Our WODFather cooked up a nice ladder workout for us yesterday, and I hope you guys liked it! Normally we get to work backwards from 10, but with this workout, we started at 1, and worked our way up. I know that personally, I like the reverse ladders better.

Complete as many rounds as possible in 10:00 of:
deadlifts (100/65kg)
burpees

Your first round will be one deadlift, one burpee, then two deadlifts, two burpees, etc....until time runs out. Boy I tell ya, those first 5 rounds I felt like I was CRUSHING IT!

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If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that 100+ sit-ups in a single workout will leave your abs S-O-R-E! We had more than a few CrossForters complaining about tender tummies yesterday. That sneaky Wednesday workout was ALREADY starting to show it's effects yesterday, and that's never a good sign. Day 2 is always worse!

Your WODFather put together a cute little AMRAP for you guys, and I hope you enjoyed it!

5 rounds for max reps/calories of:

:30 dumbbell thrusters (45% of bodyweight)
:30 rest
:30 knees to elbows
:30 rest
:30 row (calories)
:30 rest

In all honesty, 5 rounds seemed like a lot, but it flew by pretty quickly. That seems to be the case whenever it's an AMRAP workout. And while this workout was carefully crafted, and well planned, it didn't offer any relief to those of you with sore abs. SORRY!

You'll notice the prescribed weight is 45% of body weight for your dumbbells. HEV-EY. We saw a few brave souls reaching for the 45lb dumbbells, but at the end of the day only two guys were tough enough to grab the 50lb-ers.  Congrats to Mark and Neil for using the "big dogs"!

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It was a busy "hips" day at the Fort yesterday. The WODFather paired together kettlebell swings and box jumps in a double tabata workout!

8 rounds for max reps of both:
kettlebell swings (24/16kg)
box jumps (24/20")

We saw some pretty impressive scores! Our evening classes were asking what a good score was to shoot for. I simply pointed to the board and said, "whatever Rosie got, minus 10 is an amazing score". Rosie is new to the Fort, but she is already KILLING the workouts! Atta girl!

With all the counting backwards from 3, I didn't have time to take any pictures. I did manage to take some video during our strength work, which was single rep back squats for our general programming. Gabe put up some SERIOUS numbers, and knocked Tommy Mo off the record board by back squatting a whopping 162.2kg's! WOWZA! One thing I'd like to point out is that Gabe has never squatted more than 120kg's. He just looked up at the record board and decided that it was time for some MAN SHIT. Good work Gabe.

Gabe 162.2kg back squat PR from Jennie Yundt on Vimeo.

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Was anyone feeling a little extra crowded yesterday? If so, it might have something to do with the record breaking attendance we had. There were 73 people who came through our regular group classes! This absolutely blows my mind, and thank you to everyone for helping the Fort grow! We are looking at expanding our current class time offerings since classes are filling up fast. First and foremost, let's address the evening hours. I need a show of "comments" from people who would attend a Tuesday/Thursday 4PM class. How about a show of "comments" for a Monday/Friday 7PM??

The workout yesterday felt similar to last Thursday for some of you, but trust me, it was different:

15:00 AMRAP
5 power cleans (60/40kg)
10 pistols
15 sit-ups

Ah, pistols. Kinsy got a nice surprise when I challenged her to do unassisted pistols AND SHE COULD DO THEM! Atta girl! It's funny how all this working out stuff has made your legs so strong.

We are going to be putting in another order for CrossFit Fire Fight shorts. They will cost $45, and the sizes run in men's even waist sizes. I posted a sign up thread on the Facebook page. If you'd like a pair, could you post a comment there please? If you don't have a facebook account, just shoot me an email.

One last thing. The Fort will be paying for round trip limo bus transportation to and from Fogo De Chao on 2/5. If you would like to save yourself the cost of parking AND have a super fun ride to dinner, sign up on the whiteboard at the Fort. We'll need an accurate count so I know what size bus to rent. If 24 people sign up, and 36 show up....we're going to be in big trouble! Bus will leave the Fort at 4PM, and leave the city at midnight. I heard a rumor that Charlie is going to do a repeat of his kick move from Saturday!

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The workout yesterday was another one of your WODFather's double AMRAP creations!

5:00 AMRAP
30 wall ball shots (20/14lb)
15 pull-ups
5:00 REST
5:00 AMRAP
30 box jumps (24/20")
15 ring dips

One of my all time favorite questions about ring dips came from Danielle. She asked, "does anybody ever do these things without a band?" The Mayor was in the same class and his witty reply was, "Only in the movies". Last night I was reminding people to keep their chest and chin UP when they're doing ring dips. Don't stare down at the floor in front of you, instead pick something straight across to look at. Not only does this keep your body in a better position, it also makes for better pictures.

Brianna had the unfortunate luck of meeting the edge of her box for the first time last night. OUCH! The good news is that she's only slightly bruised, but we're expecting a full recovery.

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Every good coach knows that you shouldn't "over coach" your athletes. Let's use the snatch for this analogy. Give your athlete one or two things to think about every time they set up. That's it. If you shout 6 cues at your athlete every single time they get ready to pull the bar off the floor, they'll either punch you in the mouth or get very frustrated. Or both. Let your athletes sort out one or two things at a time. "Knees back". "Big shrug". See? Nice and simple.

"knees back, drive through your heels, close bar path, lock out those elbows fast, hips back!"

Um, I'm sorry...I didn't quite catch all that. What exactly am I supposed to be focusing on?

This over coaching is also true in our everyday lives. It is most definitely possible that you are "over life-ing" yourself. Slow thing down a bit, and focus on one or two things at a time. Trust me. Your life will actually become less hectic if you start slowing it down, and biting off manageable chunks.

So grab your life barbell, and focus on what needs to be fixed FIRST. What is the most GLARING deficiency in  your life? In the gym, we focus first on the aspects of your lifts that could cause injury. In your life things might not be that black and white so make yourself a list. Fold the list so only the top one or two items are visible. Don't let the list overwhelm you. Instead, tape it to the bathroom mirror so you see those top two items every single day.

Now go out and start enjoying instead of over life-ing. Enjoy your family. Enjoy time with your friends. Most importantly, enjoy your workouts.

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The Fort is a pretty fun place to be, isn't it? My favorite day is always Saturday. Between the Oly class, the Team WOD, and the occasional Paleo Breakfast, it is my all time favorite day of the week. At the conclusion of Team Saturday, we had a handful of people who played a quick round of dodgeball, and it looked like you  had a great time!

The team workout was done in teams of 4:

400/300/200/100m rows
AMRAP
20 push press(35/25kg)
20 lateral hops (20")

While partners A and B were alternating on the rower, partners C and D were working on the AMRAP. Only one person could be working at a time at each station. Bill had some magical algorithm for scoring, otherwise I'd explain how it worked. Essentially, the team with the lowest score won.

We tallied up the team scores with a little confusion, and then declared our winning team.

Now....I hate to do this....but I think there was a clear miscalculation on the part of our winning team. Tommy and RTL teamed up as partners, and KTUCK partnered up with Kinsy. On the AMRAP portion of this workout, the girls managed to accumulate an astounding 9 rounds of push press and lateral hops - which was only slightly higher than the other teams. Tommy and RTL reported accumulating 16 ROUNDS within roughly a 10:00 period. I'm not saying you two weren't working hard. I'm not saying that you're incapable of amazing feats of strength. But let me just go out on a limb and say here that I think the chances of doing 160 push presses and 160 lateral hops EACH is nearly impossible.

Let's compare this to Fight Gone Bad. Say you could maintain a blazing fast Pete Rasmusen pace of 40 push presses a minute....that would have consumed 4 minutes of your time EACH. That would have left each of you exactly 1 minute a piece to get 160 lateral hops. You would have had to do about 3 lateral hops every second in order go accomplish this. Do you see where I'm going with this?? All I'm saying is that the scoring discrepancy is just a liiiiittle too large, and I'm going to have to award our second place team the honor of "champions" for this week.

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