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K-Star

Going through Kelly Starrett’s material on the Crossfit Journal (of San Francisco Crossfit) has been huge for me. His videos on Midline Stabilization have helped me personally as an athlete and professionally as a trainer.

His latest video on Hamstring Assessment was really a big piece of what’s missing from me as a trainer. I hate stretching, not because I don’t like flexibility, I think flexibility is great. But simply because stretching never works!

I’ve never seen anybody get flexible by stretching. I’ve seen people that are flexible stretch, but I’ve never seen anyone go from Point A (inflexible) to Point B (flexible) by stretching.

Now along comes K-Star and he explains why. So dig up Hamstrung and his Midline Videos on the Crossfit Journal and read what you can on PNF stretching. That or just come to my classes, because we’re going to be doing a lot of this in the near term and I’m going to work on getting K-Star out to PCF ASAP.

20090218 Meals

Food was a little better today, but note the BW at 213 today – Goddamn Key Lime Pie!

20090217 WOD/Meals

GW
Took this one from CF Omaha
Power Clean 75% x 3 x 4
Overhead squat 9 x 3
Weakness (was originally going to do handstand pishups, but class started and there was no room so did L-sits)

Power Clean
Warmup
3 x 75
3 x 115
3 x 135

Wod
4 x 3 x 155

Notes: I don’t even know what my power clean 1 RM is, so based this off an assumed 1 RM of 195.

Overhead Squats
3 x 135 (failed on 4)
9 x 135
9 x 135
2 x 135 (failed on 3)

Notes: wrists were really the limiting factor here.

The embedding isn’t working, but here’s my vid from the WOD:

20090217 Power Clean and Overhead Squat from Brian Wilson on Vimeo.

L-sits
6 x 10 seconds

Quote of the Day:

The essential problem of all varieties of universalistic, collectivistic, and holistic social philosophy is: By what mark do I recognize the true law, the authentic apostle of God’s word, and the legitimate authority…as logical argumentation cannot decide between various dissenting creeds, there is no means left for the settlement of such disputes other than armed conflict. The nonrationalist, nonutilitarian, and nonliberal social doctrines must beget wars and civil wars until one of the adversaries is annihilated or subdued. The history of the world’s great religions is a record of battles and wars, as is the history of the present day counterfeit religions, socialism, statolatry, and nationalism.

-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, VIII.2

Let’s not discuss in detail what the cheat meal at Ray’s consisted of, but in brief I can assure you there was wine, steak, garlic mashed potatoes, blue cheese, and KEY LIME PIE!!!  Beware my bodyweight tomorrow!

20090216 WOD/Meals

G
“Cindy”
Max Rds in 20 min
5 pullups
10 pushups
15 squats
Rounds: 19

Compare to 081201: 17 (+5 pullups +10 pushups)
Compare to 081103: 16

Cindy is a weird one for me. My PR is still 21 from June 07.

Two things I’ve done lately that’s helped me improve:

1) Obviously Zone, that’s been crucial
2) Filming my thruster and realizing both it and my squat were jacked up. Watching K-Star’s Midline Stabilization vids on the Crossfit Journal were a big part of this too. I realized that I was sliding my hips forward on my thruster, hence losing posterior chain tension. I also realized I was hinging my back during my air squat, causing the same effect.

So today my squats were much much faster. When I did this in Nov and Dec, I was really disappointed in just how slow my squats were, i just couldn’t crank them out. Now with adjusting my hip and torso position on the squat, my frequency is way up.

Goes to show that after 2.5 years of Crossfitting you can still improve your air squat.

Food situation was a little crazy today, but overall I’m happy with this.  I had a bad carb hangover on Saturday that jacked me up, so while I was way over on fat blocks today, at least I adjusted nicely when I realized I had over-carbbed at brunch, and settled in for the rest of the day with some good chow.

Plus seems like Zone/Paleo is continuing to gain steam at PCF.  Had several folks talk to me today after the WOD classes and three folks from Foundations Class 1 stick around and discuss as well.  I hope they jump into it ASAP!