No strength workout today.  Well, I guess I should say it was one big strength workout.

“Linda”

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 of:

1.5x Body-weight Deadlift
1x Body-weight Benchpress
.75x Body-weight Squat Cleans

My max deadlift is 1.5x my body weight, so I scaled as follows. I pretty much halved all of my weights.

• Deadlift : 133# (74%)
• Bench Press : 89# (49%)
• Clean : 67# (36%)

I was surprised that, of the three movements, I found the bench press to be the easiest.  When I move my weight up next time, I can probably be more aggressive with my bench press weight.

Time: 23:37

The trainers have been busy the past few days, making new toys to torture us with.  They stuffed a bunch of army canvas with wood chips to make an uneven heavy sack.  Today we had to use them in a workout.

First, though, we had a strength workout.  Three sets of 15 shoulder presses.   I did 35# and that was pretty easy, so I stepped up to 67#.  This was a bit too aggressive.  I did 10 reps and this was all I could do.  After a bit of a rest, I did 5 more reps with this weight, then stepped down to 50# for a final 15 reps.

3 Rounds of:

10 Alternating Sandbag Cleans (5 each arm)
Run to Truck with Sandbag

Kyle suggested that I use a 42# bag and decided to stick with it after a couple of trial reps.  I though that the workout would catch up with me even though it felt easy at that time.  I should have used a heavier weight, since I cruised through it.  The running was difficult though.

Time: 4:27

Today’s workout was a fun one – running and barbell work.

4 Rounds of:
Sprint 250M
6x Hang Power Clean (155# Men / 95# Women)
3x Push Jerk/Press (155# Men / 95# Women)

My time was 6:12 using 77# for the HPC and PP.

Times for each round:

• :41 run / :40 weights
• :51 run / :37 weights
• :54 run / :50 weights
• :58 run / :41 weights

The first and third barbell sets were slower because I accidentally lowered the bar to a hang after the 6th rep and had to re-clean it before starting the presses.  I’ll have to throw a little more weight on the bar next time, since I wasn’t having to dip much at all when catching the bar for the clean, and was doing straight push presses. Adding a little more weight will force me to shrug more explosively to get the bar up when cleaning, and make me catch the bar lower on the press.  I’ll probably move up to at least 89# next time.

I tried to do crossfit again yesterday.

“Elizabeth”

21-15-9 reps of:
Clean 135 pounds
Ring dips

Post time to comments.

This seemed a lot harder than my last one. First, I don’t know the Olympic lifts, so doing 21 cleans was pretty daunting. Someone at the gym who did undergraduate weightlifting gave me some good tips after he noticed my horrible form. After doing the first 21 cleans poorly, I stopped. Later I realized that I should have substituted 2X squats instead. The other workout in Elizabeth is ring dips. I don’t have access to rings so I did regular dips instead. Since ring dips are so much harder than regular dips, I should have done twice as many, but I was already doing 10lb. (the last 9 reps @ 8lbs) assisted dips and getting tired. I’ll work my way up to it. I added some rowing to my workout too – 1000m @ 3.5 resistance in 4:54.1