CrossFit South Bend

Keith finishing up his squats from the 10,000lbs workout

DWOD (completed before SWOD) Sprints Complete: 8 x 50 yard Rest 60 seconds

SWOD Power Snatch 6x2 Strict Pull Ups 3 x max reps

The other day Robb and I were chatting about the Amateur Program. So I thought that I would do a post on the life cycle of the Amateur Program. The general life cycle will last about 21 weeks. Weeks 1-3: Inter-Muscular Coordination. This can be equated to learning how to throw a baseball. You learn to step, point at your target, throw the baseball and follow through. Basically you are ingraining the movement pattern. Which is why it is crucial we develop the correct movement patterns for all of our lifts Weeks 4-6: Intra-Muscular Coordination. This is when your CNS (central nervous systems) becomes more efficient. The nervous system is essentially the body’s electrical wiring. During this phase the motor neurons that tell your muscle to contract become more efficient (i.e. allows you to lift your weight). This is key in your ability to display your absolute strength rep ranges of 1-3 this is where the CNS is really tapped in. Weeks 6-9: Hypertrophy. This is when the muscles start to increase in size. One of the ways to also get stronger is to create a larger cross-sectional of muscle. Just as a side note: there are two types of Hypertrophy. (1) sarcoplasmic (reps of 8-11). This creates a larger bulbous muscle but doesn’t necessarily contribute to strength. Think more body builder here and this is also the rep range our accessory worked would fall into. (2) myofibril (reps of 4-7). This will be more on the strength increase and less on the actual size of the muscle, this is where our barbell work will generally fall under. Weeks 10-21 (rough timeline) will be spent developing your base level of strength. At some point there will come a time when you are unable to do the weight in your progression that day, so lets play out a little scenario. Robb has worked his way up to 300lbs on his squats. He comes in on Monday and hits reps of 5-5-4. He was unable to complete his 5th rep. He gets one more try. Maybe his sleep was off, food was off, stressed out, etc. You get the idea. Thursday he comes in and tries 300lbs again and his resulting reps are 4-3-2. At this point Robb is no longer able to recover from the volume and intensity. So what we will do now is called a “Reset.” We will drop back 3 weeks (i.e. 30lbs). He will start back at 270lbs and try to work back past that sticking point. You can replace squat with any of our other lifts and apply the same scenario. At some point during weeks 10-21 the Amateur program will fail to be optimal. How will we know? Examples are: your ability to recover from the previous days sets has severely decreased, or we have done multiple resets. We will cross this bridge when we get there, and it will be different per individual.

I know the picture quality isn't the best, but that is Rich Froning way out in front of everyone on the hundreds workout. He ended up taking 4, 1st place finishes. This was my first time at Regionals and it did not disappoint.

SWOD 3 RM Max Height Box Jump (landing about parallel)

DWOD 10,000 lbs Lift 10,000 lbs as fast as possible using only one rep of the following: 1 Squat 1 Press 1 Deadlift *You can use any weight on the lifts and it can be done in any amount of rounds. You can only do one rep at a time and must cycle through all three lifts to complete one round. *The goal is to lift 10,000 lbs as fast as possible.

We may have to get a little creative with this workout. We will figure out the logistics at class

Good Reads 42 THINGS I LEARNED LEADING UP TO 2013 Earn Your Carbs

SWOD Power Clean 5x3 (add 2.5lbs to last workout)

DWOD Complete 5 rounds: 2 Snatch pulls Rest 30 seconds 10 Lateral 20" box jump Rest 30 seconds *Focus on achieving triple extension on snatch pull and pulling the bar as high as you can without breaking extension *For lateral box jump, start from the athletic position and jump laterally to the top of the box landing in an athletic position. *Step down from the box

SWOD Deadlift 5 RM (add 10 lbs to last workout) Strict Pull Ups 3 x max reps

DWOD Complete 2 rounds for time: 50 Sledge Hammer Strikes LT 50 Sledgehammer Strikes RT One Arm Farmer Walk 50 yards RT One Arm Farmer Walk 50 yards LT *Rest 2 minutes between rounds *Use between a 12 -20 lbs sledgehammer. *Go as heavy as possible for farmer carry.