The logs of a burgeoning fitness and nutrition geek.
This long and fascinating essay looks at the negative impacts that advances in science and technology have in our ability to deal with disease. This paragraph toward the end leapt out at me in particular:
Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?
I think we’re currently seeing something similar with nutrition at large. Our advances in science and technology have given us a modern diet starved of nutrients, chock full of unhealthy grains, empty calories, refined sugars, and strange chemicals.
Fortunately we are now seeing new and exciting diet trends analyzing the merits of a more ancestral diet. This look backward is proving to be richly rewarding as we rediscover essential scientific truths about nutrition and health.
I’ll save the soapbox. Suffice to say, the article is a worthwhile read.
6:15pm at home.
Warmup: Kelly Starrett’s Hip Prep and Shoulder Prep exercises.
WOD: Tabata Something Else
Tabata intervals of pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups then squats, for total reps. No breaks between exercises. (Tabata intervals consist of eight rounds of 20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest.)
My results:
39 pull-ups
60 push-ups
50 sit-ups
101 squats
Total score: 250
Kipping isn’t really an option for me here at home, so I started off strict then scaled back to add a slight jump.
Another real-world workout! This time, two thousand-pound steel barn doors. It took four people and a mix of levering and pure brute force to get these loaded up on a trailer. More good times!
One interesting phenomenon about living at home with the folks for a time: being recruited for manual labor. Today, my brother and I spent a few hours dismantling and moving about 3,000 lbs worth of corral panels. Great way to apply a lot of the fundamental lifting movements to the real world.
6:00pm at BrandX
Buy in: Dead lift, 3-5 rep max
WOD: “Nicole”
AMRAP in 20 minutes of…
400m run
Max effort pull ups
Cash out: Balance beam and cartwheel work
For the WOD I managed four rounds: 23-11-12-9, plus one final 400m run.
Kipping rhythm was a bit of a limiting factor for the pull ups, all those extra swings certainly weren’t doing my grip any favors. Besides that, some unexpected stomach cramping had me walking bits of my last few 400m laps, not sure what that was all about. I’ll chalk that up to going into the WOD a bit too on the hungry side, I guess. And just sucking at running in general ;)
Some decent dead lift progress tonight: 205x3, which is 20lbs better than my PR of 185x3 a few weeks ago. Not huge numbers by any means, but it’s slow and steady progress on my way up to my double bodyweight goal of 300lbs. Next up: 225x3.
Recently, the main site WOD was the CrossFit Total (“CFT”): a sum of your single-rep max for dead lift, back squat, and shoulder press. That got me thinking: what’s my target CFT? Without having done the CFT yet, I don’t have much to base this on. But I have done a few semi-recent 3-rep maxes of the component exercises.
6:30pm at BrandX
Buy in: 5:00 of double-under practice
WOD: “Cindy’s Snatch”
As many rounds as possible in 20 minutes of…
5 power snatch (95/65)
10 push ups
15 squats
Cash out: Practice Lever and Ice Cream Makers.
I managed 8 rounds + 3 reps of power snatch. Scaled weight to 65lb for my first three sets, dropping down to 45lb for the latter five once my form started degrading. I have relatively little practice with power snatch, so this was a good opportunity to practice clean form.
Overall, good snatch practice, and a chance to apply some lessons learned about intensity after yesterday’s Fran. My goal for the next time I do this WOD is to stick to the same weight (65lb, or a bit more) for the duration of the entire workout.
Oh, and I’m finally getting the hang of those double-unders! I really should have kept count because I had some very decent streaks in there.
6:00pm at BrandX
Buy in: Thruster practice
WOD: “Fran”
21/15/9 reps for time of…
Thrusters (95/65)
Pull-ups
Cash out: Six laps of wheelbarrow walks.
Gnarly! I think this was my first actual Fran, and its reputation certainly is well deserved. The WOD was capped at 10:00, and with 65lb thrusters I managed to only just finish the first two sets.
That called for some homework, and it turns out that BrandX’s own Jeff Martin wrote a great article on intensity that just so happened to use Fran as an example.
The biggest limiting factor for me was definitely cardio-respiratory endurance. I managed the first set of thrusters without taking a break, but put the bar down four times during my second set. On top of that, my breaks were too long, apparently doing more harm than good for my body’s breathing regulation. I need to learn more about that little physiological mechanism.
The second limiting factor was my pullups, specifically my grip endurance. While my kipping is decent (though it could certainly be better), losing my grip just meant more frequent breaks, compounding the breathing issues further.
By the end of that workout, my lungs were on fire, and I was hacking up my lungs (and even smelling a faint tinge of blood!) for a good two or three hours after the workout. Apparently this is called the “Fran Cough.” Good times.
Next time: Stick with 65lb thrusters, continue working on my pull-ups, and in the interim practice better intensity management so I can actually finish the WOD in under 10:00.
