Galveston Exercise Tips for CrossFit

Galveston Exercise Tips for CrossFit When you first begin CrossFit and exercise is just and exercise. It sounds simple enough. When you first learn a burpee you think ” Well this is pretty terrible. It is a squat-pushup-jump squat combination”. Then you spend a couple of months struggling through them and getting a little smoother in the movement. THEN THIS HAPPENS! You get some exercise tips from someone meaning well. Changing of a Movement You are plodding through a set of burpees and someone in class says “Hey…try it like this ! ” They then proceed to flop to the floor with a thud and jump 1/18th of an inch of the ground in jumbo shrimp posture. There was no pushup, squat, etc. Does it meet the standards of the movement? Yes per CrossFit standards. Does it abandon the original purpose of the exercise ? It depends. If you are trying to elevate your heart rate (which is normally the purpose of a MetCon) than the “flop jack” will get the job done.  Are you doing it to make the difficult exercise easier to get done with the workout as fast as possible? So ask yourself are you doing LESS WORK to finish the workout? Exercises have a purpose (Pull Ups) Pull Ups (Strict) are designed to strengthen a whole slew of muscles. In CrossFit we get bogged down on “How to Kip and Butterfly and…” that we forget to great amazing at the mundane.  Kipping pull ups have their place but when they take the place of getting strong they can hold back athletes long term development. So are you using Kipping Pull Ups to spike your heart rate or using them to the exclusion of strict pull ups? Think about it? WHY AM I DOING THIS? Are you doing it to better at competing, get stronger, get a cardio response? Take control of your training. Training versus Competing When CrossFitters first feel that “competition” part of CrossFit and learn ways to be more efficient to complete a task sometimes it abandons the “why” of training. Example: The Front Rack Dumbbell Lunges during the Open. The standards had a pretty liberal definition of what a “Rack” was competitors were using grips that would save their shoulders from fatiguing but by strict standards were not a front rack (which challenges your core ). When the Open is over a lot of athletes never revert back to the “training version” of an exercise and are stuck at the “competition” version. Think to yourself “Am I competing today or training today?” Are you using that exercise that strengthen yourself or are you doing the bare minimum of form requirements to make the workout easier? ]]>