Renewal and Alignment

How’s THIS for balance?!

Here is a great article taken from CrossFit West Santa Cruz detailing the benefits of CrossFit as a method for balancing out the muscles of the body that may be over or under-worked.

Many, if not most, sports create imbalances in the body due to repetitive movement demanded by the sport. CrossFit balances the body, renewing it by virtue of constantly varied exercise.

Sports, by their very nature, are repetitive. A volleyball player performs the same movements over and over, a swimmer even more so. Not that a volleyball player’s movements are boring or lacking in grace or power, quite the opposite, but performing similar motor patterns over and over leads to imbalances in the body. Over time, those imbalances can lead to problems.

Volleyball players, for example, often have overdeveloped muscles in the front of their shoulders due to the constant hitting and spiking the ball. This can cause bad posture and a host of other problems as the muscles pull the shoulders forward, rounding the spine, making the chest concave. This then leads to yet more problems. Get the picture?

CrossFit, a constantly varied mixture of pushing, pulling, driving, squatting lifting, exploding, and running movements is the perfect compliment to repetitive sport movement. CrossFit balances the body, and in the case of our volleyball player, pulling the shoulders back, developing the muscles of the neck, back and posterior chain, correcting the posture and relieving the pressure on the strained rear shoulder muscles.

Thus, one can make the claim that CrossFit renews the body, bringing its parts back into alignment and forcing the body to move and work as a whole.

Post to the forum, and tell us how CrossFit has affected your body, your posture, and your imbalances!

Today’s Workout:

Buy In – Benchmark run or row

WOD – “Michelle”

Elite: For time:

50 Double unders

then 21 – 15 – 9 reps of:

Thrusters (65/95)
Knees to elbows

then:

50 Double unders

Zone 3: scale thruster to 55/75lbs

Zone 2: scale thruster to 45/65lbs; sub single skips x 3 if needed

Zone 1: scale thruster as needed; sub single skips x 2

Cash Out: limbo contest… How log can you go?

Shannon (Bones)

November 19, 2009 at 7:15 am

It’s too bad the picture didn’t come out as big as I would have liked. You have to look really closely to notice that Rory is balancing on a roll board AND doing his OHS!!!! Killer tricky. Go Rory from CrossFit HQ!

Sean Falconer

November 19, 2009 at 1:29 pm

That picture is bad ass. I’ll stick with OHS on the ground for now.

This WOD looks pretty interesting. I hope the DU magic is with me today.

November 19, 2009 at 4:19 pm

HUGE shout out to Lani for pulling off the first female muscle-up in the gym this morning!! She actually had enough strength to do two sets of single muscle-ups.

I’m glad I was there. She did this after setting a new female Fran record. Not a bad day for Lani and it’s only 8am :-).