Sandyspringscrossfit

Congrats to Karin, Jeff and Nina and everyone who competed on their great showing at Crossfit Woodstock's memorial WOD "Mr. Joshua".

Fran's Boat Race was a nasty little number

Elizabeth

21-15-9

135 lbs. Squat Cleans

Ring Dips

Fight Gone Bad IV. We're almost half way to our fundraising goal but we still need your help. Donate soon!

If you didn't get the email about the Labor Day fun leaves us a note in comments and we'll make sure you get the email.

Body weight movements are some of the biggest parts of what we do in here. Look at workouts Like Murph, Angie or Cindy these workouts are some of the hardest in crossfit and they are completely body weight. Improvements in body weight movements come very slowly if they are not worked constantly, so I'm going to talk today about two things you can do to improve your body weight movements.

Grease the Groove. Grease the Groove is a basic procedure first enumerated by Pavel Tsatsouline (incidentally the man who brought kettlebells to America) and used to great success in his program. What GtG says you should do is to increase the specificity and frequency with which you work body weight movements. The article specifically states pull ups, but you can also use this for push ups, squats and dips. Throughout the day when you think about you knock out small sets of 5 or 10. What has worked well for some is putting a pull up bar in your home and knocking out a few every time you pass under it. The amount of exposure to the movement forces a quicker adaption and an increase in the overall strength of the movement. Meaning that by doing more over a longer period, when you need to you can do more when you need to.

Negatives. This is another method that can be used to quickly build strength in body weight movements. Essentially what a negative means is forcing the body into a weighted eccentric movement, where a given muscle is forced to lengthen under tension. In plainer terms this means jumping up to the top of a pull up and lowering yourself slowly (3-6 seconds) to the bottom of the movement. The same can work for full push ups, dips and squats in some cases. I've used this method with ring dips to some small success. This is a very potent methodology ad should be used very carefully, start slowly with negatives and never use them during a workout. This is skill work for before or after a workout. Start out with 3 sets of 5 reps and work up to around 3x15, but never more than this. I'd be surprised if you'd weren't able to do a normal (non-negative) body weight movement before you got to 3x15.