Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Tuesday 16.9: Rings, bar technique, 15min amrap

Tuesday. Skills, ring muscle-ups. Bar technique, overhead squats (max 60kg) and hang power cleans (max 70kg). Metcon, 15min amrap of: 250m row, 10 hang power clean (60kg), 10 bar-facing-burpees. Result, 5rds + 5 cleans.

It was a party day: Toni came to my home gym. He landed from his ivory tower among normal people and gave presence to the gym where it all began and where he built a strong base before joining Crossfit Vantaa affiliate. This was a great day of training and lots of positive things happened. Agenda included muscle-ups, technique training with light weight barbells and then breath-taking metcon in the end.

The end

Skills.
  • Ring muscle-ups
My goal was to hit this emom-style so that 2 reps would be done for 4-5 minutes. Every minute 2 reps and then recovery for the rest of the minute. On the first minute those mu's were easy. Probably easier than they've ever been. Don't know what that was but anyway they felt good. This would have been a great chance to hit more consecutive reps.

Second set's first rep was easy as well but the second one was more challenging. My wrist didn't land in a perfect position once I got over the rings. On third minute I got a fail. What was this. Don't know but that was a bummer. I took one more rep just to remind muscle memory what this move is all about. So this skills-part totaled 5 reps.


Scaling dot.com's workout. Pat's the man


Barbell.
  • Overhead squats
  • Hang power clean
I've had huge flaws in my overhead squat technique. And I've realized it only recently. The issue is I haven't found a form where my armpits would shoot forward, currently they've pointed downwards to the floor. That creates wrong kind of rotation to the shoulders and the weight is not carried correctly with muscles. Another thing is squat stance on ohs, it's quite narrow for this squat and thus maybe not that stabile. Third issue is my chest which should be more upward. All these three elements have brought problems and I haven't been proud of this movement.

Today we worked on each of these issues. For some reason when I hit a workout with Toni, things happen. Last time he corrected my hang power clean just like that and today after we had done some adjustments I got below parallel in wider stance with my armpits facing forward. Thanks coach! Now I gotta keep on repeating these movement patterns to improve muscle memory.

I took random sets with both overhead squat and hang power clean. Ohs went up to 60kg and hang power cleans up to 5x70kg. The purpose of this barbell work was definitely not heavy weight but technique.


Guys hitting/missing some pretty big ass weights


Metcon. Result, 5 rounds + 5 cleans
  • 250m row
  • 10 hang power clean, 60kg
  • 10 bar-facing burpees
This was a "fun" workout in the end. We wrote this on the spot together with Toni. I wanted to have rowing and hang cleans. Toni threw in bar-facing-burpees and funnily we both had same reps in mind. These are awkward moments where we have similar thoughts concerning our workouts. And clothes… We very often tend to have similar shirts at work. Today it was kind of exaggeration. Note, we didn't call each other in the morning and match the shirts!


Okay, back to the workout. Rowing was very light in the beginning for some unknown reason. I kept the pace at around 1:45 for first 3 rounds. Couldn't find a reason to pace it up because the distance was short and there wasn't much ground to make. For the last 2 rounds the pace dropped to around 1.52-1.54. Had I pulled with more strength, that would have brought fatigue faster. No point because extra second or two dropped from time would have been taken back (and more) in catching my breath before taking a grip on the barbell.

All cleans were done unbroken. That was success. Hook grip is the key here. I remember doing a workout back in the days which included 30 power cleans from floor with 50kg. That was some sort of qualification event for Finland's national Crossfit Games, the Winter War. At least I recall it was part of this throwdown. In that workout my grip was smoked and I used open grip back then. That brings me to an idea of repeating that workout and see what's the difference with this small adjustment. Anyway, I got the cleans today unbroken, they definitely started to burn me towards the end but there were really any doubts of making all sets in a row.

Bar-facing-burpees… Huh, that's not a walk in the park. 10 reps per set, totaling 50 reps in this amrap. My technique and efficiency has improved on this one a lot and I can do them faster than before. Big thing is to utilize a good hip extension when coming from the floor. You got to land your feet close to the bar and hop over it in one continuous movement. Then it's all about pacing yourself and having a steady movement back and forth around the bar. This is so much tougher than regular burpees. The jump over the barbell makes it painful. It gets to your lungs big time.

This was definitely a good metcon, a good burner. Round times stayed solid. They were around 2:32-2:55 throughout the workout. I got 5 full rounds, and on the 6th one finished rowing and 5 cleans. This totals 1.250m rowing, 55 cleans and 50 bar-facing-burpees.





No comments:

Post a Comment