Big Events Happening For SFCF Coaches!

It's A Boy!




Coach Angel welcomed his first baby boy, Kai Liu Orozco, almost three weeks early on December 9, 2010. Kai weighed in at 6 pounds, 2 ounces and momma Tami and baby are home already and doing just fine. Congratulations Coach Angel!

Coach Corrine Ties The Knot (Finally) :)



Coach Corrine and her longtime love, SFCF athlete Michael Dimitruk, tied the knot in a beautiful wine cave in Calistoga on Saturday, December 4, 2010. The Reverend Kelly Starrett was on hand to marry the beautiful couple and a good time was had by all. Congratulations Corrine and Michael!

Run & Performance Seminar with Brian MacKenzie - January 15, 2011 - 1-4 p.m.

Spend 1 day with Brian Mackenzie (creator of CrossFit Endurance) learning proper running mechanics and how to set up your performance for success with the correct scaling to understand where your success will start.

You will be video taped before and after and be given drills to learn how to run effectively along with proper queuing. You will then learn how to properly take this new skill and implement it into your own programming for success.

$75 for SFCF Members
$85 for Non-Members

Register Here: http://shop.crossfitendurance.com/collections/seminars/products/san-francisco-run-performance-seminar


SFCF Members - email juliet@sanfranciscocrossfit.com for discount code.

SFCF HOLIDAY SCHEDULE

San Francisco Crossfit will be having a somewhat abbreviated schedule the week after Christmas. Here are the highlights:

December 24th - 9:00 a.m. - Christmas Eve Chipper

December 25th - No classes

December 27th - 6 a.m., Noon, and 6 p.m. classes only (no 7 a.m. or 7 p.m.)

December 28th - 7 a.m., Noon, and 6 p.m. classes only (no 6 a.m. or 7 p.m.)

December 29th - 6 a.m., Noon, and 6 p.m. classes only (no 7 a.m. or 7 p.m.)

December 30th - 7 a.m., Noon, and 6 p.m. classes only (no 6 a.m. or 7 p.m.)

New Year's Eve - 6 a.m. and Noon classes only (no 7 a.m.)

New Year's Day - 10:00 a.m. - New Year's Day Chipper

Olympic Lifting Club Cancelled December 26th and January 2nd

SFCF Represents Again at the Quad Dipsea!

This past Saturday, November 27, 2010, SFCF was represented by 6 athletes who ran the Quadruple Dipsea (from Mill Valley to Stinson: 28.4 miles, 18,552 feet of elevation change) and all 6 finished! Four athletes were repeats from last year (Mike Megrian, Robert Tuller, Pon Somnhot, and Josiah Bunting) and there were 2 virgins (Chris Knievel and Kenso Kagawa). This was Coach Tuller's 8th finish in this event.
In the photo from left to right are:
Mike Megrian, Chris Knievel, Robert Tuller, Pon Somnhot, and Josiah Bunting; missing: Kenzo Kagawa (all finishers). Congrats to all of you!

6th Annual Turkey Chipper!

Thanks to everyone who participated in our 6th Annual Turkey Chipper! We had a massive crowd of over 60 people - all of whom were able to eat more pie as a result of the workout scientifically designed by Coach Kelly. Extra kudos to the pie-winning team who accomplished the workout largely one-handed.

Change Everything? Easy. But not simple....

Have we got your attention? Yeah, we just finished our FIRST Spring Leaning challenge. Now a little confession and some background.
I was not into this. Yeah Yeah, my doctoral work was on adherence, and
barriers to adherence. So what.
The conversation with my wife (the ripped one in the family with the yoked abs) as I remember it.

A "photo transformation challenge?" I said to my wife Juliet.
"Yep."
"Doode, that's so weak sauce. Besides we talk about nutrition all the time. Doesn't everyone eat like my daughters?"
"Nope, most of our athletes probably don't eat breakfast...much less know how much they eat during the course of the day."
"No."
"Yep. The only precondition of this contest that I will run (Juliet wife voice), is that everyone has to log their food. They can eat paleo/zone/nutrisystem/jennycriag for all I care. They just need to be accountable."
"All right." (with arrogant resignation)
"Dewd, It's YOU Kelly, that is always saying that nutrition is the gateway to greatness, and that abs are made in the kitchen..."

I do say that. And Juliet was dead right. Our athletes needed: A formal, public way to track food and be accountable. And, another food lecture about quantity, and quality.

And we did just that. Josh made about $850 bucks by the way. He split the pot with...




Oh snap! Meet Dr.DR. aka. Ellen Krasik, PhD/MD and now fantasy Pathologist at UCSF and $850 bucks the richer.
It turns out eating brown foods, and lots of Diet Pepsi doesn't support Div 1 soccer,brainy, super badness. She literally saves lives. She's the one in the lab making the weird CSI medical saves. Now she even LOOKS like a super hero.


Do it at your gym.
It's easy. Just take the most badass, hard working, motivated people you know. Hint, they are your training partners in your gym. Give them a template for what good eating looks like. You know, what kinds of foods are actually "food", when, and how much, etc. It's all out there on a website called, Crossfit. And then?

Make it a contest. You should see the radness at our gym. Insane.
And who cares if you go faster, which you will and is the only really good reason to do anything hard.
But you will, and you will look awesomer too.

It's almost like this sh*t works.
My wife being right I mean.

K-phat-like-a-first-grade-pencil-star

Ps. Here is my passive aggressive way of saying my wife was right, and I was wrong.
She's the hot mom on the right, the girl on the left (Catherine Gravelle) is my sister. Catherine is an all american Ball player.
Recently at the alumni reunion game, all the girls asked her how they could look like she does... And Juliet aka, Whiskey?
She's just a world champion mother of two. You like apples?



K-how-do-you-like-dem-apples-star




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What It Takes

This weekend past, SFCF sent a team to compete in the Crossfit Southwest Region Qualifier. There are several qualifiers going on like this on across the country in the lead up to the 2010 Crossfit Games, but none will be as large or have as fierce competition.
There is something special about competing against California. Maybe it's because Crossfit was born in this state that there are so many excellent gyms, coaches, and athletes around. Either way, the Southwest Regional was larger than the entire Crossfit Games last year. And, everyone was better prepared.

Including us.
As you may already know, Team SFCF was able to pull out an incredible win over some really excellent teams.
In fact, no other team was able to be as consistent across as many varied workouts as SFCF. In a scoring system where lowest points wins, SF had half as many points as second place, and a full quarter of the points for third.

There ended up being 76 teams competing for one of eight births to the games. The quick math yields 456 athletes competing for the bragging rights of being the best affiliate team in the region.

Driving home with the "Trophy" on our dash (see below), I started to think about what it really took to have six amazing athletes out-exercise everyone in the region.



To be frank, it takes a fair bit of luck. No not because the workouts favored us (there were no barbells to be seen) but we were certainly lucky that we were good at the ones that came up (as anything could come up). And it wasn't the other 76 teams there weren't on their A-game, because they decidedly were.

No, I think it takes luck to "happen" to get six terrific athletes together at a parking lot canopy gym.
It takes even more luck to have an incredible coaching staff that is obsessed.
Finally, it takes freakish good fortune to have a community of training partners that show up day in and day out literally for years.

In fact, it's impossible to create. It just happens. That's what makes it so special.

Corrine, Damian, JD, Catherine, Juliet, and Angel.
The SFCF Impossible Six.


Coach K-the-bob-roll-of-fitness-color-commentary-star

Two Words....Fuzz

Look. You've got to take care of your tissues. This is probably second in importance only to the universal "protect your crotch" law. Stretching or mobilizing your tight business is always a good idea, but in reality as about as sexy as laundry and taxes.
But, really, who cares if your performance suffers, or you get pulled into terribly technique poor positioning, or are really weak at the end ranges of your range of motion, or you are wearing out your joint surfaces?

Enter the Fuzz Concept.

Maybe, you will start stretching because you just don't like the concept of "fuzz" accumulating in your tissues. Fuzz you ask? I have a fuzz problem? What the fuzz? Gil Hedley, rockstar anatomist, makes an excellent case and presents a compelling hypothesis for internal muscular resistance. You can think of muscular "stiffness" as a measure of how well the muscle tissue (and other connective tissues) slide past one another. The more stiffness, the greater the internal resistance of the system. Increased internal resistance means decreased efficiency and lost power output. (We actually talk about this at the Movement and Mobility Seminar.) Dr. Hedley describes the formation of fuzz as secondary to immobility (like sleeping). As an aside, Leopards do stretch by the way, and you aren't a leopard--so quit using the "leopard defense" to rationalize your stiff/tight self. Know what makes even more fuzz accumulate in your body? Muscle damage. That's right. Working out.

Go ahead, say something witty you fuzz collector.
Now watch the man himself describe the fuzz epidemic.

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See. Aren't you embarrassed that you are so fuzzy and you didn't even know it?

Gross.


K-banishthefuzz-star

Loading And Tensioning: Part II

As promised here is the second installment. You may need to review part I.

As we begin to view our athletic movements and bio-mechanics through the filter of soft-tissue load-ordering, common athletic injuries and sports-related body problems become much easier to understand. Let's use the classic sport's medicine diagnosis "jumper's knee," as an example.

Jumper's knee is generic term for some kind of tendon problem (tendonopathy-itis/osis) of the patellar tendon below the knee cap (which is technically a ligament I know.) This kind of problem most often expresses itself as a painful knee cap in jumping related movements like the push-press in the image above.

Let's take a closer look at what's going on at the knee. It order for Bernard to keep his torso upright and his "jump" moving straight up and down, he clearly has to bend more at the knee and not the hip (hip flexion will tilt his torso forward and he'll end up jumping off axis and out of plane, or squatting). But because the knee and quadriceps are loaded first (they typically move first), subsequent loading of the hips and posterior chain will only increase the load forces at the knee cap. Now imagine a high level athlete with tight quads and tight anterior hips (gasp, impossible) and you've got additional freakish system tensioners on an already pre-loaded/pre-biased tendon system. You do have to keep the torso upright after all (so hey, burn those patellas). Compounding the forces at the knee is the anterior translation (forward movement) of the knee out over the foot as the athlete dips lower and nears peak compression. This translational tendon loading can exponentially increase the forces at the knee cap.
No wonder your knees are sometimes sore after a crap-ton of push-presses!

Clearly, cueing athletes to turn our their feet a little, stretch their quads, get adequate warm up, and compress to their heels, will significantly attenuate the forces on the tendon at the distal knee cap. You need to get as much hip loaded as is possible without inclinating at the torso. But now, you understand how and why these tendon puppies get hot.

So don't jump the barbell up from some knee forward, dog-poo, weak-ass(literally), muted-hip (CF talk for weak), position and wonder why your knees are all uppity.
You loaded 'em first, then jumped. And where's the butt in that?

Stay tuned...Part III

Coach K-love-your-knees-star