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The Open is here! Make sure you sign up!
Check it out here!
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At the Box
Happy New Year to all…I truly hope you have a great and prosperous year ahead. As we all know with the onset of a new year comes a slew of resolutions, some realistic, some not.
One way to set up for success is to pick goals that are achievable and realistic. Pick one or two small goals that you know you can get to. This will help build confidence and set you on a good path.
Use your support system…. family, friends, coaches all play a big part in your success as they can help motivate and help you.
Write it down and put it somewhere you see it daily. This will be a reminder to stay on point. Plus when you check it off the list it will feel good to see your goal checked off.
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For those of you with nutrition goals (eating better, getting leaner, or performing better), use Marcus as a resource, he is probably the smartest (geekiest) guy I know when it comes to nutrition. Marcus will get you dialed. Which leads me into the 23/1 rule….we have you mostly for an hour a day, you are on your own for the other 23…let’s say you come in daily and hit it hard, awesome! Then you leave here and eat like shit and get little sleep. Guess what? Your results are going to be way decreased from what they could be because you’re not owning the rest of your day. Be responsible, own your life! You are the master, act like it. We innately know what is good for us and what is not, listen to that little voice and do what is best for YOU, you won’t regret it.
A big shout out to all that have been hitting PRs lately…great to see it and look forward to many more.
Your Oly lifts are getting better and you are all getting strong, be proud of yourself and keep hitting it hard.
The Open is coming in 2 months and we are super stoked for another season of great training and competing. If you are interested in stepping it up, ask me and I will get you going in the right direction.
As always our door is always open so if you have requests, questions, suggestions, or whatever, come chat anytime ….Cheers!
-Mike
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Athlete of the Month - Dave Anderson
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It’s been almost a year since Dave walked into BCF and inquired about classes. I remember him saying he drops his kids off at OGA and has seen our peeps running around with med-ball and barbells and kettle bells. Most people tend to run the other way when they see that but Dave was curious….and here we are about a year later and Dave has turned into a beast! Dave’s overall fitness, strength, and skill development has gone through the roof. Dave is a great example of how hard work, dedication and consistent training really pays off.
Dave also happens to be an all-around great guy that is super friendly and has nothing but good things to say about others, a perfect example for all of us to follow. Dave recently brought his wife Karol on board and they now both train in the afternoons. Be sure to hit Dave with a high five when you see him and say hi!
We all look forward to watching Dave kick butt this year….great work Dave!
-Mike
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Just over a year ago I didn’t know anything about CrossFit. When I started this journey I had no idea it would become such a big part of my life. My experience started when I would see BCF athletes out running or carrying weights around the parking lot while I was dropping my kids off at OGA. I would think to myself, “I need to get back into shape, I should check that place out sometimeâ€. After saying this to myself for about a year I finally decided to check it out. I talked with Mike and told him that I needed to start doing something and he encouraged me, shared his enthusiasm and invited me back for the fit test.
I was nervous, but determined to show what I could do in this “fit testâ€. I gave it my all and it flat out kicked my butt. I left that day feeling dizzy, kind of sick and seeing stars. I wondered if this was the right thing for me to start doing in my 40’s!. But I went back and kept going back, even though I continued to be nervous for the first few weeks. Everyone was friendly and helpful which made it easy to keep going. Mike and Brian always had time, always helped me with form and technique and never made me feel like I didn’t belong, even though I was brand new to CrossFit and they were going to the Games. You could easily see that it was a welcoming, friendly environment, with people who cared about others.
My initial goal was to show up 2-3 days a week. Yes, “show upâ€. Not a very strong or defined goal. I can’t say when the nervousness stopped and I flat out just started having fun, but that’s exactly what happened. Within a few months of starting I was going in 5 days a week and my goals were much more defined. After a year now, my goals continue to evolve and they now include double-unders, handstand push-ups, and muscle-ups; all of which are still in various stages of development but they are progressing.
I feel much more energetic, much stronger, and I physically look different than when I started. My friends and family have noticed and it has even inspired some of them to start their own journey.
There’s not a chance I would have achieved the results that I have anywhere else. CrossFit pushes me harder than I could ever do on my own, but in such a good way. CrossFit is fun and rewarding because of the people. Not just the coaches, who are awesome, but everyone here at BCF. My thanks to all of you, especially those in 4:30 class.
-Dave
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The Happy Mapping of Arms - Part 3
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This month we are going to talk about the 3rd joint of the arm, the elbow joint and the two different actions that take place there.
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If you have tendinitis of the wrist or elbow, or if you have problems with finger control, or if you suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome or tennis elbow, then you should pay careful attention to the structure of the two lower joints of the arms and correct your map if necessary. I can almost guarantee that your map will be incorrect if you experience those difficulties.
The elbow joint is a joint of two bones with one. There are two bones in the lower arm that make it possible to both rotate and bend. If all we did with the lower arm was open and close it, we would only need one bone in the lower arm. Notice that it is different rotation than is available at the shoulder joint, where there is also rotation available (with a different design not requiring two bones).
So bending and rotating both happen at the elbow. It is misunderstanding the rotation that can give people so much grief.
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Notice in the picture above how rotation occurs on the pinky side of the forearm and hand. Place your hand on a flat surface and try this for yourself. When you rotate your lower arm around the pinky side, movement is easy. Now try rotating around the thumb side. Not so easy is it? The ulna bone is the axis of rotation, the stable thing around which everything else moves. See how the radius bone is round at the end?
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It’s like a little wheel, perfectly designed for rolling around the ulna. This movement is important to know for nearly all the movements we do at the box (Pullups, Muscle ups, Cleans, Snatches, TGU’s, Front Squats, Rowing). In a supinated hand (palm up) the two arm bones (ulna and radius) run parallel to each other. When the hand is pronated (palm down) the radius bone crosses over the ulna. If we attempt to rotate more around the thumb instead of around the pinky side of the hand, it can cause great tension on the tissues that lie between the radius and ulna. This becomes exponentially apparent as our skills become more refined and explosive. Increasing the potential for discomfort, inefficiency and painful nastiness not only at the elbow, but at the wrist and even up to the shoulder.
So play with how the forearm both rotates and bends at the elbow. See if you can separate the two movements. Try it from the forearm hand rest relationship position and try it from the bad relationship position. Bending and rotating very often happen at the same time so we think of them as one, but they are not.
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To contact Rich, either give him a call at
503-939-2524 or email him at rroskopf@beavertoncrossfit.com
Conable, Barbara, and William Conable. How to Learn the Alexander Technique: A Manual for Students. Portland, OR: Andover, 1995. Print.
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Squats Are Safe, But You're Probably Doing Them Wrong
by Mark Rippetoe
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One of the most persistent myths in the entire panoply of conventional exercise wisdom is that squats below parallel are somehow bad for the knees. This old saw is mindlessly repeated by poorly-informed orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, and chiropractors all over the world. Better-informed professionals such as productive strength coaches, weightlifters and powerlifters, and those willing to examine the anatomy of the knees and hips for more than just a minute or two, know better. Here are four reasons why.
1. The below-parallel (hips just below the knees) squat position is a perfectly natural position for the human body. People all over the non-air-conditioned world spend time squatting as a resting position throughout the day, and all of them arise from it without injury. There is nothing harmful about either assuming a squatting position -- whether sitting down in a chair or into an unsupported squat -- or returning to a standing position afterwards. The world record for the squat in the sport of powerlifting is now over 1,000 pounds, and the guy is just fine.
We've been squatting since we've had knees and hips, and certainly since the development of the toilet. The relatively recent idea of gradually loading this natural movement with a barbell doesn't change the fact that it will not hurt you. If you do it correctly -- you don't get to do the squat wrong and then claim that squatting hurts your knees, any more than you get to drive your car into a bridge and then say that cars are dangerous.
This discussion refers specifically to the strength training version of the movement, the one designed to make you progressively stronger by lifting progressively heavier weights. If you are doing squats as calisthenics, it doesn't much matter how you do your hundreds of reps, because you're going to get sore knees anyway.
2. The reason a weighted squat using sets of five reps doesn't hurt your knees is that a correctly-performed full squat is not really a knees-dependent movement. The squat is a hips movement. The knees just go along for the ride; if you squat down, your knees have to bend, but they don't have to take the majority of the stress. The hips are much better protected joints than the knees. They are completely surrounded by muscle -- muscle that rapidly adapts to the stress of squatting by getting stronger and better at squatting. The correct squat drives the hips back and the knees out to the side a little during the descent. This puts the majority of the force on the hips where it belongs.
The squat is also a back exercise, because it is best performed with a more horizontal back angle than is typically recognized as correct by less-experienced exercise trainers. This back angle allows the bar to stay over the middle of the foot -- the body's natural center of balance against the floor. And the more-horizontal back position allows the hips to do their part of the work, keeping the stress off the knees and providing a way to progressively strengthen the back too.
But more specifically, the full squat is not only safe for the knees, it strengthens the muscles that operate and protect the knees so effectively that nothing else even compares to it as a basic exercise for the lower body.
The quadriceps muscles on the front of the thigh attach to the tibia (the shin bone) just below the kneecap, on the bump at the top of the bone on the front. When they pull on the knee, the force is directed forward relative to the knee joint. Balancing this forward force is the backward pull from the hamstrings, which attach on either side of the same bone (the top of the tibia). When the hamstrings are positioned correctly by the hips moving back and the torso leaning forward, the backward pull from the hamstrings balances the forward pull from the quads. This balance is optimum when the hips drop just below the level of the knees.
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3. The advice to never allow the knees to bend past 90 degrees, or to never go below parallel, ignores the fact that the squat is not merely a way to "do quads." The full squat works all of the muscle mass in the body below the position of the bar on the shoulders. To maximize the amount of muscle worked, the squat must be done slightly below parallel with the knees out, the back angle in a position to keep the bar balanced over the middle of the foot, the neck in a neutral position, and the hips bearing most of the load. This correct version of the squat works all the hip muscles, all the leg muscles, all the back and abdominal muscles, and protects the knees, the spine, and the neck while allowing progressively heavier weights to be lifted.
4. Partial squats have a marked tendency to leave the hamstrings -- and their important backward-directed tension that protects the knees -- out of the movement. This is because partial squats are so often performed with a more vertical back, either accidentally or due to poor instruction.
A partial squat also allows the use of much heavier weights, because you don't have to move them as far. Unsupervised kids in the gym do this all the time. Unfortunately, so do high school football players under the often less-than-qualified guidance of their coaches. After all, it's very cool if your entire defensive line is "squatting" 500 pounds. As a general rule, if the bar is so heavy that you cannot squat below parallel with it and stand back up, it's too heavy to have on your back.
The below-parallel squat is the best exercise in the entire catalog for whole-body strength, power, balance, coordination, bone density, joint integrity, and mental toughness -- good things to develop if you don't have them. Learn to do them correctly, start out light and go up in weight a little each workout, and watch the improvement happen faster than it ever has before.
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A How To Guide for Scaling WODs - Christian Stricker
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So you come into class and the WOD is a 3 round triplet of 10 Deadlifts at 315 lbs, 10 handstand push ups and 10 box jumps at 30â€. You know that you have done a max deadlift at 335, a max effort set of 5 handstand push ups and your highest box jump is 36â€. You could conceivably do the WOD before the day ends, possibly even before the class is over but would this be a smart approach? The chances are unlikely unless you just cant get enough jostling around of your cervical vertebrae, the sound of snapping ligaments in your lumbar spine and a stream your life force leaking out of the miniature craters you have decorated your shins with.
As fun and exciting as that sounds, here are some guidelines for a more practical approach and useful guide to scaling.
For conditioning WOD's, power output is key, this means your total power output over the course of a workout or the equation: power = work / time. For instance anyone who can run 100 meters, can run a 5 k but if it takes you a years worth of running 13.7 meters a day, your power output is exceptionally minimal. That is an exaggeration but it illustrates the idea nicely. A more relative example might be the one above where the weight is ~95% of the person's max, which is typically doable for 2 reps in a max effort setting. Max effort lifts, either in weight or reps, take a long time to recover from, sometimes the duration of an entire conditioning workout, making this a poor choice to use for conditioning. Here are some general percentages and rep ranges to use for different workouts. Use a lower percentage in the range for higher reps and higher percentage for lower reps.
1. For high rep workouts. Example: Several rounds of 20+ reps or a single time through of 40+ reps.
a. Use a weight between 40-50% of your max or a weight you think you could do 30+ times in a set if you had to.
b. If modifying the weight is not an option, ie. Bodyweight movements, modify the movement to allow you do the appropriate amount of reps in a sub maximal set.
2. For moderate rep workouts with multiple rounds of 10-20 reps of a movement or a single set of ~40 reps.
a. Use a weight or movement that you could probably do 20-30 times in a single set if you had to, about 50-60% of your max.
3. For Low-moderate rep workouts with multiple rounds of 5-10 reps or a single all out set of 20-30 reps and moderate rep EMOMs (5-10 reps per minute).
a. Use a resistance/movement that you could do 10-20 times in a set or about 60-75% of your max.
4. For low rep conditioning workouts and low rep EMOMs 1-5 Reps.
a. Use a heavier weight, 80-90% of your max or a weight you could do 5-10 times.
Hopefully that takes some of the confusion out of scaling workouts and allows you to get the most out of your training. Remember you are not fit if you are injured and unless your fitness is your livelihood or your life depends on it there is no need to rush it, it will come.
-C. Stricker
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