Crossfit Scottsdale - working on some snatches

Hey Fellow Crossfitters - On my recent trip to Arizona, I was lucky enough to be with a couple of friends, Josh McDonald and Nick Clancy, most of you remember Nick who was a former member of CFSWB and just recently move to the Arizona heat with his girlfriend and Josh who is a friend and crossfitter at CFSWB was down visiting Nick during the same time, so we all got to WOD together and man was it good!

This box has been around for several years and you can see from the pictures, it is quite extensive, many pull up bars, squat racks, sand bags, ropes and so much more, they can do it all here!  In fact they have hosted Level 1 Trainers course and a Crossfit HQ demo WOD.

So Nick is a soon to be trainer at Crossfit Scottsdale and so he set it up to have us WOD at 7am.  Honestly I am not sure if they have a drop in fee but we did not pay one so I picked up a T-shirt.  We arrived at the box a bit early to take care of some paperwork.  Then we spent some time rolling out with the foam rollers and took a look a today's WOD as follows;

3 position snatch skill set - work up to your max where you can do a full squat with all three positions
1 - from the floor
2 - from just above the knee
3 - from the hip crease

Then
10 min EMOM - Every minute on the minute for 10 minutes
1 - Power snatch - choose a weight that challenges you, I choose 95#
1 - burpee with high jump
The snatch increases by one rep on every minute but you stick with just one burpee.

However, before the WOD, Tyler our coach for the class took us through a nice warm up.

400 m run
inch worms with push ups
Sampson stretch with twist
knee highs
butts kicks
bear crawls
side steps

Then we went right into the Burgener warm up and got our weights out for the 25 minutes of snatch skill work. So I started with the bar and was able to work up to 115 doing all 3 positions, and by far the most challenging movement was snatching from the hip crease into a full squat.

Before the WOD Tyler said that we could either do a power snatch or a full snatch into a squat, so thinking that I wanted to really push myself out of my comfort zone, I thought that I would do 115# into a full squat, HA! I quickly learned that this would be a mistake.  Right when he said 3-2-1 GO I pulled the bar but I didn't get under it and failed big time, I fell right on my ass.  Tyler quickly came over and help me strip a 10# plate from each side and then I attempted the 95# squat snatch and failed yet again, so I guess I was going to power snatch, which is what I did and after I finished my burpee to a high jump, I was only left with 20 seconds of rest, Damn!  So I learned an important lesson here, be realistic of your goals before the WOD especially right after a strength workout.

Now, after round 2, I was able to catch my breath but when we got to round 5 this WOD began to bite back.  You had to increase the snatches and still get a burpee but rest time was getting thin.  The last 2 rounds were the killer, I finished round 9 with 10 seconds left and finished my 10th round when Tyler called time.  I fell over and lay there trying to catch my breath.

I looked back at Josh and Nick and they were both dripping sweat with the classic blank stare in the eyes,  "man that sucked, but in a good way!"  and I thought to myself, that is the beauty of Crossfit, you can take as little as 2 movements and put them together and that combination will take it to you!

Tyler was nice enough to take some pictures of us during the WOD.  A special Thank you to him and Crossfit Scottsdale!  I will be back!

Crossfit San Francisco - I heart you

Hey Crossfitters - I hope that you are all doing well and getting your WOD on!

On a recent trip to San Francisco I had the pleasure of visiting a pretty famous Crossfit in San Francisco.  This Crossfit is owned by Kelly Starret.  If you don't know who he is, he is the writer behind the Mobility WOD and if you have not seen this, I suggest you check it out.  He has copious amounts of information related to mobilliy and flexibility.  You can find a link to his site from the link below.  The box is located right close to the marina district near the presidio

http://sanfranciscocrossfit.com/

During this trip, I wanted to get to one of Kelly's classes but the time slots just didn't work which left me with the 6 am slot.  This box does not charge for drop in crossfitters but instead you make a donation to their local charity, nice idea!  They also do not post the WOD's the night before, so good and bad because I do like to cherry pick but not in this case.  Also, this is the only crossfit that I know about that is outside, they do have a covered area but its small and I have only been there when the weather was nice and quite honestly I can't imagine what it would be like to WOD in the rain.....

From my hotel, it was about 3 miles to the box and decided to jog there, so I left at 5:15 which should  have given me plenty of time, at least that is what I thought.  I got about half way when I ran into construction signs and a major detour and when your running this early in the morning in the dark it can be challenging to find your way around.  At one point I was pretty turned around and honestly thought that I might not make it to the class.  At one point I could see where I needed to get to but didn't know how to get there.  Eventually I kept running and while I had to take the long way there, I did make it.  Yes, I was 10  minutes late and thankfully there was no penalty for being late!

I arrived and after introducing myself to the instructor, I joined the 20 or so crossfitters in a warm up and stretch.  The WOD for this day was strength and skill work, Wow, I really enjoy doing strength work for a couple of reasons, first of all I need to get stronger and I have found it helpful to get tips, feedback, and instruction from other trainers which has proved beneficial for my form.

WOD
Back squats to a box - find your max and then do 3 sets of 5 at 80%
then
Find your max box jump and hand stand skill work.

During the warm up, I met up with a nice kid who was back from school and training at crossfit until he heads back for the fall term.  His name was Gary and he was on the rowing team at a small school in PA and he really enjoyed crossfit.  We partnered up for the back squats.  The idea here was to focus on really moving the hips back and sticking your butt out and keeping the knees stable while moving slowly to the box, we used a 18 inch box and after finding our max we moved to 3 sets of 5.  This felt different than a normal back squat and more difficult.  Best I could muster was 195 and so we moved on to our sets.

After our sets we moved to max box jumps and while rotating through this you were supposed to work on hand stand walks.  Honestly, I do not remember what height I got to but Gary went higher than anyone that morning!  Way to go Gary!  I managed to put in some good hand stand walks, nothing super special but progress.

If you are ever in the downtown area and want to see how they do crossfit in San Fran, I suggest you visit Kelly Starett!  Thanks again for allowing me to visit and WOD with you all.

Until we WOD again.
Steve Umscheid