Here’s the million dollar question of the day: Do you exercise CrossFit Maturity? Or do you simply just steam through a WOD with reckless abandon, performing mediocre quality reps until a coach catches you and calls you out on it?
Here’s an example of CrossFit Maturity. Let’s say you’re quite proficient at full plank pushups. However, you’re in the middle of a WOD and you’re feeling fatigued. With each rep, you’re getting less and less of the way down, and you’re no longer able to get your chest to the floor. Would you scale automatically to use your knees and complete the rest of your pushup sets from here because your form has broken down? If not, you should. This would be a fabulous example of what we’re going to call CrossFit Maturity, wherein you know when it’s necessary for you to scale without someone telling you to do so.
Wouldn’t you like to say that you strive for excellence and push yourself to get better at all things CrossFit, but not at the expense of good form? We’d love for you to be able to say that, too! Part of maturity is remembering to leave your ego at home. So what if you have to scale down a bit? Let it go. Scaling down of your own volition means that you’re playing by the rules, staying safe in your form, and performing at your true and present ability during each possible moment.
The Coaches can confidently say that all of you Zoners are doing a great job of learning proper form and technique. We enjoy looking around our quickly growing gym and seeing people setting themselves up for the WOD and doing exercises correctly on their own. I can think of many occasions where I have witnessed clients making judgment calls mid-WOD to take off some weight, or scale things down. This is exciting progress. We are able to see a level of CrossFit Maturity emerging here at the Zone, and we want to encourage to all to stay mindful of this and keep it up!
Today’s Workout:
Buy In – Take 15 minutes to work on a Goal or a Goat. There are a lot of goals on the black board to be completed by the end of February or beginning of March.
WOD – “Trio”
1. Mini “Fran” 9 – 6 – 3 Reps of Thrusters (65/95) and pullups.
Rest 2 minutes
2. Mini “Diane” 9 – 6 – 3 Reps of Deadlift (155/225) and Handstand Pushups (1 ab mat / head to ground)
Rest 2 Minutes
3. Mini “Grace” 10 reps of Clean and Jerk (95/135). NOTE: No dropping the weights, unless you are going to injur yourself. Focus on touch and go reps!
Zone 3: scale thrusters 55/75; scale deadlift 115/175; scale handstand pushup (female 2 ab mats, male 1 abmat); scale clean and jerk to 75/ 105.
Zone 2: scale thrusters 45/65; scale deadlift 95/135; scale clean and jerk to 75/ 105. modified pullups and handstand pushups;
Zone 1: scale weights and exercises as needed
*** Keep a running clock in the workout, athletes please calculate your 2 minute rest accurately. Subtract 4 minutes for your total time. ***
Cash Out – 500M row focusing on your rowing technique.
Running WOD
Rest or very easy recovery run (5K to 8K)
Please post in the comments when and where you are doing your run if you would like people to join you!
100 Day Burpee Challenge:
Burpees today: 84
Buy-in: 3570
Verrryy interesting WOD, looking forward to it!
Looks cool.
Is it wrong that I already hurt looking at that?? 🙂
haha no… remember, if you’re not nervous before a wod, you’re not ready for it 😉
hey sean, it’d be wayyyyyy cooler if you were back here to battle me on it!!!
How’s training going? Your boy Tim has a BIG front squat hey?
PS,
good comments on the Maturity issue – we all like to try to be heroes on occasion but make sure you aren’t trying to make each workout your “last stand”. Know when you need to take a break, ease off on the weight, and when your form breaks down, stop and regather.
Live to fight another day!
turts
What time ya WODing, Cam?
Looks like 6:30… see ya there? It’ll be interesting with the HSPU – is kipping allowed???
yes, kipping is allowed 😉
This should be lots of fun 🙂
The maturity thing is interesting and something I’ve been thinking about lately, although I didn’t think of it in those terms. One of the things my new coach has been encouraging me to do is to train CrossFit as my sport rather than just approaching it as a fitness workout. The difference being that not every WOD needs to be treated like a race or a competition situation. Sometimes it’s better to slow yourself down or use less weight to concentrate on perfecting the movements. In the long run, your speed and strength will improve so that in the “game” situation, you can turn up the intensity and do it with the most efficient and sound technique.
I know with running, in training you hardly ever run your race pace. You run slower so that you can increase your mileage and overall endurance, and mix that in with some specific speed training. That also helps with recovery time, you can increase your workout volume by varying the intensity and not kill yourself.
This will be tough for me to do as my competitive juices start kicking in when that clock starts, but I’m just going to have to rely on my maturity to slow myself down so that I can get better in the long run :-).
This is one of my favorite posts to date. I’m guilty of ‘reckless abandon’, for sure.
I think as well it’s a delicate balance when you are trying to maximize the WOD (i.e. using enough weight to challenge yourself but not so much as to blow your form apart.)
Some days it’s a gamble and you go too heavy. Other days you think that you could have gone heavier (or faster).
from another CF forum: “For a good time, call FRAN 21-15-9”
I agree Sean! I have been taking that approach in the last few months. After recently going through a situation where I could not mentally push myself through the workouts , I realized that I was going “all out” on the wods way to much! It is like how Greg Everett explained it in “every second counts”… he doesn’t push himself to the limits every workout, because he figures he only has so many in him and once they are gone, they are gone.
Great post Bones!
Wendy I love the saying 🙂
Greg or Josh said that?
Great comment Sean.
Opps Josh haha!
Nice comment Sean. I find it’s an interesting balance though between stepping down intensity and making sure you are adapted to “the suck”. I’ve gone both ways – before the Winter Challenge I don’t think I was exposing myself to enough intensity, whereas there have been other times when I’ve overdone the intensity.
Definitely if we are looking at people who are training 4+ days per week, the intensity does have to be modulated. With some of our members who are on 1-3 days per week, they can afford to hit pretty high intensity most times they come in.
Regardless, it pays to consider most days as “training/practice” and the occasional workout as “competition”. Intensity is such a huge part of the gains that people see through Crossfit so it needs to be present, just in dosed amounts.
turts
What a great resource!