Workout of the Day
Happy Weekend!
Thanks to our team of coaches for holding it down while Sarah and I are in Chicago for a seminar this weekend. Not to worry, the Sweaty Saturday Team Specials don't stop when we're not there... enjoy this spicy meatball of a WOD!
WOD For 09-23-17:
In Teams of Three Athletes...
For Time:
100 Calorie Row
100 Chest-to-Bar Pull-ups
80 Calorie Row
80 Deadlifts @ 155/105 lbs
60 Calorie Row
60 Front Squats
40 Calorie Row
40 Push Jerks
20 Calorie Row
20 Clusters (AKA "Squat Clean Thrusters")
Only one athlete working at a time. Reps may be partitioned in any fashion and do NOT have to be split evenly.
(Compare to 08-13-16)
On Elegance
Pat Sherwood was the flowmaster at my (and Sarah's!) Level 1 seminar nearly eight ago - which essentially means he (among other things) led the weekend's instruction and delivered the key lectures. His mastery of the concepts and methodology behind CrossFit were intermingled with his sharp sense of humor, fantastic delivery of complex ideas, and wise perspective on the real world applications of the program. I left the weekend incredibly impressed and enthused, and my respect for Pat and for CrossFit has only since grown over time.
Fast forward to eight years later and the application of what I learned that weekend has now become the work that we love. And the quest to constantly improve the ways we can help folks become better has enriched my life immensely. The more I learn, and the more I experience, the more I realize that simplicity often rules - and that the ingenious solutions to our fitness and life challenges are almost always the simplest.
Pat wrote an article for the CrossFit Journal back in 2013 titled "On Elegance" - a free copy can be found here. It's brief, and simple, and hits the nail on the head. It's pretty cool to think of what we do in the gym as "elegant" - and even cooler when we start to appreciate clever simplicity both inside and outside of the gym.
WOD For 09-22-17:
ON A RUNNING CLOCK...
A) From 0:00 - 15:00
With a Partner For QUALITY:
800m Run TOGETHER
Then Split...
600m Row
50 Wall Balls @ pick load
40 Kettlebell Swings @ pick load
30 Burpees
Both partners run together completing 800m. Then partners split the remaining movement reps evenly, with only one partner working at a time. This is FOR QUALITY not for time, so move with a purpose but prioritize movement integrity in order to prepare/warm the entire body for 5x5 back squats.
B) From 18:00 - 38:00
Back Squat (Week 5, Day 2):
5x5 @ 85%
Across
CrossFit Acronyms: HAP
If you thought Wednesday's WOD was a creeper I think this one will prove to be sneaky as well, but in a completely different way. Hey, at least it won't be to country music?!
WOD For 09-21-17:
3 Rounds For Time:
100m Kettlebell Farmers Walk @ HAP (Heavy As Possible)
20m Bear Crawl
20m Walking Lunges
400m Run
-then-
Weighted Plank Hold:
3 x 0:45 Seconds
(Rest 1:15 Between Efforts)
The Fascination With Erg 18s
You would think Tuesday's re-introduction of running would make us forget about rowing for a bit. The Summer of The Erg rolls on in 18s this week... giddy up!
WOD For 09-20-17:
7 Rounds, Start Every 3 Minutes:
18/15 Calorie Row
30 Double Unders
5 Power Cleans @ 205/145 lbs
If you cannot finish the prescribed work within the 3-minute interval, you must finish the round you are on, take the next round OFF, and then start again on the following round by dropping the row to the next lowest calorie scaling tier: 18/15 > 15/12 > 12/10.
The Most Important Question of Your Life
About a year-and-a-half ago Sarah wrote a great blog post titled Stress And Living On The Roof (click and give it a read if you didn't have a chance to previously), and at the time one of our awesome members, Margaret, sent us a post by Mark Manson as a follow-up of sorts - it was titled The Most Important Question Of Your Life. It's an excerpt from his best-selling book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k: A Counterintuitive Guide To Living a Good Life and I thought it was fantastic, so wanted to share it here on our blog. The original article can be found by clicking here and I've pasted it below in its entirety as well:
Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.
Everyone would like that — it’s easy to like that.
If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence — but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.
Everybody wants to have great sex and an awesome relationship — but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. They settle and wonder “What if?” for years and years and until the question morphs from “What if?” into “Was that it?” And when the lawyers go home and the alimony check is in the mail they say, “What was that for?” if not for their lowered standards and expectations 20 years prior, then what for?
Because happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back to life.
At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.
People want an amazing physique. But you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibratingthe food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazingwithout appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.
What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
There’s a lot of crappy advice out there that says, “You’ve just got to want it enough!”
Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.”
Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off a person or ten thousand.
If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.
Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?
That answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together.
For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician — a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. The fantasizing continued up through college, even after I dropped out of music school and stopped playing seriously. But even then it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I was biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of time and effort into getting out there and making it work. First, I needed to finish school. Then, I needed to make money. Then, I needed to find the time. Then… and then nothing.
Despite fantasizing about this for over half of my life, the reality never came. And it took me a long time and a lot of negative experiences to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it.
I was in love with the result — the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I’m playing — but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.
The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling 40 pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the top.
Our culture would tell me that I’ve somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser.Self-help would say that I either wasn’t courageous enough, determined enough or I didn’t believe in myself enough. The entrepreneurial/start-up crowd would tell me that I chickened out on my dream and gave in to my conventional social conditioning. I’d be told to do affirmations or join a mastermind group or manifest or something.
But the truth is far less interesting than that: I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.
Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.
This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”
This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.
-Mark Manson
WOD For 09-19-17:
On a Running Clock...
A) From 0:00 - 8:00
Squat Snatch + Overhead Squat:
8 Minutes to Build to a Moderate Weight (Not Max)
The goal is simply to work up to something heavier than to be used in Part B, focusing on speed in the snatch and overall movement quality.
(From 8:00 - 10:00: Rest 2 Minutes & Re-Set Barbells)
B) From 10:00 - 16:00
"2010 NorCal Sectional Event 1"
Against a 6-minute Clock For MAX REPS:
800m Run, then
MAX REP Overhead Squats @ 115/75 lbs
(Compare to 05-03-16, 02-05-15, and 04-08-13)
(From 16:00 - 18:00: Rest 2 Minutes & Re-Set/Rack Barbells)
C) From 18:00 - 38:00
Back Squat (Week 4, Day 1):
6x2 @ 80%
Across
Monday Evening Yoga Reminder
Dani had a nice turnout once again during Sunday morning's yoga class, and we wanted to post a reminder that she's also teaching a Monday evening (Sep 18) class at 7pm as well!
For what to expect during one of Dani's yoga classes click here to read a previous post. Remember that yoga is available to all Arena Ready members as a part of your membership (there is no charge to attend!) - we simply ask that you sign-up for class in advance so that Dani knows how many to expect, and bring your own mat if you have one (we have a few to borrow if you don't). All levels of experience are welcome.
Hope you all had a great weekend!
WOD For 09-18-17:
AMRAP 18 Minutes:
18 Calorie Row OR Assault Bike
18 AbMat Sit-ups
1, 2, 3, 4, etc... Rounds of "Nate"
Rounds of "Nate" start at one and then increase by one every time the athlete completes the preceding AbMat Sit-ups:
18 Calorie Row
18 AbMat Sit-ups
1 Round of "Nate"
18 Calorie Row
18 AbMat Sit-ups
2 Rounds of "Nate"
18 Calorie Row
18 AbMat Sit-ups
3 Rounds of "Nate"
Etc... until 18 minutes expires.
1 Round of "Nate" is:
2 Muscle-ups
4 Handstand Push-ups
8 KB Swings @ 70/53 lbs
Bye Bye, Barbell
It's been two weeks since we've had a programmed day that didn't involve a barbell. Woof. That's far too long of a time period, even for a gym that loves the barbell movements. So for Saturday's WOD here's a little partner AMRAP that should be fun to chase two full rounds with your buddy.
Happy Weekend, all!
WOD For 09-16-17:
Skill Review:
Kipping Toes-to-Bar
-then-
AMRAP 20 Minutes With a Partner:
100 Wall Balls @ 20/14 lbs to 10/9 ft
75 Kettlebell Swings @ 53/35 lbs
50 Toes-to-Bar
25 Burpee Box Jumps @ 24/20 in
Only one athlete working at a time. Reps do not have to be split evenly. Who can do two full rounds (or more)?
Yoga This Coming Sunday & Monday
Upcoming Yoga Classes: Sep 17th & 18th
Don't forget about the two opportunities to take Yoga class with Dani in a few days - Sunday morning at 9:00am AND Monday evening at 7:00pm!
For what to expect during one of Dani's yoga classes click here to read a previous post. Remember that yoga is available to all Arena Ready members as a part of your membership (there is no charge to attend!) - we simply ask that you sign-up for class in advance so that Dani knows how many to expect, and bring your own mat if you have one (we have a few to borrow if you don't). All levels of experience are welcome!
Squat Program Halfway Point!
It's Friday and the last several days have included low-ish volume, high-intensity couplets and triplets as a means to create opportunities for good, varied training adaptation while keeping in mind the end of the "volume phase" in the 8-week squat program. Friday's 6x6@80% will be the most volume of any one session in this program, and the next four weeks to follow will be the "intensity phase" where the total reps decrease in each Friday session while the weight increases.
So get in the gym, grab a #swolemate, get your body primed and moving, get the blood pumping, and give your legs a shake-out to prepare for the "fun" that is a true 6x6 session.
Happy Friday, folks!
WOD For 09-15-17:
ON A RUNNING CLOCK...
A) From 0:00 - 15:00
2 Rounds For QUALITY, Split Evenly With a Partner:
50 Calorie Row
40 Kettlebell Swings @ picjk load
30 KB Goblet Squats
20 Burpees Over The Rower
Partners split the reps evenly, with only one partner working at a time. This is FOR QUALITY not for time, so move with a purpose (i.e. don't lollygag or you won't be done by 15:00) but prioritize movement to prepare/warm the entire body for the back squats.
B) From 18:00 - 48:00
Back Squat (Week 4, Day 2):
6x6@80%
Across
The "Double Dosing" Will Continue Until Morale Improves
We started the week with a medium-length station rotation met-con and have since incorporated strength work, gymnastics skills, and weightlifting into various "double dosed" training scenarios. That trend continues on Thursday with a math-friendly WOD preceded by a 10 minute heavy double hang power snatch (some may remember that last week it was a heavy triple hang power clean on the same clock).
Thursday should be good times and another opportunity for some serious intensity and power output with very measured volume. Then come Friday you know what... 6x6 HOLLA!
WOD For 09-14-17:
Hang Power Snatch:
10 Minutes For a Heavy Double (NOT a 2RM)
-then-
A) Against a 4-Minute Clock for MAX POUNDS LIFTED:
33/25 Calorie Row
33 Box Jumps @ 24/20 in
MAX REPS Hang Power Snatch @ "you pick the load"
REST 4 Minutes, then...
B) REPEAT
Score by total poundage (total reps x load used). You cannot change the weight between parts A and B, so choose wisely.
Mindbody App
As many of you know (and as mentioned last week in the blog) the Arena Ready app is on the fritz, so for booking (and cancelling) classes on your phone please download and use the free MINDBODY app in the meantime.
Please let us know if you have any questions, and thanks for your attention!
WOD For 09-13-17:
On a Running Clock...
A) At 0:00
For Time:
21-15-9
Deadlifts @ 225/155 lbs
9-6-3
Ring Muscle-ups
B) At 15:00
For Time:
21-15-9
Hang Power Cleans @ 135/95 lbs
9-6-3
Deficit Handstand Push-ups @ 4/2 in
The Athlete In The Arena
Last week a drop-in athlete who just moved to San Francisco commented on how much he liked our interpretation of the Teddy Roosevelt quote and how we've applied to Arena Ready the community.
On that topic, here's a blog post that we wrote OVER FIVE YEARS AGO (wow, how time flies)...
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
--Excerpt from "Citizens in a Republic," Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
We've always loved this quote - we feel it speaks to anyone who has fought hard to achieve something, whether or not they won. It's a beautiful description of how a life of purpose feels. This quote took on new meaning when Sarah saw it on the wall of her grandpa's office shortly after he passed away. He was her hero, and he was never proud of anything other than her best. He inspired her to achieve things she might not have otherwise considered. We believe that is what a hero is fundamentally, someone who can set an example of what's possible.
Arena Ready exists to investigate and understand the limits and capabilities of people individually and collectively to improve their own lives and the lives of those around them. Success is not an overnight phenomenon, it's a result of showing up every day to do the best you can on that day. It's the combined efforts of a community to improve the way its members approach their lives. Most importantly, it's individually defined - to succeed, you must know what you consider success.
We believe there is too little authenticity in the world today - by focusing on appearances, people too seldom focus on substance, and these artificial fronts weaken everyone - only through honest evaluation and effort can anyone ever know where they stand, and where they can go. Everyone sees the world through their own interpretation - we see a world of limitless possibilities. We see potential in everyone, and if possible, we want to help people achieve that potential. We've been blessed to experience world class coaching throughout our careers spanning multiple sports, and we hope to pass on the lessons we've learned.
The Arena is intense. It's your life, and this is a battle. We believe it's a battle worth fighting, and we stand in your corner.
WOD For 09-12-17:
On a Running Clock...
A) From 0:00 - 6:00
AMRAP 6 Minutes:
50 Wall Balls @ 20/14 lbs to 10/9 ft
100 Double Unders
50 Overhead Walking Lunges w/Plate @ 45/35 lbs
B) From 10:00 - 28:00
Back Squat (Week 4, Day 1):
6x2@80%
Across
C) From 32:00 - 38:00
AMRAP 6 Minutes:
50 Wall Balls @ 20/14 lbs to 10/9 ft
100 Double Unders
50 Overhead Walking Lunges w/Plate @ 45/35 lbs
Never Forget
WOD For 09-11-17:
3 Rounds For Max Reps (0:40 Work / 0:20 Rest & Transition):
Push Jerks @ 115/80 (no rack)
Chest-to-Bar Pull-ups
Kettlebell Swings @ 70/53 lbs
Burpee Box Jumps @ 24/20 in
Row for Calories
(Rest 1:20)
This is 0:40 (forty seconds) of work per movement, with 0:20 of rest/transition time between movements. There is 1:20 rest between rounds. Score is total repetitions across all three rounds.
(Compare to 11-29-16)