11-07-20: Push presses and sit-ups, and burpees, and running

Elm City CrossFit WoD for July 20th, 2011

The push press. It seems so simple, right? Use a slight knee and hip bend to drive a weight from your shoulders to the overhead position.  It seems almost... natural. That does NOT make it "simple!" (CrossFit Infinite)

Sit-up form to try to keep the hip-flexors out a bit more. Note the towel under his back, filling the same function that an abmat would, namely, allowing full extension of the abs and preventing the small of the back from driving into the floor at the start of the movement. Both very good things. I presume he was protecting his junk from monkeys or something in the pic on the right. Safety first. (Simply Natural Supplements)

---

WOD: 21-21-15-15-9-9

• Push Press 95/65
• Reverse Crunch

Sellout: 5x On the minute

• 2 Burpees
• 1 Crack Dash

Walking in, my hope was that the rep scheme was an odd way of saying 21 push presses, 21 sit-ups. Nope, rather than the CrossFit regular of 45 reps, we were shooting for 90 today. Great googly-moogly!

Here we see Nicole Carroll showing perfect alignment on the dip phase of the push-press or push-jerk. Hips have closed a bit, knees have closed a bit, and the line between her center of balance, her hips and the bar make a straight line. In other words, she has dipped straight down.

As it turns out, I've been doing it wrong for quite some time.

Here we see Rob showing off several possible positions for the bottom of the dip. The first one is obviously the correct one, the same as Nicole's above. In the middle picture, in leaning forward a little, he's brought the bar in front of his center of balance. When he tries to straighten out of this dip, rather than driving the weight straight up, it will tend to shoot even further out in front, making him do even more work if he's going to rescue the lift.

In the last picture, we see the problem *I've* apparently saddled myself with.  In an attempt to keep from leaning forward, I've failed to actually close the hip, leaving me leaning back. This "felt" like I wasn't leaning forward, which is technically true, but my mental image of what I was doing looked more like the first picture. A LOT more pressure and strain is put on the lower back in this configuration, and the action of the hips reopening is completely omitted, making the lift even harder.


Total Time: uknown (it was nearly a week ago at this point. I'll try to keep up with this better in the future.)