Box squats and mini-Cindy

Box squats
3 x 5 x 40kg paused on a 12" box

AMRAP 10
5 pull-ups
10 push-ups
15 squats

5 rounds

Push-ups, as always.
Wanted to hit muscular failure if it was there for me this time and it was. Getting stronger, but I can't last more than 2 or 3 rounds unbroken.

Back to 3, 6, 9 again.

The cement is drying in my souped up version of TP's redenck squat stands right now.
I'm badly in need of a drill press or at least an engineers vice, preferably both, to finish them. I'll see what I can do.

12 minutes of heck

AMRAP 12 (becuase everyone does multiples of 5)
6 burpees
12 x 22kg dumbbell swings

8 rounds

I may have been able to cope with 12 burpees/round. I wasn't approaching muscular exhaustion in any round, which surprised me. I think the jumping component of burpees staves that off for longer. Interesting.
Swings were unpleasant from the general "god I'm buggered" point of view, in fact aht applied to teh whole thing really.

Exactly what I wanted. Short enough not to wipe me out for the next few days, hard enough to get me severely winded, no muscular exhaustion in any component.

Deadlifts

5 x 105kg
5 x 107.5kg
5 x 110kg
I got that wrong again! My top set was supposed to be 107.5kg. Must get this right or I'll top out too soon.

20 x 85kg

Not much to say about form, I'll wait to see what hurts tomorrow.
Consciously worked on sticking my knees forward so that my hips dropped and hip and thighs came into it more. I tend to stiff leg it and my back won't cope with that with much more weight.

Ran to and up the local hill. Walked down, it's a loose metal road and kind of steep, then ran home. Not sure how far, probably a bit over 1km? Oh! A mile according to Gmap-pedometer.
Actually quite fun to be moving along with no heavy lifting stuff wearing me out in the middle of the run.

Fran

21-15-9
30kg thrusters
Pull-ups

13:27

Pretty much let down by my pull-ups, I don't work them enough.
Thrusters showed improvement. Still too quad powered and slow out of the hole, but I accelerated out to lock-out nicely. Wrists hurt but. The RSI is getting to be a bit of a problem.
I only have to make it to the end of the week and then it's off work and into sculpting, carpentry and cooking which will help them heal a bit.

The Highlight of my week

This from a post I made to the BX forum, the CF mainsite forum and the comments of one of Coach Burgener's excellent O. Lifting videos.

Definitely trying to spread word of this fantastic app around!

Warning, overexcited geek alert!

You know how in many Olympic lifting videos they show the lift from the side on and superimpose a wiggly line on the clip which traces the path the bar takes?
That’s normally done using an application called Dartfish, which costs US$1000 for the basic version and does so much more than just bar path tracing that it’s a minor feature.

Well after a year of searching off and on I’ve just found an open-source application called Kinovea (http://www.kinovea.org/en/) that does some of the same thing.
Given a side-on video of an Olympic lift you can select the end of the bar and let the software track it for you and draw the path of the bar throughout the lift.
Dartfish will also give you data on bar speed etc, but for most of us, it’s the bar path that is most telling.

I’ve uploaded a video I processed of Annie Sakamoto cleaning to YouTube.


Not even remotely criticising Annie’s technique, ;-) it just happened to be the first video in the Olympic lifting section of the mainsite exercises and demos page.

In this case all I had to do was select which segment of video I was interested in, click on the image of the end of the bar and tell it to trace the path, then save the resulting image.
The output file format is not a common one, but it’s also not unusual and it’s not hard to find something that will view it. YouTube sucked it up without belching.

I used the experimental 0.8.4 (http://www.kinovea.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?id=132)version of Kinovea. The trace feature is available in the stable release too, but may not work as well?

I think that this is so cool!

Actually there is some ability to export data to spreadsheets for analysis, but I haven’t explored that.

Now I'm not sure how to use it.
Not as in how to get it to draw the wiggly lines on the screen, but where in my training this is useful. Right now it would be a waste, I don't need software to tell me my O. Lifts have issues, but do I wait until I think I've got it right and then start watching more closely (when I'll have embedded even more bad habits) or start at some earlier stage when I still have grossly (and I do mean that literally) bad technique?

Michael 0.6

3RFT
Run 600m
30 x 20kg good mornings
30 sit-ups

20:44

Which goes to show that my brain doesn't work too well even before I start training, as 0.6 of 800m is not 600m.

Deadlifts

5 x 97.5kg
5 x 102.5kg
5 x 105kg

20 x 82.5kg

Those were godawful ugly.
I don't know why but I could not get my shoulders back and that seemed to throw everything off. A few reps were right on the button, but it was ferociously hard to set my back and maintain the position.

Still, I suppose improving my ability to assume and maintain that position after a day hunched over a keyboard is the primary reason I do these things.

Skill work

40kg Box squats to 12" box went well. Still lpopiong a little, but much better on the last set.
Probably should have warmed up better, i.e. at all.

Snatch drills from the WCC video - back to being pissed off. Fantastic couple of videos though.

Repeat with a twist

12-9-6
400m
20kg OHS
Ring push-ups

14:28

Should have used more weight on the OHS. They were still a struggle, but not because of lack of strength, just lack of puff.

Deadlifts and mile

5 x 92.5kg
5 x 95kg
5 x 97.5kg

20 x 80kg

Those were pretty good. I want my back more gorilla like, but given the amount I sit all day and how nearly imposssible it is for me to get in that position even without weight, that will do to be going on with.

Inspired by video master mastroj and a comment from Lynette, I used my phone to video myself rather than rewinding over the same minute or so on the video tape in the camera. It worked really really well.

Ran around the block afterwards to stretch and balance things out.
A little over 9 minutes.
Didn't over-reach, often,. Quads stayed relaxed, mostly.
Didn't heel strike at all. Got some good hamstring powered pulling for a short stretch and when I combined that with a lean I think I was actually using the pose technique for a little bit. The recent journal video helped enormously. I thought I was supposed to be nearly kicking my butt all the time and I just couldn't move my feet that fast. Turns out that your feet come up high as more of a follow through when you run fast, which I definitely am not! Take that out and the technique feels much more natural.

Technique work.

Low bar box squats
Better than last week, but need work. While I'm sitting back further than I was, I'm not getting my shins to vertical or behind it like I want to. That's gonna take some time.

Burgener warm-up with PVC and a light bar complete and I'm happy with it. Coach B could pick tons of holes in it and I forgot things like keeping my wrists cocked in in the hanging movements until I was watching the last run through, but I only learned that today.

Very humid afternoon and I'm sweating buckets.