Saturday, December 18, 2010

10-12-16: Weighted Pull-Ups, Rowing and Burpees

CrossFit Garden City WoD for Thursday December 16th, 2010

Notes:
Strength:
5+ Strict Pullups - Add weight that allows for 5 hard sets of 3 reps. (30# weight vest)
90-120 seconds rest b/w sets.
Conditioning:
5 all out efforts. Try to maintain same number of burpees of every set.

Kristan Clever, 2010 CrossFit Games women's division champ, rockin' the weight vest pull-ups. (mirweightedvest.com)
Rowing. More fun in groups. Too bad we only have the one rower. And that I usually workout alone anyways. (crossfitendurance.com)
Burpees. Probably not, but its still an awesome picture of guys apparently trying to learn how to fly... (iamcrossfit.com)

Did my usual warmup (rather than the Rx'd CrossFit Warm Up), and went and found our one remaining weight vest.  It's actual weight is unknown. I've heard it referred to as 20# and as 35#.  Frankly, I have no idea... comparing the "dead weight" of the vest to a dumbbell just never seems to work. So, let's call it 25-30#.

Set the timer running, climbed up on the pull-up machine, and cranked out 3 weighted pull-ups. While not really kipping (there isn't room to do so without endangering your ability to procreate), they were NOT strict pull-ups in any sense of the word. After 90 seconds, I did another set of 3, this time as chin-ups (palms facing me).  I continued alternating between pull-ups and chin-ups for the duration of the 5 sets.  In terms of my inability to do strict pull-ups with the vest, I'm left wondering if I should have gone bodyweight and worked on my strict pull-up form. Even spread over 7.5 minutes, 15 strict pull-ups would have been quite a workout by themselves.

After that, I prepped for the conditioning part of the workout.  Set the rower to a 500m course, cleared some space for burpees, and got ready.  Each row took about 1:50, which is a fairly slow pace. Every time I would cruise into 250m with a split time of about 1:39... but right about then my strokes would either fade in power, or I would lose so much wind that I would end up doing faster, but far shallower strokes to just try to keep moving.  Either way, my time stayed fairly stable across all five rounds.

First round of burpees, I managed 9 before time ran out on the round.  In all honesty, I probably could have squeezed in 2 more, had I been feeling daring.  As it was, I barely managed to maintain reps across the other four rounds, but in the end, I was successful.  Oddly, while getting to 9 reps in the 3rd round was nearly impossible, with my final jump-clap coming a few seconds after the round was over, the 5th round was actually pretty easy.  I don't know what changed there... did I finally make friends with exhaustion and come out the other side? Personally I doubt it, but I also can't explain it.

All in all, another awesome workout.  I'm really loving the strength work followed by the conditioning work. I might be following CF Garden City fairly closely from here on out.

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