Tag Archives: Cleans

Monday Morning Strength

I am really liking this morning workout time. It’s hard to get up, but if I drag myself into the gym, I feel great afterwards.

Here’s what I did today… still working things back up to where they were:

500m row to warm up (1:47)
3×5 back squat – 265# for all… felt good. Not too hard.
3×5 bench press – 205# for all… challenging but doable.
3×5 clean – 155#, 160#, 160#… felt really good. I failed on one of the 160#’s, but it was just due to bad form. The weight actually felt relatively light.

I did lots of stretching in between the sets. Good stuff. If we could just get our sleep back on track, I think that would make the whole package.

I am still progressing, though. I was able to fasten the weight belt another notch lower today =)

Endurance and Power Cleans

Leave a reply

This week, per Dave’s suggestion, I am adding in two CrossFit Endurance WODs. Monday (4/26/2010) was the first one:

10x Row 125m / 1 min rest

My set times were:

1) 22.9	6) 23.7
2) 23.0	7) 25.3
3) 23.0	8) 24.3
4) 24.1	9) 25.1
5) 25.2	10) 24.6

This was harder than I had anticipated. The willingness to push hard was gone by set 4. Still though, my last set was less than 2s different than my first.

Tuesday (4/27/2010) night, I had originally planned on skipping, but then saw the WOD and thought it looked fun, so I went. It was:

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 Power Clean (135lb Rx) with 200m run after each set

My time was 18:11. As usual, the running sucked. I just feel like a huge lumbering fool whenever I run any distance. Maybe I just should just accept the fact that I will just always suck at running. It just doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Sigh.

At Wladi’s suggestion, we followed the WOD up with a Tabata Row. I went a total of 868m. This is the first time I have actually tracked how far I have went. Pretty interesting.

<Witty Title>

Leave a reply

I had a pretty bad day today. You know, those kinds of days where nothing seems to go right? You don’t feel like you got anything of consequence done. You feel like you are fighting upstream with everyone and everything around you. That was the kind of day I felt I had.

If I would have missed a workout today, well, that would have been bad, but luckily, V and I made it to the 6pm class. Upon walking in the door, I started feeling better. A little self inflicted punishment to help forget about the day and how much it sucked… that’s a good thing.

Tonight’s workout, I hear, was a qualifying WOD somewhere (not sure of where exactly) but it was five rounds of:

5 power cleans (Rx @ 155lb)
10 burpees (did as many strict as possible)
Red Line Sprint (roughly 200m, and there was no sprinting)

My time for this one was 14:41. I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping myself moving while not taking too many breaks. The first three rounds were OK, but the last two felt like someone had removed all oxygen from the planet Earth. Not a pleasant experience.

After the WOD we hung around and talked for a little while. I love the people that we have met at the gym. They are so incredibly nice. Not really any douche bags to be found there.

V and I hung around the house for a bit after getting home. I didn’t feel like cooking so we just scrounged around. We watched some more of a movie that we started a few days ago, then went to sleep.

Unable to sleep by the constant turmoil that is my upcoming wedding in Mississippi, I now sit here writing this blog post. I don’t really want to get into the details of what is ailing me on a public forum, but it has been the source of many hours of lost sleep. Needless to say, a huge weight will be lifted on June 6th, 2010.

I love the girl I am marrying more than I can ever describe. That’s got nothing to do with it. It’s all coming from the event itself.

At the very least, I managed to be a little bit productive by creating a fan page for Crossfit Cedar Park. If you go there and you love it like I do, take a second to log onto Facebook and be their fan.

I guess I’ll try to go to sleep now.

Night of 100 Cleans

Leave a reply

I was very apprehensive about going to work out last night. If you read my previous post, you know about my current physical problem du jour (i.e. I hurt my neck sleeping). Since Monday, I have been doing rehab exercises and using the roller quite a bit to get in there and massage things out.

Yesterday around 4pm, I felt really good. I didn’t have any pain and I was rearing to go. I called the chiropractic office near my house that we have been wanting to go to for a while (Maximized Living in Cedar Park) to see if they had any appointments for today. They have split day hours, open in the morning for two hours and at night for two hours. There were no appointments open for me, so I decided to go to the gym. I figured I would rehab more if I needed to and try a light version of the WOD.

Yesterday’s WOD was:

4 cleans on the minute for 25 min

Followed by:

“5 minutes of fun”

The Rx for the cleans was 155lb for guys. I didn’t want to go Rx as I didn’t want to worry about tweaking my neck further. I tried a few with a modest 135lbs. They felt fine. I didn’t feel any stress on my neck and back. I knew though, that it was really important to keep my form very strict to avoid injury.

So, I started out with 135lb. Scott and Trevor happened to be around watching and were encouraging me to go up in weight. For sets 1-19, I think, I got the 4 reps in over the course of about 10-12 seconds. Bowing in to peer pressure (i.e. Scott and Trevor had the plates ready and I didn’t really have a choice, Trevor says), I went up to 145lb for sets 20-22, then again up to 155lb (Rx) for the last 3 sets.

This workout was HARD. Obviously it would have been WAY harder had I done it entirely Rx’d but, I hate taking chances when I am trying to get over an injury. I am happy that I took it slowly and cautiously building up the weight as I continued to feel OK. Today, I am working on stretching a lot and continued use of the Grid Roller.

These 100 cleans were followed up with “5 minutes of fun” which consists of:

1 min regular crunches
1 min oblique crunches (left)
1 min oblique crunches (right)
1 min reverse crunches or leg lifts (I did leg lifts)
1 min regular crunches

The scoring on this one is to count your total reps. I was cautious with this one too as crunches usually put a lot of stress on my neck. I counted 282 total reps. I was trying to find the last time we did this on my blog, but I guess I didn’t tag it. Oh well.