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




.

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

Festivus

Just a quick note to all of you that are looking for something to do on Christmas day:

We will be holding Festivus at noon on the 25th at SFCF. There will be an aluminum pole (valued for it's strength to weight ratio), airing of grievances and feats of strength. And eggnog.

See you there,
-Boz

Christmas Schedule

Hey SFCF,
Be sure to note the changes to our regular class schedule at sanfranciscocrossfit.com.

1) No classes on Christmas.
2) Christmas Eve-- 8am all levels
3) Dec. 26th. No level 2-- only 8:30 and open gym
4) The week after Christmas 28-30th. 6am,noon,6pm
5) New Year's Eve--6am,Noon
6) New Year's Day--10am




James Mills will be bringing a little SFCF to the Nutcracker
at Fort Mason. Don't miss.

Loading and Tensioning Part 1

There are a few "rules" of the body that may be applied across multiple applications and body systems. One of these rules is; tissues that are moved into a loaded or biased position first, experience increased relative tension, load, or positional significance throughout the subsequent remaining movement. This is a fancy way of saying that your body's soft tissues (muscles, tendons, joint capsules, etc) undergo tensioning in the order in which they were first loaded.

For example, imagine stretching your hamstrings while laying on your back (we are really just mobilizing hip flexion because it would be impossible to "just" stretch the hamstrings in isolation). If you begin to lift your leg up to your chest with a straight knee, you will "feel" the stretch behind the knee more than you will in the belly of the hamstring. The converse is also true. If you bring your leg up toward you chest in hip flexion (with a bent knee) and once you run out of slack THEN try to straighten you knee, you will feel the tension biased more toward your butt (toward the tissues that were stretched first).

Soft tissue tension or load ordering plays a significant roll in your athletic development whether you know it or not, and it extends far beyond simply stretching your hammies. For example, good technique in the bench press dictates that you break at the elbows first and not at the shoulders on the negative or lowering portion of the lift. Not only does this good technique cue allow for more weight to be lifted, but it also vitally protect the shoulders from "crappy bench press" positioning. But, if you examine this technique in terms of tissue load ordering, you are able to see that shoulder soft tissue loading is delayed (ordered later than triceps) until the decent of the bar dictates that the shoulder move significantly to accommodate the movement. Delayed shoulder soft tissue loading radically decreases the stresses put on the shoulders at peak movement compression. Don't believe me? Go ahead and load up your shoulders before your triceps and see what happens (no don't unless you LIKE shoulder surgery).

So, as you can see, loading tissues in the order you want to stress them affects many of the movements and maintenance strategies we take for granted.

How might this principle affect your deadlift max? Stay tuned.

Coach-hit-the-tequila-before-the-beer-star (liquor before beer--never fear, obeys the ordering law too)

Year 5.

Ok. We can't take the heat. We are back. And, we have a ton of new ideas and content.
Truce?
Great.


So, this past week launched us into our fifth year of SFCF and we have a big, big year planned.

Check out our newest physical culture experiment below:



More info to follow, but be sure to note our fresh container makeover.

Also notable: A solid SFCF crew took on one of the toughest short course ultra-marathons last Saturday. The Quad Dipsea has some 19K feet of elevation change over some 28+ miles of single track and literally thousands of stairs.



It's almost like this stuff works.

Stay tuned....

Coach-good-to-be-home-star

American History, and you.

It sometimes comes to my attention that due to the fact that people lead busy lives, they must not really know about the local resources available to them. It has to be.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about learning how to row from SFCF's own Erin Cafaro. Yeah, yeah, she won a Gold Medal in Bejing. Yeah, and was the national champion at Cal. Oh, but did you know she just sorta created American history by winning the first EVER Gold Medal in the Pair (think partnered suffering) at the recent World Championships in Poland about a month ago? And, she doubled up in the 8 too? You didn't know she was a double World Champion?
No?
Yeah, and you get a chance to actually row, with her. And what's freaky cool, is that on the second day of the seminar, YOU get to head out to one of the coolest places to row on the west coast (with Erin) and you get to actually ROW on the water, like a real rower. Did you know people pays thousands of dollars to spend a day skiing with Olympians (who don't have 400 FGB like Erin btw)? YOU get the chance to actually learn to row from a very gifted instructor, and an American History Machine. Doode, she can autograph your puke stained shirt! You might learn something and get to hold the "biscuit". What, you've never held a Gold Medal? You've never been coached by a Current World Champ?

Dewd, learning to row like this is really cool. Trust me.

But seriously, your rowing sucks. It does, and your crappy technique is killing your times, and you are loosing serious fitness points.

The Crossfit Rowing Cert can be signed up for here.
It's the weekend of October 24, and 25th.
ERIN won't be coaching it again out here for a while. And we lose her to the competitive rowing season soon. Don't loose your chance, then complain when you suck at crossfit rowing pieces. Remember one of our mandates for attaining elite fitness to learn new sports. So come learn a new sport already, and hang out with a brilliant rowing instructor and an excellent coach.



Coach-I've-held-the-biscuit-star

Satori

"One day I wiped out all notions from my mind. I gave up all desire. I discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude.





I felt a little strange--as if I were being carried into something, or as if I were touching some power unknown to me...and zzzt! I entered.





I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos.





I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw people coming toward me, but all were the same man.







All were myself! I had never known this world. I had believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never created: I was the cosmos; no individual me existed." -Sasaki


Awakening, or satori, is the fundamental aim of Zen. According to the Zen text Denkoroku, "It is to die completely and then come back to life."

Hmmmm, sounds like heavy, high rep squatting to me. Looks like it too.

Coach K-the-buddah-squatted-heavy-too-star

Things I Am Into (thanks Dan)

This is a post about Things I am Into.

No order. No reason. Just the truth.

1. If your gym is more beautiful than this, it's cool. You are dead and in heaven.



2. This is James. He's a professional badass ballet star. That's 305.

3. Red Stripe, Bacon, Potato Chips.


4. This is Ethan Kochis. He is so humble and badass that he will be embarrassed by this video. Effit, I love PR's.



5. I saw and bought this poster at Ed Hardy's place Tatoo City SF. If running were really like this,
running would be cool.


6. This is a 200kg box squat. But who cares, because my neck is sooo red I look like Hell Boy.
I match my 25kg bumbers. Do you? That's cool.



7. Snatch-Grip width Chins (palms toward you). Try it. You suck at it.
In fact your chins are sissy compared to your pull ups. Truth. I said it.



8. Basic Gymnastics. Super basic. It's not even really gymnastics. It's pre-gymnastics.
It's really, really hard and solves a bunch of your crap. Note elbows out past wrists.
I heart Carl.


Coach K-DanSilverwannaBe-Star

Holy Sh*T

First off I wanted to thank Kelly and Juliet for allowing my words to grace this blog. I can honestly say that for the better part of two years the SFCF blog has been something I have ingested regularly. Its been like a different present of knowledge and humor to unwrap on a daily basis. I also have a newfound respect for how hard it may be to produce awesome content as often as our coaches do. We are being coached by coached warrior poets people.

“When You Can’t Come Back”

Any athlete will tell you that it’s a sad day when you realize your playing days are over, whether that be at the collegiate or professional level. Regardless of your sport or how far you have pushed yourself within that respective sport, or whether injury or in my case ability signaled the end of your athletic career, you will never forget the moment you realized that part of your life was over. I can vividly remember when that moment arrived for me. It was May of 2005 and I was standing outside the baggage claim at SFO waiting for my mom to pick me up from my flight home after being cut from my second spring training by a professional baseball team. It was a sad realization of “well what the hell do I do now”? All I had ever known was baseball year around since I was 10 years old and it had now come to a screeching halt. My next few years from 2005-2007 were spent playing on local SF baseball teams just to be around the game, yet never regaining the same intense passion I felt when I would toe the mound for a game that actually meant something, wearing a jersey that represented an entire college. In July of 2007 following a 6 week boxing camp, pain in my right hip began to impair walking, sitting, and lying down to the point of blinding pain. I was told by an Orthopedist at Kaiser that I had what is known as FAI or Femoral Acetabular Impingement. I was basically told to avoid all activity where I had to pivot on the ball of my right foot because that in turn would pivot the head of my femur and aggravate my condition. That was like being told to not be active anymore which to me was unacceptable. I was also given a rehab program that seemed fit for someone who would be confined to an elliptical for the rest of his life. By the time my hip had healed enough to run I had honestly lost the motivation to exercise anymore. Instead I simply sat on the couch every night after work and blamed my lack of activity on my hip.

Dizzle Cafaro is actually the man who suggested I try Crossfit in November of 2007. By that time I was 235 pounds and would probably have clocked a 3min 500m row in my condition. I have to say that my first experience was intimidating (I told JD I wouldn’t go until he came with me), and eye opening as to how out of shape I was. I was sweating bullets and out of breath doing 1 rep max front squats with 155 pounds. My 2nd WOD was Fran w/ a blazing time of 12 mins with ripped hands to boot. I can honestly say I drank the SFCF kool-aid that night and could instantly realize I had found something that could deliver me from several months of terrible pain that had effected how I walked, being able to sit for long periods of time, or even sleep for more than an hour at a time without waking up because of the pain. Slowly week after week I noticed that my hip was gaining greater range of motion, and I was becoming stronger and leaner. I also was thrilled with the fact that Kstar and Boz were always able to offer me ways to work around hip pain that allowed me to complete WOD’s if my hip had become an issue during a certain movement. Crossfit, and more specifically Crossfit San Francisco has been something that has definitely sent my life down a path of fitness I know it wouldn’t have gone down had the Dizzle not introduced me to a little slice of fitness heaven in the loading dock of the Sports Basement. My hip will be a lifelong issue for me, however crossfit and the lessons I’ve learned through our amazing coaches have drastically improved my range of motion, strength, and recovery period when it does act up, and illustrated to me the various range of motion stretches I can do religiously to (as KSTAR would say) “normalize” my hip . The easiest way to illustrate the drastic changes I have gone through since joining crossfit (other than the weight loss) would be two examine two topics I mentioned earlier: my hip, and my Fran time. When I first began I could barely overhead squat 135, and front squat 155. Fast forward to August of 2009 my best Overhead squat is 235, and my best front squat is 235. In addition my 12 min Fran time is now a five min Fran time (Kelly may not like me mentioning but it was done hungover). Im also weighing in at about 205 pounds as opposed to the husky 235 pounds I began at in November of 2007.Across the board my WOD times have dropped drastically, and I’m- the proud owner of a C2 Rower I affectionately call the “Soul Cleanser” which routinely punishes me (that’s what she said).

Lastly I will say that as a pitcher there was nothing like being in the middle of what I like to call a “holy shit” moment. It is a moment present in any sport, and it was what I lived for out on the mound. It’s the moment where you do something amazing on the field of play, or turn in a performance you have to pinch yourself to believe, and the crowd is going nuts and your team is mobbing you…..this is the moment when you take a step back, look around at what you just accomplished and utter to yourself “holy shit”. I have experienced these same moments at crossfit and it is precisely what entices me to keep coming back, keep improving, and in my own personal way keep claiming victory. My pitching days are over for good, but SFCF still has plenty of “holy shit” moments in store for me.

Lucas “Holy Shit” Robinson

Not a Gimmick

I was asked recently by a non-crossfitting friend (yes, they exist in theory) what I thought were the reasons for Crossfit's popularity and success. My response was immediate. I said, "Because, it's not a gimmick. Front-Squatting and Running isn't a gimmick."

And it's not. Marrying together Olympic sports is a hard stinking workout, and one without a ceiling or top-end.




Last night, we had nine racks simultaneously in use by teams of three. Beginners were working out next to advanced athlete and both were working at their available capacities.



A couple of nights ago, I was talking about the "not a gimmick" conversation with my good friend and pro-couch surfer Johnny Welborn. His response? "I've been training hard since high school. Add college football to ten seasons playing in the NFL and that's a lot of time. Lifting weights and running always kicks my ass. Always. That's why this stuff works, and why it always will."

Gymnastics? Not a gimmick. Check.
Olympic Weight-Lifting? Not a gimmick. Check.
Barbell Training? Not a gimmick. Check.
Running and rowing? Not a gimmick. Check.

All these elements mixed together? Gut Check.



Coach K-so-much-room-to-get-better-Star

Sometimes, You Just Gotta Do It

Recently at SFCF, we performed some rough calculations and estimated that we have administered over forty thousand workouts. It’s true and a little staggering. And, buried within this considerable volume of athletic coaching, are certain patterns and predispositions of our athletes. For example, we rarely have to tell women that the weight they are using to back squat is too heavy, and that is why they aren’t breaking parallel (the opposite is quite true of men). Another one, and the topic of this post, is that we rarely see our athletes choose to slow way down (finish last-ish) and commit to actually finishing a skill or movement when they can keep their speed up by substituting or scaling. For example, we will often have clients that can perform all the pull ups in a workout like Fran, as singles, but will move to some variation of jumping or band assisted pull ups if given the chance. Yeah, yeah, I know, you’ve got to “ scale too” to increase work capacity, etc, etc… And it’s true, it is completely appropriate to work at relatively scaled loads to manage overall higher average work outputs over time. But it is also true that sometimes you’ve got to go full dose, and as slow as it takes to get the job done. I mean, forty-five deadlift singles at 225 is a daunting task for a beginner and made worse by the psychology of going SLOW. This however is where real capacity is gained.



As an experiment, take a look on the main crossfit site at the next time a workout like Isabelle turns up (Powersnatch 135 x 30). You will literally see people posting sub 4 minute times with a piece of PVC or the bar. Dewd. Seriously. There is no linear progression for scaling workout that don’t come around very often. And this is not an insignificant point. There are so many things to work on in Crossfit (like several Olympic sports for example) that it is hard to go light and fast one time, planning to go slow and prescribed next time, IF the next time you see that given exposure is several months later. What actually happens is that people NEVER opt for heavy and slow. When we “score” workouts at SFCF for example, we count unmodified and slow, higher than light and very fast. And so should you.
You are never going to go fast at a workout that involves forty-five handstand pushups unless you can actually PERFORM forty-five hand-stand pushups.
Remember, you can always manipulate rep-schemes to fit your fitness/capacity levels and still perform all the work of a given wod. Instead of 21-15-9 for example, how about nine sets of five? Or, god forbid, fifteen sets of three! Clearly it’s tough to do this with deadlifts if you can’t actually pick up the weight, or cleans etc, but there are movements that you can do like the negative portion of the handstand pushup.

At some point, you’ve got to bear down and actually attempt to complete the work.
It’s ok if you have to go slow. Your ego will survive the experience.

Coach Kelly

A Word About Your Low Back

This back positioning is sweet. Learn to lift like Rob Orlando.

Admit it, you thought I was going to hammer Rob about his low back as soon as you saw the title of this post and photo. Oh no, young padawan learner. Rob's kung fu is very, very strong. But let's talk about why.

1) Rob is very, very strong. His perfect form does not break down even when he lifts round, gravity dense objects from terrible positions.

2) Perfect form? Yes, note that Rob's low back is FLAT! His low back is loaded and in neutral. Look again at the photo. Rounded? Phsah! Flat, and flat is safe!

3) Rob has stellar hip flexibility and he is sufficiently abducted (leg's turned out) to maximally un-impinge his hips. The hulk tail (legs) is not wagging the hulk (hips). Rob's connective tissues and joint capsules are not passively pulling his low back into a less than ideal flexed position. And this is a huge point. Don't let your hips dictate your spinal positioning! Get those knees out and get some hip flexion flexibility already!

4) Rob's hips are high enough to allow for his low spine to be in a more advantageous position. Butt down is fine for O-lifting to keep the chest upright for the second pull, but Rob's rock is low and he has no second pull here. He has to keep his hips high to teeter-totter into an workable position.

5) Rob's thoracic-spine is how he accommodates the flat low back. Note any good strength lifter and you'll see thick paraspinal muscles along the mid back. Why? Because loading the mid spine in a flexed position is way preferable than loading the crappy low back in a flexed position. McGill ET all demonstrated that lifters and athltes with chronic low back pain loaded the low back first in movement. Rob is loading his legs and upper back first. Well done Rob.

6) That stone is as close to Rob's center of gravity as possible. And, it is as close to his chest as possible. Be one with the stone. Literally.

7) Even if Rob was in a slightly flexed lumbar position (which he is not), he is not violating the "minimize spinal movement under load" principle. He starts in a tight position and lifts. Your spine will handle a ton of silly nonsense if you can keep it in one position during extreme loading. It does NOT handle inter-vertebral movements very well during loading. In fact, this is why squatting and reversing into lumbar flexion is the number one way to destroy your back (or deadlifting and ending up in a flexed lumbar, dog-poo position).

8) Robb practices. A lot.

Way to lift with your legs Rob!

Coach-K-suckered-you-didn't-I?-Star