Today we chopped the week in half with a nice 2-part workout, both centered around the theme of the Clean&Jerk. Love it or hate it, but the olympic weightlifting movements are a crucial part of CrossFit. As coaches, we love olympic weightlifting and love even more to teach you guys the little trics of the trade when it comes to these challenging and technically next-level movements.
The workout started with a warm-up, followed by some technique training. Both the clean as well as the jerk were ´Power´ today. But what do we mean when we say ´Power clean´? And what then is a normal clean?
In both the clean and the snatch, power refers to the position in which you catch the barbell. In a normal clean/snatch, also know as a Squat Clean / Squat Snatch, you catch the barbell all the way down in the squat. This means that your hips are well below your hips and you are on your lowest point possible when catching the bar.
In the power clean/snatch, you catch the barbell with the hips above the line of the knees. In order to catch the barbell higher, you also need to pull the barbell higher up. In general, people power clean less weight than they squat clean, because of this higher pull that´s necessairy. If you are one of those athletes who´s power clean is higher than your squat clean, either your squat could use some strength or your technique could use a bit of extra attention;)
But for today, power clean&jerks it was! First we got 10 minutes the time to build up towards a heavy single, doing 1 repetition every minute. Not too much time to think is always good, just keep the focus up and go.
After the 10 minutes of practice, and maybe a PR, it was time for a workout. 50 Clean & jerks for time, interrupted by 20 double unders at the start of every minute. The goal of the double unders today was to fatigue the shoulders and get the pulse going even more, to teach you to have good technique with a 160 BPM heartbeat. Because what good does it do to have a perfect technique if you cannot do it under any circumstance? That sounds like CrossFit..
Also today, like every wednesday, it was time for the coaches training again. We have the tradition to do the daily workout in this training, together with some extra stuff. Today, that extra stuff was sandbags and sleds. As you can see, Ben was having a great time here..
