Tuesday 101116

Skill

Muscle-up Progressions

WOD

9 – 6 – 3

Thrusters, 135#/95#

Muscle-ups

The 6 AMers

As athletes get more experience with the CrossFit movements, an important consideration is how much weight to use for a given WOD. As you know, our priorities (besides for safety which is first and foremost) are range of motion, technique, and then intensity. It doesn't make much sense to load an athlete with heavy or even moderate weight when they are unable to meet the range of motion expectations or they have some serious flaws in their technique. However, as an athlete gains experience, their range of motion improves, and they begin to dial in some of the finer points of the movement, we can look at increasing intensity, which includes increasing the load used for the movement.

One of the things that can happen is that we get comfortable utilizing a certain weight for a movement. A good example is the thruster. There are several WODs where 95# is the prescribed weight for the guys (65# for the ladies). Sometimes a WOD will call for a heavier weight, say 135#, with a lower rep scheme. An athlete may look at that 135# and know that it's not in the cards to work with that load. Often times at that point the reaction is to throw that old stand-by of 95# on the bar. Thing is, we're starting to hang in our comfort zone. What we don't want to happen is anytime there's thrusters, the default is 95# regardless of reps, rounds, or time domain. This makes it difficult to progress. If we don't push ourselves, it's impossible to have a break through.

So for those of you who have been at this a while, the next time a WOD comes up with a weighted movement, try bumping the load up from the last time. It's tough to jump up in load, but that's good. If it was easy, it wouldn't be so fun!