BenchMark day! Today, we had a typical CrossFit Workout on the program, a classical BenchMark named Elizabeth. As you might have noticed, there is quite some CrossFit workouts that have a special name. And especially the workouts with a Girl-name (Fran, Helen, Elizabeth) or a last name (Murph, Nate, Holleyman) are worth remembering.
These are varified bench-mark workouts that we repeat every now and then, because people are doing them all over the world. They are called bench-mark because you are setting a certain score for yourself (a benchmark) that you can beat later, in order to show improvement of fitness. But why are the workouts called after girls?
The CrossFit Girls
According to CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman he named the benchmark workouts after girls (in similar way that storms are named after girls by the National Weather Service). He felt that because these workouts are so physically demanding that they leave you feeling as though a storm hit you.
Greg Glassman
I THINK ANYTHING THAT LEAVES YOU LAYING ON YOUR BACK GASPING FOR AIR WONDERING WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO YOU, SHOULD BE NAMED AFTER A GIRL.
Today's workout
Enough about the CrossFit-girls, let's talk about todays workout. We started the workout with one of my all-time favorite things to do: a heavy single clean. The ultimate combination of explosiveness, strength and technique. A favorite of many, since there is always room for improvement, we can never stop learning. An airsquat you have learned at some point, but the clean always has some tiny things that you can improve to make it even better, even heavier!
After that, we put all that learning into practice with a nice 21-15-9 combination of squat cleans and ring dips. The pulse went up quite a lot in the squat cleans, again - explosiveness!, but we gave it a chance to cool down a bit in the ring dips. These movements always slow us down a bit, since it's often the strength holding us back, not the breath.
A nice week to start of with again. We see that the classes are slowly filling up again, at least in the morning, so that means that everybody is back from holiday. We will have our summer-class schedule one more week after this before going back to normal, so let's all get back to the gym, come in as much as you can and lets get fit together!
New Course
As you might have seen on Facebook, this fall we will have a couple of new courses: A new episode of Fat-To-Fit (Marie), a brand new lifting-course (Mart) and Ben will have a new course:
In this 10 weeks program Ben shall be having, he will dive a bit deeper into the technique of the longer workouts and mobility. This course is all about improving your performance/experience by improving your mobility and your game-plan: how can you make your work-outs more effective, more smooth, more pleasurable, with just some technical adjustments and a better mindset. Because you can get a lot better at workouts without getting a lot stronger/better in conditioning: often the workout is not too hard, your plan just sucks. He will combine this game-plan oriented, long-workout course with the other main limiter of our workouts: mobility
So if you feel like you hit the wall after 5 minutes, your 'conditioning' is holding you back or you cannot do whatever you want to do because you are too stiff and want to make a change: send a mail to ben@crossfitverftet.no for more information!