Thursday, August 27, 2009

Workout of the Day:
Split Squat
5-5-5 (each leg)
(Check out the good demonstration of a split squat from our friends at Catalyst Athletics – we prefer and will use the first version, with the barbell racked in front.)
and then,
The Burpee-Wall Ball Challenge
Teams of two will play five two-minute rounds for max reps of:
Wall Ball Toss and Burpee
(Teammates will stand shoulder-to-shoulder. One partner will perform a wall ball toss off the wall to their partner and immediately perform one burpee. Teams will repeat for as many reps as possible, counting only those reps in which the ball clears the 10-foot target and is caught before touching the ground. There will be a two-minute rest period between each of the five rounds.)

The whiteboard after Tuesday's Fran

Tracking Progress at CrossFit Invictus
Written by C.J. Martin

What makes a good fitness program? CrossFit provides a good answer – one which increases work capacity over broad time and modal domains. But you’ll never know whether your fitness program accomplishes that goal unless you track your performances. In an effort to track our athletes’ progress, we administer a dozen benchmark workouts at set intervals throughout the year. We do this to ensure that our methodology is working for the vast majority of our athletes. If we see retrograde performance, we as the coaching staff go back to the drawing board and figure out how we can improve our program design. So how did we do on the most recent iteration of Fran?

In short, our athletes rocked it! We had a total of 74 brave athletes take on our favorite four-letter word on Tuesday. Of those 74, 28 of our athletes had performed Fran last on June 8, 2009 (with the exception of two who hadn’t done it since March). So how many new PRs did we have?  25.  That’s right, 25 of 28 athletes hit new PRs. (We include in that number four athletes who took slightly longer, but performed the workout with significantly more weight or less banded assistance.) Here are just a few of the highlights:

• Josh E. – 3:48 down to 2:56 as rx’d
• Barry – 8:56 down to 7:44 as rx’d
• Jen – 11:40 with a red band down to 11:38 as rx’d
• Courtland – 11:30 (65 lbs.) down to 9:01 (75 lbs.)
• Christina M. – 7:40 down to 6:53 as rx’d
• Laura – 8:55 down to 6:23 as rx’d
• Dawn – 9:02 down to 7:54 as rx’d
• Ricky V. – 11:37 down to 9:11 as rx’d
• Dhuey – 11:56 down to 8:47 as rx’d
• Jim H. – 6:30 down to 5:32 as rx’d
• Blake G. – 8:30 down to 5:20 as rx’d
• Ari G. – 6:00 down to 5:30 as rx’d
• Richard M. – 6:00 down to 5:12 as rx’d
• Gary M. – 12:53 down to 10:07 (red band)

Congratulations to all of those who tackled Fran on Tuesday. Your consistency and strong efforts are an inspiration to all of your coaches. We feel blessed to work with such amazing athletes every day.