Tuesday, June 9th: Nate's back and Running Grace

5 Rounds:
15m Bear Crawl w/ 25# DB
10 DB Thrusters (25#)
10 Ring Push-ups

14:31

So the ortho let me back at things with the advice not to do anything stupid...Actually she told me if it hurts don't do it but what's a workout without a little bit of pain?! That said I'm going to be trying a new approach to my workouts. My time off gave me a lot of time to do some research and reading and let me develop a different system, still based partly on the Crossfit philosophy but with a little more added in.

I think what took me out in the first place was a combination of too much weight, poor form, and over-intensity. I'm hoping to be able to do some work and correct all those by switching my workouts to 3-4 days of gym workouts with only 1 day of heavy weights a week. All the other days will be workouts based on less weight resistance but still done at high intensity (most workouts done in less than 20 minutes) with more isometric resistance with weight augmenting the resistance generated by the movement and muscle flexibility. For the rest of the week, it will be 1-2 days of low-intensity, long duration, high-endurance work such and swimming or long distance biking. NO intermediate level training such as running or paced endurance workouts, such as Murph, for instance.

The remaining 1-2 days will be completly random. Introduction of new sports, or workouts that I've never done or tried before. This is a tennant of the Crossift program that gets overlooked. Neurmuscular recruitment is an important part of how muscles react and respond to training. Most untrained, no athletic adults have a muscle recruitment per contraction of 20% of the myofibrils in any given muscle. Even some athletes only have a total recruitment of 30-35%. A total of 50% is found in some of the best athletes in the world. That being said, variety in a workout causes muscles to respond in different and varied ways increasing the overall recruitment. Strength and weight training, even though important, doesn't serve to increase recruitment but rather increase myofibril density due to water retention. Only a consistently different and varied workout plan will serve all purposes of increasing strength, work capacity and muscle volume.

I'll admit that this is not easy if not impossible to prove if I'm right about all this. Everything I'm saying may all be a bunch of BS, but I'll never know till I try it and see if it works. The best benchmark I can provide is to compare the 5k time I did from May 25th to one in 3 months or so to see if the muscle efficency I hope to train will result in a faster 5k time or not. In the end this could result in a great improvement to my training or it could cause injury or decrease my overall work capacity but I'll find out when I'm done!


Shane:
Running Grace; 5 rounds:
85# Clean + Jerk
400m Run

15:21