Hey, this CFSB shit works

I'm certainly not the first to say it, but it was the first time I got to test it myself. I'd gotten "PRs for reps," while working through the program, but I hadn't gone after a 1RM before this week. Thursday's shoulder press test was unsatisfying, due in no small part, I'm sure to the inconsistency with which I worked it (5 times in the last 7 weeks and not at all for the 5 weeks after I set my PR in December). My squat, on the other hand, has been getting lots of love and attention from ME sessions, to DE box squats, to sets of 20, and a handful of new 5RM efforts, but I hadn't done ME sets of less than 5 since January. Today, I got to see how those lighter weights translated to the truly heavy stuff. As you might guess by now, the anwwer is: quite well, thank you.

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Warmup
Row 500m D6 144.5
Hip mobility drills

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 275x1, 295x1, 305x1 (PR), 315x1 (PR), 320f

A little more aggression and I would have had that 320. I got stuck halfway up with my form locked in solid and held it there for a couple of seconds, but couldn't push through. If I'd hit it harder to begin with, I'm pretty sure that would have gone up too. Still, I'm very happy with this.

Skill work
Handstand practice 8:00

Need to do some shoulder mobility work ahead of time next time. I'm getting pretty solid, but I just don't have the range of motion to lock everything out where it needs to be to make these easier.

Metcon
3 rounds:

Row 500m
50 squats
25 DB swings, 55#

13:56

That was rough. The swings were hard, but unbroken. The squats got broken every round. I was really feeling the heavy stuff. Still, the performance wasn't half bad. I'm planningto give metcon more attention between now and the Games, and hope to have this workout under 12:00 by then.

Core work
GHD 2x15

Bring what you got

Sometimes you've got plenty in the tank and are firing on all cylinders. Sometimes, you just gotta limp on through. There was nothing objectively wrong with me tonight. I just didn't feel it. My timing was off, my strength wasn't there, and I felt all kinds of strange during the metcon. Still, you can't wait for everything to be right; sometimes, it's just time to get after it.

Yesterday I managed a morning workout that didn't even merit a post.

CFWUx2
One mile run 7:23

Was supposed to be 5K, but my back/left glute were attacking me, much like they did during my three-hour drive the previous day, so I bailed on the run. Was short on time anyways, so no big deal. Felt much better today, but didn't get out to the gym until 8:30 pm - not my favorite time of day (unless I'm getting to bed early or grabbing an after-dinner drink). No such luck tonight.

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Warmup
Jump rope practice 4:40 (max 3 DUs)
Shoulder mobility triplet

Heavy stuff
Shoulder press 45x5, 95x5, 115x3, 125x1, 130x1, 135x1, 137f (141 is my PR)

Had hoped for a better showing after my CFSB work, but no matter what I do with my programming, I'll be keeping the shoulder press and other overhead work in a regular rotation. One of these days, I'll see some strength gains there.

Metcon
Filthy 50

30:11 (PR by almost 3:00)

Box jump, jumping PUs, swings, lunges, PPs unbroken, but
DUs took 5.5 minutes
Got to burpees at 18 minutes (previous best was to wall ball by then)
Burpees took 5.5 minutes
DUs took almost 7 minutes (in 1s, 2s, 3s & 4s)

Felt like puking after the wall ball. (Yes, Jenna, I walked away twice. Even tried to walk away from the burpees, at which point I just dropped and did three more.) Sat down after the burpees at the hands of a metcon demon. Felt pukie close at hand and had weird muscle spasms that made it feel like somebody had placed a heavy hand on the side of my neck. Very strange. Got some evil calf cramps as I was finishing up the DUs and hobbled inside feeling Angry Hungry. I swear, if I found a person in the fridge, I would have ripped off their arm and eaten it. Thankfully, I was able to take out my primal aggression on some leftover London Broil and fruit. Good to get in a solid midweek session.

Holy hamstrings

Got up this morning and thought I had no chance of having a good workout today. Slept a solid 8.5 hours (for the first time in ages) but it was a gray, rainy day, I felt sluggish, and my hamstrings were downright angry. Yesterday's workout was a tough one, but I didn't expect to feel it this much. I could tell something was off warming up. Double unders weren't happening and even the basic bounce was causing me difficulty at first.

As I finished the warmup, however, I figured out the cause of my malaise. I had pizza and beer for dinner last night. I was at a niece's birthday party and wasn't prepared for the carb fest. That was the first pizza dinner I'd had since at least November, maybe as far back as August, and my energy levels were all screwed up as a result. Knowing this was oddly reassuring. I told myself that I was stronger than I felt, and brought a little extra attitude to my workout. It didn't cure everything, but it gave me the confidence that if I warmed up to it, I could pull some heavy deads.
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Warmup
Jump rope 5:00
Boz OHS
TGU-windmill, 45x3

Heavy stuff
Deadlift 45x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 275x1, 295x1, 305x5, 320x5 (new 5RM)

Metcon
Josh

21-15-9

95# OHS
2 pullups

8:12

Core work
Getup-situp 20x5 each, 30x5 each
SLRR 30x5 each, 40x5 each

My pullups sucked and were broken to hell and back, but I managed the OHS unbroken, which felt good. Maybe I could have gone faster on the pullups, but I felt like I was on the edge of muscular failure the whole time and thought that would kill my metcon. Guess I should have pushed a little harder, but given how I felt coming in, this was a good showing.

Vacation week

This last week has been a doozy. I had the kids to myself from Thursday through Monday, was in Connecticut on business from Tuesday through Thursday, and had five nights where I worked until after 9pm. There never seemed to be a good time to get in a workout and in the few times where it was possible, spending time with family or time contemplating the inside of my eyelids seemed a better choice. The upshot was that today, I was able to pick up my programming pretty much where I left off - hitting a workout not that unlike my last one. So much for constantly varied. At least I kept it functional, and I hit it with a well-rested intensity.
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Warmup
Hip mobility drills
Shoulder mobility drills
Agility drills (dot, triangle x 5, W x 3)

Skill work
Handstands, 5:00 (four solid 10-15 second holds, these felt really good)

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5x2, 95x5, 135x5, 185x3, 225x2, 255x1, 260x5, 270x5, 280x5 (PR)

Burgener warmup

Metcon
Running Grace

3 rounds:

10 C&J, 135#
Run 400m

14:10

Core work
Abwheel 2x10

Nice to hit a PR on the squats in consectuve weeks. That felt heavy. It's fun thinking I'll be going even heavier next week. Reminds me of my starting strength days.

My running Grace got messed up by a malfunctioning treadmill in round 1. Lost about a minute there, but I kept pushing afterwards and was laying in a heap by the end. Got a bit of a Fran cough coming on at the moment. I don't that I got a good time and it's hard to compare to others with the extra 100m spent going from bar to treadmill, but I sure brought what I had to it. Very little standing around and I kept the pace up on the treadmill outside the beginning of the last round. Was spent enough that even after a 5+minute rest prior to my core work, I literally fell on my face at the end of the first set of abwheel rollouts.

Overtraining, part 3 - Enough is enough

So far I've covered the easy stuff - describing what over training is. The challenge is to know when you're sneaking up on getting overtrained and what to do about it, so you don't suffer a setback - whether that comes in the form of illness, a protracted plateau or injury - and to do this without being overcautious and not thereby getting in enough training. There's no crystal ball to make this determination, and striking the right balance between overtraining and undertraining is very much an individual thing.

I'm a person of extremes and habit. When I first hopped on the CrossFit train, I didn't want to get off. If I missed a day, I'd do two a days to catch up. That didn't last long, but in the same vein, sometimes I'll program myself a week of workouts that looks great on paper, but turns out to be a bit much when coupled with the demands of life, and it's very hard for me to let go and dial back the workload midstream. On the flip side, when I need an couple days off and decide to kick back and watch a little TV instead of hitting the gym, my motivation to get back in there and abuse myself CF-style quickly wanes. That shouldn't be a suprise. The body seeks stasis, and the couch is a good deal more comfortable than the second round of Fran.

The general population obviously prefers the couch, but there are lots of CFers who err on the side of overtraining. We want to push as hard as we can, and that's a good thing. So, how do we figure out when to back off?

The science of overtraining is much better developed for endurance athletes - folks who pile on a training volume that dwarfs the output of, say, a Fight Gone Bad, even if it's performed with an intensity that doesn't come close to a sub-20-minute CrossFit WOD. The science for resistance training or hybrid CF-style training is relatively new, but here's a good article that discusses some of the science of resistance-exercise overtraining that I found researching the subject.

Symptoms of overtraining that seem to apply to CF athletes include (and this is based on my limited experience):

• Decreased performance;
  
• Sleep problems;
  
• Decreased coordination (including technical faults in your lifts);
  
• Elevated resting heart rate;
  
• Moodiness;
  
• Increased susceptibility to colds;
  
• Lack of energy;
  
• Decreased appetite;
  
• Random pains (as opposed to workout-related soreness);
  
• Decreased confidence and motivation in the gym; and
  
• Occurrence of nagging little injuries - muscle strains, sprains, joint tenderness.

Which symptoms affect different people will vary, of course. Performance will suffer for just about anyone, but that can happen for plenty of reasons besides overtraining. I never have problems eating, but if I'm getting overtrained, I'll wake up at 3:30 a.m. every day, get irritable, catch colds, and develop random joint pains. How much the latter three symptoms are related to lack of sleep and how much to overtraining is sort of a moot point. As I said a couple of days ago, overtraining and underrecovery are two sides of the same coin.

I've gotten much better about identifying overtraining. I have an autoimmune disorder that gives me arthritic symptoms when I'm close to catching a cold, and while this has gotten much better since I went to a paleoish diet without as many inflammatory nightshades, I've learned to tune into my joints as an indicator of overtraining the way an old farmer might predict the weather with his rheumatism.

Not everyone is so fortunate as to have a built-in warning system. Of course, mine comes with a price. When the immune system goes haywire, I can get real sick. Last March, after fighting off a cold for over a week and having had a less-than-dedicated winter of training, I decided it was time to hit it again and do the MainPage WOD - Fight Gone Bad. This wasn't a case of overtraining, but it was one of underrecovery, and I paid for my stupidity in the form of a three-week bout with the flu. I've been much smarter this winter, backing off a little when my stress level is way up and some of the warning signs of overtraining are there, especially when my kids are clearly incubating opportunistic viruses for me. It's not so much that I take days off (although that has happened, too), but I tweak my programming to do things that I know don't stress my system too much. Wednesday, I decided against the Filthy 50 I had planned in favor of squats and a short metcon - an intense workout, no doubt - but one with much lower volume and of the type to which my body was more accustomed.

You'll need to develop your own experience with what workouts you can get away with while flirting with overtraining. Workouts that crush you with volume or intensity, like a chipper, a Fran or a Fight Gone Bad are clearly ones to avoid. Likewise, avoiding intense sessions with the types of exercises that brought you to the point of overtraining is obvious. However, a Cindy for you might be like a heavy squat day for me - something that you can do without over-stressing your system and still get in some decent training, even if your performance isn't at it's best.

The question remains, however, how do you know when you're getting overtrained. Getting sick or injured is really too late to figure it out. Beyond self-awareness, there are some tests you can do to see if you might be overtrained. I started trying two of these today, so I have no personal experience upon which to evaluate these yet, but I'll put them out there for you to try.

For volume-related overtraining, track your resting heart rate before you get out of bed in the morning. Elevated metabolic rates are associated with high-volume overtraining, at least among endurance athletes. If your heart rate goes up and stays up for several days in a row, even after a rest day, you might be getting overtrained.

For intensity-related overtraining, do a test to see how many dots you can put on a page in 10 seconds. Again do this first thing in the morning. This one comes from Dan John, who found that for his strength-focused training program, this test worked much better than the resting heart-rate test. The idea behind this is that as instense work overloads the central nervous system, fine-motor skills are the first to go. If you start putting fewer dots on the page, even after a rest day, again you might be getting overtrained.

I tried to establish a baseline for these this morning, but given that I took a 12-hour decongestant to help fight off a head cold and got only 6.5 hours of sleep, my numbers might not be indicative of baseline conditions. My results:

49 bpm
51 dots

I'll try to keep this up for the next few months and see what I learn.

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OK, that was lengthy. I'll keep the workout post short and sweet. Another great day in the sun, this time with some finely aged PRs matched and broken.

Warmup
Cross-country hopscotch
Triangle drill
Hip mobility drills

Skill work
MU progressions - 3 consecutive MUs
Back lever progressions

Heavy stuff
Back squat 45x5, 95x5, 135x5, 185x3, 235x2, 255x5, 265x5, 275x5 (new 5RM)

Metcon
50 in the clip

50 burpee C&Js, 95#

8:43

Core work
5:00 rolling planks

(Photo from early in the metcon. Form didn't look this good as it went on and even here it looks like I didn't give it a good shrug.)

Heavy thrusters suck

Those are my words of wisdom for the day. There really isn't much more to say. I chose a metcon I hadn't done in a year and a half, and while I went heavier and faster today, it was still a gruesome struggle. On that note, perhaps I should start with the workout today.

Warmup
Agility drills (dot drill, triangle drill x3, W-drill x3)
Air squats
Shoulder mobility drills
Boz OHS Drill

Heavy Stuff
Shoulder press 45x5, 75x3, 95x2, 110x1, 110x5, 115x5, 120x5 (New 5RM)
Skipped the CFSB endurance sets in favor of:

Metcon
Fat Fran on a diet

15-12-9

135# Thruster
25# Pullup (should be 45#, but I left my brain at home)

11:17

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Not a great showing; not horrible either. I started out strong. Did the first 10 thrusters unbroken, which left me gasping for the pullups. Managed the first round in 2:30, but things went steeply downhill from there. The next 12 thrusters took three minutes.

There's just something about picking up a heavy barbell when you're gassed that is perfectly humbling. You grab the bar, you've got the wind to move around, maybe even the strength to do a rep or two, but your body wants nothing to do with lifting the weight. You start talking to yourself. Pains appear out of nowhere.

Body: My forearm aches.

Brain Your forearm?! What? You're doing thrusters. Pick up the bar.

I grab the bar and don't do anything with it.

Brain: Hello! Pick up the fucking bar.

I pick it up; I can barely manage three reps. I shorten my rest; I can only manage two reps. I try an extra rep - spectacular fail. I missed my last rep, too, and had to rest and try again. That was disheartening, but maybe it was a sign that my body knew what it was doing when it refused to pick up the bar.

At least the last round of pullups were unbroken. The lighter than Rx'd pullups were too easy, given the nature of the workout. Didn't figure that out early enough, however, because I was suffering metabolic meltdown after the first 15 thrusters. Guess I need to go back and try this again in a couple of months.

There are brutal metcons, and then there are brutal metcons with thrusters. In a class of their own are metcons with heavy thrusters. Overhead lifting may be a goat of mine, but those are from one of the circles of hell. I clearly need to do more thrusters - light, heavy, in-between. They are Evil, but the fires of hell will make me stronger.

Overtraining and under-recovery - Two sides of the same coin

I really have no desire to become the poster child for my subject matter, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from squeezing in an evening workout, despite my lack of sleep and crazy work schedule. I really haven't had the time to pile up the volume in the gym to get overtrained. However, I have had enough stress and bad night's sleep recently that even with a more-than-reasonable workout volume, I have plenty of potential to be under-recovered.

There are those who say that there's no such thing as overtraining; there's just under-recovery. While that may be true in a literal sense (you're overtrained if you can't recover from your workout), I think there's some benefit to maintaining the semantic distinction. Just remember that the two are inextricably related.

I tend to thing of overtraining as a failure of programming and observation. You eat great, you sleep 10 hours a night, you take time to stretch and do soft-tissue work, but you simply pile on too much work to maintain performance over time. This happens to elite endurance athletes like cyclists, who get too far "out on the razor," leaning out in response to training and being able to positively rip up a mountain pass early in the season or at the beginning of a stage race, but then finding they lack the reserves to recover. They're eating all they can; they're getting daily massages; and they're sleeping as much as they can, but they peaked too soon and trained to hard early on to succeed later in the season or the race. They are a classic example of someone who is overtrained. For them, the fall from grace is swift and hard. They are so specialized and up against such severe physical challenges that they can't rely on a different energy system or a different group of muscles to help them compete. They, as they say, start to go backwards quickly.

In the CrossFit world, we don't load ourselves up with such specialized training, where the same muscles and energy systems get hit day-in and day-out. As a result, overtraining is not as obvious to us. The programming of CrossFit, in fact, is designed to maximize intensity while minimizing the potential for chronic overtraining. There's enough variety of exercise and workout duration that broad, intense stimulus can be delivered day-in and day-out with a less severe risk from overtraining. Still, working like a dog three days out of four will catch up to just about anyone eventually, no matter how disciplined you are with your recovery when you're not working out. That's the reason that the conventional wisdom for following the mainpage WOD is to do it on a 12-week cycle where every 4th week is performed at ½ intensity and every 12th week is taken off from training entirely (or similar variations on that theme).

Don’t underestimate the value of those ½-intensity sessions. These are prime opportunities to dial in form refinements that will lead to improved performance down the road. Alternately, the light weeks provide an opportunity to learn new skills that can’t yet be performed at an intensity that might inhibit recovery.

Bill Starr says that when people get overtrained, it’s almost always because they do too much work on their light days. They throw some isolation exercises in to get those beach muscles pumped up or they add a metcon to work up a sweat. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with incorporating a variety of activities into a program (heck, CF is grounded in such variety), doing additional work without rhyme or reason is the surest way to interfere with recovery and inhibit progress.

Missing workouts every week makes it easy for me to avoid overtraining. However, that doesn't get me off the hook. The things that keep me at work until after the gym closes produce their own form of systemic stress that can produce the symptoms of overtraining. In this case, however, it's related directly to under-recovery, rather than my workout programming. I don't have time to foam roll; I don't eat quite as well; and I wake up at 3:30 every day thinking about what I have to do today. Still, I have to make the same adjustments to my programming as if I found that I piled on too much work the previous few days. Therefore, I bagged catching up on the much-needed chipper I missed yesterday, in favor of something that while difficult, wouldn't beat me down so much that I caught the family head cold (at least that's my hope).

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Warmup
Row 1,000m 3:41.6 (D6, 28spm) - sped up my stroke rate and this felt much easier, like a warmup even
Hip mobility drills
Goblet squats

Heavy stuff
Front squat 45x5, 95x5, 135x3, 185x2, 205x1, 205x3, 215x3, 225x3, 235x2 + fail
Back squat 45x5, 225x17

Metcon
Tabata rowing 1,017m (D8)

Core work
2 rounds:

15 Glute-ham raise
15 GHD situp

The 225x3 front squats felt strong, and I was really close to getting out of the hole on that last rep at 235. I probably should have fought it out a little more. My 3Rm is 230, which I did last fall on a day when I popped into the weight room in jeans and sneakers while my kids were in gymnastics. While it's fun to have that as a benchmark, it's also time for that mark to fall.

The high-rep back squats were surreal as always. I staggered forward after the 16th rep and ended up with my right foot a good 8 inches in front of my left. I tried to put it back to parallel, but I just kept picking up my foot and placing it down in the exact same spot, like a horse counting to three. It wasn't that I didn't have the strength left to adjust my feet. I quite simply had lost control of my extremities, like some elongated character in a Dali painting.

The tabata rowing was a first and a suprisingly good showing. I did add some extra meters on there, because I needed to do a soft-pull to get the timer to keep going for a full 10-second rest, but I'm sure I've still got a 1K row with stricter timing. I think the form work is paying off. Thanks to Tom Taylor, Erin Davidson, and Kempie for some helpful tips.