Al wasn't available for class, so the inmates were running the asylum this time around. Nina picked the WOD, and as she said herself, "you know I don't go easy." Luckily for everyone involved, she picked a 10 minute AMRAP, so there was a limit to how much the WOD would hurt (I kid, it was a good call on the WOD). Kidding aside, you'll end up doing a lot of leg work, so make sure to warm up the big muscles in your legs. You'll need them for pretty much every exercise in the WOD, and you're going to be doing them all in a row, for a bunch of rounds.
As far as safety goes, the overhead squats and weighted lunges are the biggest concerns. Those exercises are perfectly safe if you stick to strict form, so make sure you stick to strict form. It's only when you start to get sloppy that there's the potential for injury. Slow down if you have to, but don't compromise your form.
Warm Up
2 rounds of:
- 25 jumping jacks
- 10 bottom downs
- 10 upward to downward
- 10 arm circles
WoD
As Many Rounds As Possible (in 10 minutes) of:
- 5 overhead squats
- 10 front rack barbell lunges (left/right = 2)
- 15 bar-facing burpees
Cash Out
8 rounds of:
- 20 seconds of L-sits
- 10 seconds of rest
Exercises
- Bottom Down
From a standing position, reach down and touch your toes. Without letting go of your toes, squat down in to a full squat. Hold the bottom of this position for three seconds, and then stand up without letting go of your toes. Your feet should be as close to locked out as possible, so that you're essentially bending down to reach your toes. Hold that position for three seconds in order to finish the rep. The idea behind the hold is to ensure that you don't cheat by only coming up or squatting down part of the way.
- Upward to Downward
This is a lot like a "judo pushup" in reverse, if you've ever heard of that. If you're familiar with yoga, the starting position should look like the "upward dog." Regardless, lay face down on the ground and then lift your entire body off the ground by extending your arms, as if you were doing a push up. However, bring your upper body all the way up, so that your chest up faces forward while your lower body is still parallel to the ground. This is the starting position. From there, lower your head and bring it down and in, as if you were trying to bring it to meet your waist. This will naturally force your hips to come up, and you'll end up holding yourself off the ground with a noticeable bend at the waist (your butt will be a bit higher in the air than your chest or lower body). To go back to the starting position, lower your head towards the ground, then lower your chest and bring it forward in the same motion. It's not a straight up and down motion like a regular push up, it's more of an arc. You should also keep your lower body off the ground at all times. Continue the arc by straightening your arms and elevating your torso. When you finish the arc, your torso/chest should be facing forward with your lower body parallel to the ground. All of that is a single rep.
- Arm Circles
From a standing position, rotate your arm without extending your arm away from you. You're essentially making a windmill of your arm. Do this in both a clockwise and counter-clockwise motion for each arm, so that you fully warm up & stretch the muscles. Most people just do 10 rotations forward with one arm, 10 rotations backward with the same arm, and then they repeat this with the other arm.
- Overhead Squat
Grab a bar and weight it as heavily as you can handle. Most people usually put between 45 and 90lbs.
Standing, hold the bar over your head with your arms locked. Your arms should make a "Y" shape with the rest of your body. You want the bar directly over your torso, so that your spine & the bar are lined up (the idea is to keep you from leaning forward on the actual rep). This actually feels a little bit like you're holding it behind your head, and your shoulders should feel like they're actively trying to push the bar.
From that position, you want to do a regular squat. Keep your arms locked as you go down, but make sure your knees stay lined up over your toes. You don't want either of them to "buckle" by facing inward when your toes are pointed outward. That puts a lot of (unnecessary) strain on your knee. You want your butt to go at least as low as your knees, though if you can go even lower (i.e., "break parallel") that's ideal.
Once you've reached the bottom of the squat, stand back up to your starting position. At no point should you bend over or move the bar horizontally. The bar should move straight up and down. Once you come back to your original standing position with the bar overhead, that's 1 rep.
- Front Rack Barbell Lunge
To start, hold the barbell slightly below shoulder level with both your palms facing away from your body so that you can see both palms in a mirror. If you've got enough strength and flexibility in your wrists, bring your elbows straight up so that they point away from your body. This will force more of the weight against your upper torso and put more of a strain on your wrists, so only do this if you can sustain this position through a lot of reps. Regardless of how high you bring your elbows, the weights are "racked" against your chest; this is the "front rack" position.
If you have difficulty with this or feel more comfortable with the bar resting on your back, it's safe to do that. Just make sure that you rest the bar on the muscles in your shoulders and upper back, not on your neck (that's dangerous). You also want to have full control of the bar when you go to move your legs, so adjust as necessary before you take any steps.
With the weight racked, you want to bring one leg forward in a lunge, and then bend your knees so that both your knees are bent at 90 degrees. Your front knee should be directly over your front foot, otherwise you're putting undue stress on your knees. One cue that can help some folks is to treat your lunge like you're going straight up and down with your back leg.
It's up to you if you want your back knee to touch the ground or not. Touching the ground forces you to complete the full lunge, but doing so means that you'd do your lunge slightly differently. First off, you'll want to put a mat down in front of you so that you don't end up scraping your knees every time you touch the ground. However, you really don't want your front leg to step on the mat, since that can slide as you're moving back and forth (slipping with a barbell in your hands is a BAD idea). So if you're going to make your back knee touch, step diagonally with your front foot and step OVER the corner of the mat. Again, avoiding stepping directly on top of the mat. That angle will allow you to make your back knee touch the mat, but will also give you enough stability to safely perform the exercise.
This time around, you get credit for a rep every time you bring either leg forward (or, "right/left = 2" for short).
- Bar-Facing Burpee
It sounds complicated, but this is only a slight variation on a traditional burpee. Before you start, put the bar down so that your face is in front of the handle of the barbell (the fact that you're "facing" the bar is where the name comes from). The barbell should run perpendicular to the way your body is oriented for the push up portion of the burpee. You're going to jump forward to jump over it eventually. You can rest the actual plate part of the barbell on a riser to keep it from rolling.
With that little bit of pre-work out of the way, it's still a 5 step motion: 1) squat down & touch the ground, 2) kick your legs out into a push-up position, 3) do a push up, 4) jump back to the squatting position, 5) come up from squatting and jump forward over the bar. You have to turn around for the next rep, so that you're facing the bar again. Essentially, you're going to end up jumping back and forth over the bar. With a weight lifting bar, this forces you to jump at least a few inches off the ground.
Once it starts to feel normal to do this motion, you can start to make it a smoother motion by essentially dropping down into a push up position, rather than squatting and then kicking out your feet. It requires a little bit less energy, but it also requires more coordination and muscle memory.
Scale down: Step over the bar instead of jumping. This takes less energy, but still makes you do the work.
- L-Sit
There are a couple of different ways to do this, depending on how much equipment you have around. If you can grab some risers, sit down and set up a platform with 5 risers on either side of you. Put one arm on each platform with your fingers facing forward. From a sitting position, lift your body off the ground using your arms and keep your legs straight out in front of you. Your body will make the shape of an L (hence the name), but it feels a bit like holding a dip.
If you don't have any platforms available, you can do the same exercise on the ground. This gives you a little less height on the sit so you have a smaller margin for error, but that also means you can't hold the sit in as deep a position. It's not necessarily easier or harder this way, just a little bit different.
Scale down: If it's too hard for you to hold your feet straight out in front of you, you can bend your knees and bring them closer to your chest. That takes some of the pressure off your core and triceps, because your legs help carry some of the weight.
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