2010.11.4 - AMRAP

Today's WoD was an AMRAP one. The exercises were intended to force you to have good form on all of your reps, so there is no cheating allowed on bad form. If you somehow find a way to do a rep with less than full range of motion, that doesn't count. Today's high marks were 12 rounds for the men, and 13 rounds for the women.

The warm up was mostly for your legs, so be sure to stretch those out afterwards. We made sure to stretch out the calves and hip flexors, but if you need to stretch out any other part of your legs, go for it. You're going to need those muscles for the WoD.

The WoD involved variations on exercises that you've done plenty of times. Again, the focus is on keeping good form, so it's preferable to sacrifice reps for doing the exercise 100% correctly (arguably, this should always be the case).

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Warm Up
Four minutes of jump rope (try to do as many double-unders as you can).  For the last minute go as fast as you can.

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WoD

As Many Rounds As Possible (in 20 minutes) of:

·         5 pushups with the hands off the ground (bottom and top)

·         10 sit up to stands

·         15 squat to jump box

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Exercises

·         Push Ups

The two things that you want to ensure when doing push ups are that you bring your chest to the ground for every single rep, and when you come up, you make sure your arms are fully extended. So, to make sure that happens, you have to touch your chest to the ground and go flat off the floor, and then lift your hands off of the ground. You want to lift them about an inch off the ground; the idea is that if your body isn't touching the ground and you lift your hands, gravity will make sure you don't cheat. Put your hands back down on the ground, and then push off the ground. When you come up, fully extend your arms.

·         Sit-Stands

Lie down on your back, and keep the soles of your feet flat on the ground. Aggressively swing/throw your arms in front of your legs, and then stand straight up. The momentum from the swing will help with this motion, so make sure you really throw your hands hard. Standing up is going to be all legs, though. Go back down to lying down to finish the rep.

This is an awkward motion for most people, so using some weight helps. Most people grabbed roughly 15lbs of weight (dumbbell, medicine ball, doesn't matter), and used that to help with the balance. Think of the weight as pulling your weight forward a little bit as you're standing up; that's why you want an aggressive throw.

Scale down: If you can't stand in a single motion, you can do a sit up, and then use one hand to help push yourself off the ground. Be very careful with where you place your hand, you don't want to twist a wrist the wrong way and then apply your whole body weight to it. It's almost preferable to do this part slowly to prevent injury.

·         Squat Jumps

You need to set up a platform with stackable risers. You're going to use this as a guide for your squats, so use as many risers as necessary for you to squat deeper than parallel. That means that at the bottom of your squat, your bottom will be closer to the ground than your knees. For most people, that was 3 or 4 risers, depending on height.

Once you've done that, stand in front of your platform. Do a squat so that your bottom touches the platform. If you don't feel the platform, you didn't go low enough. When you come up, jump up at least an inch off the ground (shoot for 2 if you can).

The platform forces you to go all the way down, and the jump forces you to come all the way up on your reps. The idea is to counter any bad habits that you may have built up.