I wrote this article some time ago. This is still an issue I see all too often. Most people aren’t giving weightlifting the attention to technique that it deserves – this stalls their progress and frustrates the lifter. Because I’ve seen this problem happening too much, I’d like to share this article with you guys.

Let’s take the dip portion of the Jerk. The Dip portion of most of The “Jerks” I see posted on social media, are simply too fast to apply the proper tensions and muscle sequencing. Heavier weight would cause a faster, shorter dip; but trying to emulate that with light weight only forces the lifter out of position. 

Coaches, Speed should only be added if it doesn’t compromise positioning. If you continue to dip fast, and it keeps pushing you forward to the toes; then stop dipping fast. You’re looking for elasticity in the Dip, if you over tension the quads then the hips will shift underneath you. It should be an obvious correction, but sometimes we like to walk before we can crawl.

You can’t watch Ilya Ilyin perform a 535 pound Jerk, and expect to have the same speed or oscillation for that matter. 

In every lift(especially warming up), start with a smooth pattern, not a fast one, then allow speed to build gradually. I see this happen all too often when people warm up with a barbell. They put 350# of force into a movement that requires much less. The fastest part of most lifts(olympic) will be as you move under the bar. Work on your transitions; timing between the Up and Down phases of each movement.

The Russians and Chinese are two of the most successful weightlifting programs of all time. You can SCREAM at the top of your lungs, “Yeah, but they’re on PED’s!”. My rebuttal will always be, “What country isn’t?”. So we can finally give credit to two systems of teaching that work well, instead of disregarding them completely based on some weird moral dilemma you have with PED usage. Most of their lifters are 5 for 6, and 6 for 6 when not going for World Record Attempts.

Realize that CrossFit is a mix of multiple sports. Look at the Top 10 competitors of each of the individual sports that make up CrossFit. If you want good examples of Olympic Lifting Champions, look them up on YouTube. 

Yes, Asa Bartow’s Snatch is “really pretty”, but he’s no Lu Xiaojun, or Klokov for that matter. Same thing with Gymnastics, or Powerlifting. This is the exact thing that I did when I came in to the CrossFit arena. It’s also a huge reason why when I first started coaching, I received a ton of weird looks.

I wasn’t using the Conventional CF Cues given to me at some cert. I was using real world evidence. 6 years later, I can’t tell you how many people i’ve had come up to me and say “remember when you told me about those internally rotated shoulders” or “I’ve noticed people don’t actually jump, or shrug, at the top of a clean” or “you were right my toes are coming off the ground during my pull, so I should keep my toes down”, etc.

Most of us are so concerned about lifting heavy weight, that we will ALLOW ourselves to move into mechanically shit positions to do so. This is unfortunate, as it usually leads to injury. We need to change our brain when it comes to weightlifting. 

 

Instead of looking at the bar and weights, as such; try and picture it as a Pen and a piece of paper. Your goal is to draw the same line, over and over again. Typically with practice, you will be able to draw that line faster and faster; but there will be an end point to speed and stability. Find that point, and live there. Start thinking of weightlifting as an ART form, instead of just picking up heavy objects. If you don’t like all of that coordination….there’s always Powerlifting, hehe.

 

-Iron Legion Head Coach Jason Philyaw

Motivation.  If you really want to see great strides in your fitness and abilities, it’s no longer enough to know whether or not you are actually motivated.  We need to start digging into how we are motivated.

Let me explain:

There is a ton of research out there that I won’t bore you with that basically says motivation exists on sliding scale with amotivation – the complete lack of motivation on the far left, and intrinsic motivation on the far right.

Amotivation, we try not to concern ourselves with, you can lead a horse to water and all that.  Immediately to the right of amotivation though, is external motivation. It’s the scale between external and intrinsic motivation I am going to focus on.

When I was a kid, my dad used to say, ‘if you don’t clean your room, you will get punished (read ‘spanking’)’.  So, I would go up to my room, pull out a snow shovel and clear a path from the door to my bed. The room was now ‘clean’, in a manner of speaking.  

I did the least possible work to avoid a punishment.  I was externally motivated to perform a task. I didn’t want to do it; I certainly didn’t go above and beyond what I was willing to do to avoid said punishment.  The idea to clean the room was not my own, and I definitely didn’t enjoy doing it. My motivation was entirely external.

Several years later, I was a proud member of the United States Marine Corps, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream and I got my first station; MCBH Kaneohe Bay, HI.  Apparently, the Marines had a pretty high standard for the cleanliness of barracks rooms and those that occupied them.

There is some external motivation involved in the form of push-ups and extra duties if the barracks wasn’t kept as the platoon sergeant thought it should be.  But, since I was one of three in a single room, there was also a sense of accountability. If I screwed up, all three of us got punished. If I screwed up, I would be letting my fellow marines down.  I would feel bad, and internally punish myself. I would call myself all kinds of names in my head and stress about how my fellow marines would view me as a result of my unreliability.

So, I cleaned the room and took care to make sure it was properly completed every day.  I was experiencing Introjected Regulation; I was participating in a task I don’t enjoy to avoid an internal punishment.  Strangely, once I started carrying out my share of the clean-up chores, I started to internally reward myself and feel good about what I was doing. I became even more diligent in these mundane tasks, that I still didn’t enjoy, to experience an internal reward!  Motivation works both ways.

After the Marine Corps I move to SoCal and moved into an apartment with two friends in Newport Beach, CA right across PCH from the ocean.  I immediately started living the party lifestyle while I attended community college. I still didn’t enjoy the task of cleaning my room, however, I noticed that California girls appreciated a clean and well-organized room.  

So, what do you think I did?  Damn right! I spent half an hour a day just making sure that room was spic-n-span!  Seeing the long-term benefits of having a clean room encouraged me to engage in an otherwise unpleasant activity.  I had just learned about Identified Regulation, long term benefits shaped my choice to engage in an otherwise unpleasant activity.  

Five years later, I was back in Hawaii serving as a police officer with the Honolulu Police Department. I had a lovely one-bedroom apartment in downtown Honolulu, right across the street from Aloha Tower and within walking distance of all the great sushi spots and attractions of Chinatown.  

This was the first apartment that was truly my own and I loved living the bachelor life.  I worked hard and I diligently paid my rent. I was still no great fan of cleaning, I would put it off as much as possible throughout the week, but I’d grown up a bit over the previous few years and I knew I needed to start living like an adult should.  Besides, this was my space, I wanted to take pride in it and enjoy it.

That meant you clean your space.  You put away the clothes after the wash, you clean the bathroom before the mold starts to grow – not after it takes over, clean your fridge and run the damn vacuum once a week.  This is called Integrated Regulation; coherence of the activity with your self-values shape the choice to engage in the unpleasant activity.  I was cleaning because the value to me of having my own space that I could enjoy required it.

Many moons later, I have another little apartment, this time in downtown Gainesville.  It’s not much, 500 square feet and could be described as spartan. I love it. It’s just what I need with nothing I don’t.  I keep my place very clean and extremely well organized. The difference is, now I clean the apartment almost daily because I love to clean!!  I love seeing a sparkly and shiny apartment when I come home from classes or work. I enjoy walking in and not seeing clothes piled up on the bed or dishes still in the sink.  

Cleaning is therapeutic and fun for me now.  Even if I just cleaned the bathroom yesterday, I’ll probably give the shower a wipe down after I use it today.  As an added bonus, I get to enjoy my space all the more because I’ve put so much work into it. I take pride in what I’ve accomplished with a 3M pad and some 409, and it makes me want to continue keeping this space as clean as possible.  I’ve finally made the breakthrough into Intrinsic Motivation when it comes to cleaning.

Intrinsic Motivation is the gold standard in sport psychology.  Everything we do to help athletes is to help funnel them into a state of intrinsic motivation with regards to their craft.  

I am never going to the CrossFit Games as an athlete.  I know that and I’m fine with it…mostly. But I will never stop pushing myself every day in the gym. Why?  Because I want to look sexy as fuck by graduation? Partially. But I also just love working out. I love and crave the feeling after a good session with the barbell.  I never want to stop feeling just a little bit sore the next day after a particularly hard METCON. I get off on seeing how hard I can push myself in the middle of a WOD.  Did I push further then yesterday?

I never liked cleaning my room when I was younger, but I always did it for a variety of reasons and motivations.  It’s okay if you don’t love working out or going to the gym every day. It’s okay if you’re doing it for external reasons, or reasons other than love of the process.  Just keep it up, see the results, see the long-term benefits, feel good about your accomplishments and one day, probably sooner than you think, you will cross that threshold into intrinsic motivation when it comes to fitness.  

Coach Dave

Speed and Strength of course:

Most of us begin our CrossFit journey with an idea of losing some body fat, gaining some muscle, and improving our metabolic conditioning. Getting strong just happens to be one of the side effects of being CrossFit- not necessarily the primary goal. As time carries on, confidence begins to grow. Our original goals are met and we start looking at increasing skill/strength levels.

Barbell movements tend to become a big favorite; especially as we start noticing the higher skill gymnastic movements, like Muscle-ups, Handstand Pushups, and Pistols, might take a bit longer to perfect.

Because of this, some of us might think “well, I guess I’ll just get as strong as possible in the meantime” and so you start searching for maximal strength on the Barbell lifts: the Deadlift, Press, and Squat. This slowly turns into athletes attempting maximal, or near maximal loads, on a weekly basis. This can be detrimental to the Olympic Lifts.

Here is a very cool spreadsheet highlighting your strengths and weaknesses on some of the more complex movements that require speed, like Snatch, Clean, and Jerk:

http://www.waxmansgym.com/calculator/

Some of you… most of you, may have noticed that the spreadsheet pointed out a glaring weakness in Speed movements versus the basic strength movements. If this is the case, then the data is suggesting that you are either:

1. A) Going too heavy, too often- which is causing your nervous system to be over taxed. This also causes normal muscle sequencing patterns to go awry, which ultimately means you aren’t moving correctly (we’ll say “efficiently” for you CF’ers who LOVE that word). This is why Deadlifting heavy doesn’t necessarily translate to a good (read: safe) Power Clean.

(NOTE: this is usually a problem for more experienced CF’ers)

1. B) Lacking Technical Proficiency- which is why positions feel “weird” or “painful”. Practicing just Snatch and Clean doesn’t guarantee you will see your greatest potential.

(NOTE: this is more of an issue with beginners, but can also result from lifting TOO heavy)

Both are relatively easy fixes, but both also require discipline….and TIME!

If example A is your problem, try focusing on movement integrity over maximal exertion. Instead of adding weight or getting near maximal loads, see if you can move faster with moderate weights while maintaining the integrity of the exercise. Try coming up faster from your squats, pulling faster on your deadlifts, and pressing the weight overhead with more SPEED.

If example B is your problem, try introducing some new movement patterns that mimic the exercise you need more proficiency at. Sometimes this means going slower and heavier, through a shorter range of motion.

I’ll use the second pull of the Snatch and Clean as an example. If your knees keep caving in during the pull of either movement, then it means your body has not figured out how to connect to the muscle properly at the speed you are demanding. I would suggest getting involved with heavier (90-105%) percentages of your Snatch, but only work the 2nd pull. Again, focus on movement integrity and remember SPEED is the last requirement here. Balance and Positioning are the most important.

Safety Tip: Please refrain from asking other members for advice. Although they are helpful, an experienced coach will give you a much better analysis. A great athlete hack is to video yourself and find some time to sit with a coach and go over your work. By all means use your friends to help you video your work, but ultimately – if you want to get better, engage your coaches for feedback. That’s what we are here for!

The Olympic Lifts (Snatch and Clean and Jerk) are the backbone of functional movement. Time spent learning the complexities of these two lifts will pay HUGE dividends in your training and performance – whether you are pursuing CrossFit or general fitness.

Grab a video camera or better yet, set up some training time with a coach. Your body will thank you for it!

See you in the gym!

• Coach Jason Philyaw

CrossFit and Intensity – When and How to Scale Properly

Whether you are new to the CrossFit or general fitness scene – or an OG athlete, there will be times when scaling a workout may be the right thing to do in the pursuit of your goals.

Here is a great way to “scale” your work for success!

Regulating your Volume and Intensity:

On Volume:

As beginners we all tend to be very mindful of coaching, and listen to every minute detail regarding each exercise that is placed before us on a daily basis. We try and soak up every bit of information on proper technique, breathing correctly, and mobility issues that may be hindering us from correct movement.

 

Congrats to those of you who fit in this category, you will lift safely for a long time; but you may never get as far as you could by LOGGING your workouts down on paper -or even an app.

 

Proper logging requires that you note warm-up sets and reps; weight you used; belts or strap usage on a movement; nutrition for that day; perhaps even logging the mood you were in, or even the song you played(I know..lame), during your workout.

 

This doesn’t mean for Olympic lifting Classes only, but for your Crossfit Workouts as well. It’s an easy way to determine if you should go for that “100 pull-up” workout or not; you know, the one that has everyone walking like a T-rex for a few days…

 

Example:

Workout: 100 Pull ups

100 Push ups

100 Situps

100 Air squats

 

If you’re logging properly, and this workout shows up on your whiteboard, it might be a good idea to take a glance back and see what your last pull up intensive workout was. If you look back and see that you have only ever completed 50 pull ups in a workout…EVER, then most trainers might recommend that you try and go for 60 reps; hell lets even say 75 reps, just to push it a bit.

 

This can keep you from an potential overuse injury, that can set your training back by weeks, if not months. Don’t even THINK of scaling to 100 reps of Rack Rows, because the issue is still the same; total overall volume of the workout. Even 100 Rack rows might get you those nasty, sticky, bicep and forearms; especially when coupled with 100 push ups.

 

For weightlifting, it’s no different. You can log your total Volume during a workout and see how many pounds you’ve actually managed to move around in a given training session. This is a great way to regulate intensity, especially while training sick, or nursing an acute injury.

 

If a workout required you to squat for 4 reps x 4 sets @ “X” weight, but you’re feeling great; you may not need to add anymore weight, but maybe just another set…heck, maybe just a set of 2 extra reps. Thereby increasing Volume.

 

It’s the little battles that help you win the War. You don’t need to add 30 pounds and go for 4 more reps, just enough to stimulate the body so there is no accommodation. This also means Volume can be increased by heavier warm-up sets. It’s a small change, but it’s still a change.

 

This should be especially important to you Crossfit Individuals, as most people tend to cater their warmup with higher skill movements, and push the volume up that way. This way their WODs can stay regulated, and more focused on weaknesses, or strengths.

 

Example:

“General CF Warmup”

400m Run or 500m Row

30s x Samson Stretch

10 x Air Squats

10 x Pull ups

10 x Situps

10 x Push ups

 

Could be:

 

“Skill Transfer Warmup”

400m Run

5/leg x Overhead Walking Lunge w/ Plate (45/25)

10 x C2B Pull Ups

10 x Russian KB Swings (70/53)

10 x Wall Balls(30/20)

10 x GHD Situps

10 x GHD Hip ext.

 

This is a very general idea, but you could always seek the advice of a coach to help you fine tune your warmup. They don’t have to have as many reps as your previous warmup progression, because you are adding difficulty.

 

Some athletes love bringing up weaknesses through their warm-ups. Muscle Ups, Strict Pull ups, and Strict Toe-2-Bar; are examples of Skill movements that could be thrown in to your warm-up, to help increase strength before you start kipping around like a monkey having a seizure. Websites like Gymnasticswod.com have great strength progressions that could act as a warm-up before your WOD’s. Obviously, you want to consult a coach first.

 

On Intensity:

Sometimes you can walk into the gym feeling amazing, with no real pain or stiffness to speak of, and a full 8 hours of beauty sleep under your belt. Unfortunately, even that will not be enough to FULLY recover from a previous days training; say after a 1RM for instance.

 

There are several ways you can check yourself, before you wreck yourself – I really love the Vertical Jump test, after a warm up, to see how the central nervous system is firing. Find a “target” in your gym so you can test the height of your jump. It doesn’t have to be every day, but maybe those special days where everything just hurts, and your joints feel like they are bonded together with super glue.

 

Jump to your previous target and see how close you get. If you’re within an inch, or you’ve jumped higher, then it may be a good day to keep the intensity level up in the workout. If you jump 6 inches lower, it might be a sign to reduce the intensity.

 

This can be done several ways, typically by reducing the load you are working with in any given workout. It could also mean taking longer rest periods between sets, or even turning a Crossfit workout that is “For Time”, into an Interval workout.

 

Example:

5 Rounds for time:

5 x Hang Power Clean

10 x Handstand Pushups

400m Run

 

…could be changed by stopping after the round, and resting the exact amount of time it takes you to complete each round. This would give you a work-to-rest ratio of 1:1, allowing you to recover more adequately between efforts.

 

Intensity could also be reduced by changing high skill movements, such as HSPU’s, into their less coordinated counterparts, DB Presses or BB presses; changing the speed at which you run; and even modifying Hang Power Clean to an RDL, or Deadlift.

.

Reducing Volume also helps with keeping intensity low, but if you’re looking to keep your conditioning level up, try and keep sets and reps as is, and work on reducing weight.

 

Make sure you consult a coach before adjusting your own intensity in a workout. It may be true that a coach wants to really push you through some mental barriers, especially if you tend to shy away from more intense workouts; so please, don’t just give yourself an excuse to be soft:)

 

I hope this helps! Keep training hard and I’ll see you in the gym!

 

-Coach Jason

If you have been a member of a gym or sports team for longer than a few weeks, you know what it means to be sore the following day. The experienced athlete has a general idea of how sore they will be following a particular workout, where as the novice athlete is caught completely off guard by their inability to sit on the toilet the next day.

 

This is a normal process and even a healthy one believe it or not. The next day sore you feel is often referred to as DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) in fitness circles. DOMS is an important biological response to the stress of exercise.

During an intense workout, the repetitive contraction of muscles under load creates small microscopic tears in the fibers that make up our muscles. Lots of little microscopic tears sounds like a bad thing! In reality it is the only way for our muscles to elicit a growth response. In order to grow bigger more resilient muscle tissues, we must first show the body that our previous level of strength was not totally sufficient.

 

This micro damage dealt during your workout provides signals to the body to begin the repair process. The exact reason for DOMS is unknown but many speculate that it is there to act as a warning to our body not to stress the same tissues to the same intensity. If we don’t allow our bodies to repair the damage done in the gym then the build up of waste and microtrauma can accumulate and cause more issues down the road.

DOMS is our bodies built in recovery reminder. Without it, we would continue to push ourselves harder and harder each day until the result was an injury or mental burnout. The body does a good job of moderating our intensity, for a little while.

 

As our training experience increases, the amount of work necessary to cause soreness the next day also increases! The novice athlete of only 4 months will continue to be sore after each new day of stimulus where as the veteran of 4 years may train an entire week straight and never experience that pain signal from the body.

Once we adapt to the stimulus of training everyday, the signal to take some time off comes in a different form and is subtle until enough training damage has accumulated, then the effects can be very noticeable and sometimes harmful to the athlete. Over training, the term used to describe training beyond what ones body is able to recover from, is an easy trap to fall into and it can begin to affect much more than just your ability to sit on the toilet the next day.

 

While over training can leave you feeling sore, it usually will begin to manifest in the experienced athlete as decreased subjective strength, poor performance, low energy, low sex drive, or prolonged aches and pains. If left unaddressed for a significant amount of time the athletes likelihood of injury sky rockets.

All of this to say, your body needs to REST. It needs time away from the stresses of life in order to rebuild and replenish it’s stores. How and when do we provide our bodies with adequate rest?

How to properly recover:
  

Recovery is going to look a little different for everyone but it takes on the same basic principles. Without diving too deep into the weeds, here are Iron Legion’s recommended recovery strategies.

75/25- For someone who has been in the sport of crossfit for an extended period of time, they should be breaking their training week up by spending 75% of their days training and 25% of them recovering. This would simply be a 3 days on 1 day off approach to the training week. For beginner athletes this number may need to look more like 50/50 until their bodies begin to adapt to these new changes.

Sleep- If you take one thing away from this paper, let it be this. Sleep is the most important variable when it comes to healing your body. All of the body’s major recovery mechanisms are either turned on for the first time or hiked up to another level when you fall asleep and stay asleep. Our bodies produce hormones like HGH and testosterone when we sleep. Our brain washes away harmful wastes that contribute to the development of Alzheimer Disease when we sleep. Damaged muscle fibers are repaired and enhanced while we sleep. The definition of recovery should be: “Sleeping a lot! And then some other stuff.”

Low Intensity Movement- On those days when you aren’t going to the gym (Every 4th day or 25% of the week), the best way to prepare your body to come back to training is to continue moving. A rest day does not imply no activity. On the contrary. Adequate rest for your body would come in the form of exercising those same exact muscle groups that were trained during the week. The only difference is, this activity needs to happen at a very LOW INTENSITY.

 

Examples of low intensity exercise include yoga, walking/jogging, swimming, biking, hiking, playing a recreational sport, or even a body weight workout done with no timer and no sense of urgency. Active recovery should keep you moving but the goal is not to exhaust yourself, merely to stimulate the body’s repair processes!

Nutrition- Everything we eat is either used to create new cells and structures in the body or to fuel old ones. This is especially true in the window of time following a workout. As soon as you finish training your bodies repair mechanisms jump into action and they will be in action for the next 12-24 hours.

 

Anything you eat in that time you can pretty much guarantee will be used to replenish used energy or literally become the tissues we just broke down. With that being said, after you workout, do you want a small percentage of you becoming fried chicken and macaroni? Or would you feel more comfortable knowing you just replaced some muscle tissue with steak and broccoli? The food you put into your body following training is so important in ensuring you recover well. Make smart choices.

Limit Stress- Maybe you are so exhausted that the only thing this recovery day is going to entail is watching netflix in bed. That is ok too. The main component of recovery is just an absence of stress on the body.

 

If doing the above things seems like you are still training and might as well just be at the gym, then do whatever is going to make you feel fulfilled and happy. Our body needs to be in a parasympathetic state in order to repair itself.

 

If your idea of a rest day is spent working 12 hours at a desk job getting yelled at by your boss –  Sure, you aren’t training, but there is no way your body is going to be able to relax enough to elicit a repair response in a stressful situation like that!

 

Sometimes its good to get out of the gym, spend some time outside, sleep well, keep moving, eat high quality food, and relax! Think of it as charging your batteries for your next “all out” training session!

 

Coach Alex Ford