May 11

Watch CrossFit Regionals Live on ESPN3

This article was posted in: Blogs

Watch the 2012 Reebok CrossFit Regionals LIVE on ESPN3:

http://games.crossfit.com/live-stream

May 10

Crushing personal records at POWER HOUR

This article was posted in: Blogs

There’s something to be said about seeing your PR go up and up and up, even after years of CrossFit training. CrossFit London just wanted to give a special shout out to the following athletes for their recent weight lifting accomplishments:

James Partridge – increased his sumo deadlift by 25 kg (55 lb)
Dave Collie – just hit 200 kg (440 lb) on his sumo deadlift… not too bad when that’s 2.6 (ish) times his body weight! In the last year, Dave has seen his deadlift increase by 50 kg (110 lb).
Kristen Stewart – recently deadlifted 110 kg (242 lb). This is a HUGE increase from 30 kg (66 lb), which was Kristen’s starting point when she joined CrossFit London less than a year ago.

As a reminder, CrossFit London offers POWER HOUR, a speciality weight training and Olympic lifting class every Tuesday evening from 7:00-8:00pm. Come on out and see what personal records of your own you can smash!

May 7

Same old warm-up equals the same old results.

This article was posted in: Uncategorized

The warm-up is a great way to build capacity in any domain.

The warm-up is critical to your success during high intensity workouts.

Many people are trying to reverse the effects of sitting on your butt for years at a time. A lazy warm-up is the gate way drug to de-training yourself, and a good warm-up can be the key to getting more out of your workout.

Your muscles and your nervous system need time to get warmed up. It takes multiple sub- maximal efforts to hit a true max effort. This is the same reason that guy that you see bench pressing every day at your local gym has never got any stronger. (Amongst other things)

When doing high intensity workouts the percentage of your maximal effort is significantly higher than when you go to step class on Sundays. Because of this the risk of injury increases dramatically, if you are not properly warmed up. The best and worst example of this is 100m sprints. An amazing stimulus and a high risk workout for an intermediate athlete, that doesn’t know how to warm-up. The risk actually increases for a trained athlete that can move faster because the muscles can fire harder than your average weekend warrior.

The warm-up can also be a great way to establish what weight or progression you will use on the workout of the day.

Rules to warm-up by:
- The warm-up should be preparing you for the workout
o If you have 60kg cleans in the workout, you should prepare for this by doing the burgner warm-up, and some moderate weight cleans to ensure you are ready to do the heavy weight with good form

- The warm-up should get you out of breath (especially those that need to build lung capacity)
o If the workout is the first time your lungs are starting to work they will always be short of their full potential

- Should raise your heart rate and get you sweating a bit
o Same as the lungs to reach a true max your heart needs to go up and come down to hit a higher peak, sweat can be a good indicator

- Should Bring all major joints through a full range of motion and stretch elastic connecting tissue.
o Ankles, Knees, Hips, Shoulders, Elbows
o Address Mobility limiters (if your squatting and you tip forwards on the squat, you need to address your ankles and Achilles)

- Should involve skill work
o Complex skills can’t always be programmed into the workouts you must add progressions into the warm-up to build capacity

- Should always be increasing the total work load of the warm-up
o This is my biggest pet peeve to see someone doing the same variation of dips, because that’s what they do… that’s total crap, it’s time for a change if the stimulus didn’t get you a new result try another. The answer isn’t the same for everyone. If after 3 weeks of consistent work you see no improvement, ask a coach for another progression. (this is on you we can’t remember that you can do 13 knee pushups in your warm-up.)

- Know your Numbers
Each day you should be aware of what you did on the last day and what your highest numbers are for each movement. (use an index in the back of your journal to access this information faster)
Knowing your numbers makes it easier to beat your numbers.

Gymnastic warm-up for squats
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPwG2hqnOx0

Mobilitywod: for squats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBHzXF-mVjY&feature=plcp

General CrossFit warm-up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcj8YTG4H-Q

May 2

New Schedule beginning this week…

This article was posted in: Uncategorized

Here’s our new class schedule!
- Beginner classes on Tuesdays at 5:00pm and Thursdays at 6:00pm
- CrossFit All levels classes added on Mondays and Wednesdays at 5:00pm and Open Gym at 5:00pm on Fridays