Workout of the Day:
Four sets of:
Press x 2-4 reps
Rest 60 seconds
Single-Leg Squats x 6-8 reps each leg
Rest 2 minutes;
and then,
Five rounds for time of:
Max Reps Pull-Ups
Broad Jumps (5′/6′)

Complete 30 total reps each round. So, if you do 20 pull-ups on your first set, you must do 10 broad jumps before returning to the pull-up bar; if you do 10 pull-ups, complete 20 broad jumps before starting the next round. If you can easily perform more than 30 consecutive pull-ups, drop on 29 and do your 1 broad jump before returning to the bar for your second round of max reps pull-ups.

My Coach Should Be Your Coach (especially if you want to win more than $1200)
Written by C.J. Martin

Sage is my coach.  I work with Calvin on issues like mobility, muscle imbalance and prehab, but when it comes to learning the Olympic lifts, she’s my homegirl.  I meet with Sage twice a week for an hour, and in less than a month I have improved my snatch and clean and jerk dramatically.  What has made the difference?  TECHNIQUE!!!

Olympic lifting is a skill.  Everyone can muscle a certain amount of weight from the ground to overhead with minimal practice, but if you want to become efficient and achieve anything close to your potential, you need a coach, and you need to practice.  Practice alone is not the answer.

Practicing poor mechanics repeatedly can groove bad habits.  It’s likely that you’ll make some progress because your body is learning to adapt and create some compensatory patterns to enable you to move the weight through the range of motion, but it also means that you will almost certainly plateau once you can no longer muscle the weight through your sticking point.  This is a frustrating point for every lifter, because it normally means you have to reverse ground, drop your weights down and relearn the movement before you can begin to see progress again.  Your coach is there to make sure you catch those bad habits before they are engrained in your movement patterns.  Slight tweaks in mechanics can result in huge gains in a short time.

Got it, coaches are great, but why do I need to practice my Olympic lifting?

If you’re participating in the Invictus Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good Challenge – and 65 of you are, you know that you are going to have to perform a one-rep max clean on Wednesday, March 24.  You will be scored on how much you improve upon your February 1 performance.  So what’s your plan?  How are you going to add 20 or more points to your score on the Play Good Challenge workout?  Well, my strongest suggestion is that you sign up to work with Sage sooner rather than later.  This is low-lying fruit.  Grab these extra points, or you’ll wish you did later.

Sage is coaching Olympic lifting seminars Monday-Thursday at 6:30 p.m., and on Wednesdays at noon.  You can sign up for 4 sessions (one a week for 4 weeks) for only $49.  If you want to get into one of these seminars, get your name on the board or email info@crossfitinvictus.com.  If you can only make a day that is designated for intermediate or advanced lifters, talk to Pops or one of your coaches and we’ll see what we can do.

If you want more coaching – and you should, remember that all participants in the Challenge get a 15% discount on a package of 5 coaching sessions.  You can do 30 or 60 minute sessions, the discount applies to both.  Invest now in spending some time with Sage and your cleans are bound to improve.  Spend some time with Calvin, Michele or George and figure out how to tweak your nutrition to optimize your fat loss and muscle mass gain.  You only have 7 weeks to go.  Get on it!

Tags: Olympic Lifting, Play Good Challenge

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Workout Of The Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.