Only in the last two rounds I was able to have minimum breaks between movements as the end was getting closer.
My engine is in pretty good condition, at least it's evolved a lot after starting crossfit. There's still lots to do in order to minimize the breaks between movements in metcons like this one today. It also has lots to do with muscle endurance. I knew that if I'd grab the bar earlier, I would have been forced to break the sets in smaller pieces because my shoulder strength would have faded away, and that doesn't please me much. I want to go as much unbroken as possible. That's because every time I drop the bar, there's time lost again. It will take extra seconds to recover every time bar hits the floor. In bodyweight metcons I'm able to keep going with quite a consistent pace all the way, take a look at yesterday's workout for example.
This metcon was a real one. I encourage everybody to do thrusters, very genius movement to say the least. Shoulder and leg strength, endurance, cardio, core work, all in one simple movement. I've been practicing on those double unders lately quite a lot and the results can be seen. Am feeling more and more confident with them.
Wrap it up, what are the feelings after the wod?
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