11-12-12: Ring rows, sit-ups and push-ups

Elm City CrossFit WoD for Monday, December 12, 2011

Ring rows: Though used as a scaling option for pull-ups, they are difficult in their own right, requiring and building lots of multi-planar support in the shoulders, torso, as well as the arm muscles, obviously.

Push-ups. Note the abmat next to her, conveniently for my needs. There is a dearth of cool pictures of people doing sit-ups on the interwebz.

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• WoD: 10!
  
  • Ring Row
  • Sit-up
  • Push-ups
• Sellout: 2x Failure
  
  • Dumbbell Hammer Curls

The factorial in the WoD description just means rounds of 10, 9, 8, etc... 

This is the workout I'm glad I *didn't* have on Friday: It actually felt pretty good.The ring rows and push-ups caught up with me pretty quickly, but not in a way that was too distressing. I pretty much wanted to die during the 2nd and 3rd rounds (9 and 8 reps, respectively), but as the rounds got shorter, the work got noticeably easier.

The upshot with ring rows is how infinitely scalable they really are. With your shoulders directly under the rings (and where the rings are anchored), the work is very difficult. But if you just walk a bit backward, putting a lateral component into the angle of the rings from the ceiling, the work load decreases dramatically. They can be performed from a nearly vertical position for extreme scaling, or flat parallel to the floor for a tougher workout. I was somewhere in the middle, flatter in the beginning... a bit more vertical by the end.

Push-ups were all completely legit, full ROM. Sit-ups were performed with an abmat, knees apart to minimize the contribution from the hip flexors. The ROM is defined by the back touching the floor, and the shoulders moving in front of the hip crease  at the top. While the push-ups were all broken into subsets after the first few rounds, I managed to keep the sit-ups unbroken. So at least there was that.

The sell-out was good old-fashioned body building, dumbbell curls. The prescripted weight was "heavy enough to limit the set to 8-12 reps." I got it fairly close, failing out at 13 reps on the first round, 14 on the second. This was using the 20# dumbbells. 25# probably would have been perfect, but I'm not too concerned about a couple of extra reps. At least I didn't bang out 20-25 and completely miss the point. So, again, at least there was that.