Friday, August 19, 2005

Taking a break

Hi all,

I have decided to take a small break from CrossFit. Why? Well, because of a slight case of overreaching. I got a new job a while back and had to drive my bike to work every day .It's about a 12 mile bike ride every day (that's total, to and from work). That's really nothing, but combining that with CrossFit, an irregular schedule, lack of sleep and not enough - healthy - food consumption quickly added up to some signs of overtraining (excess fatigue).

So I have decided to turn my training attention to something that would allow my body to recover first.

I have always had a great respect for the old time strongmen: Sandow, Goerner, Saxon, Aston, etc, ... So I have decided to try one of their training methods. They don't involve too many complicated cycling methods or 1 RM calculations. On the contrary training is kept quite simple:
Pick a weight you can do 10 repetitions with . Start by doing 5 reps with it. Next time 6, then 7 until your reach 10. Ten start over with a weight 5 or 10 pounds heavier, for one and two arm exercises respectively . All this is a brief summary of what you will find in George Hackenschmidt's 'The Way to Live', a very interesting view of how the strongmen of old trained.

Based on that, here's what my training looked like today (and will look like for the coming 2 weeks):

Side Press: 1x6 w/12kg
Clean & Jerk: 1x5 w/ 30kg
Snatch : 1x5 w/ 30kg
Sit-up: 1x5 w/1kg plate on forehead
Pistols: 1x3(L&R) 16kg (these only be done 3x per week along with pull-ups)
Secret Service Swing Test: 5:00 : Only did minute as my hands were still hurting from the pull-ups yesterday. Got 20L+20R
L-sit practice: 3x30sec with 2:30 min Rest Interval

3 comments:

Davie said...

Sorry to see that you are stopping crossfit, but i hope that youa re going to keep posting the workouts that you dao and the results that you achieve

David said...

Make no mistake,

I am by no means STOPPING crossfit, I am just adapting myself to my situation right now.

I will however continue to strive to remain 'CrossFit' and integrate several of the benchmark workouts to keep competing with the 'Big Dogs' and remain in the high average scores and even improve to Crossfit mutant, some day.

What I am doing now is focusing on strength devellopement with other strength-endurance work (crossfit) taking a step back. Understand that I'm not quitting ;-)

Davie said...

good man..... glad to see you are adapting our workouts to suit our day to day lifestyle