“Put your teams together and see how fast you can get this 5k CrossFit style mud run done. Graham CrossFit is inviting all CrossFit gyms to help us raise money for the Washington State Council of Firefighters Burn Foundation. 

Play flag football wth a pig before you start! Then complete a 5k of the most brutal mud run in the state!

• Plenty of spectator area for those not running
• Full 5K run ( NOT TELLING  WHAT OBSTACLES ARE! That takes the FUN out of it. Graham CrossFit style.
• Event starts at 12:00 SHARP we are running waves of teams of 4.
• EVERY TEAM OF 4 MUST finish together.
• You can sign up as a single runner! We will find you 3 others to team up with.

• Tons of free stuff from the mud run vendors
• Beer Garden provided by The RAM (FIRST BEER FREE!)
• BBQ burgers/dogs and lots of other treats
• Water/chips/pop and other FREE items Provided by COSTCO
• Mud Run T-Shirt
• Music
• Bonfire
• Huge covered arena (Just in case of rain)
• Awards and prizes for the top 3 fastest teams

Sign up here!”

-Darren Shaw, Graham CrossFit, shaw@grahamcrossfit.com

In Seattle, in September 2004, there were two guys, Dave Werner and Nick Nibler, running the first CrossFit affiliate as a part-time business. They made up workouts and put them on the whiteboard when they arrived at the hangar gym after their day jobs. I would walk in having dashed home from work and as fast as I could to the gym, CrossFit North, in Magnuson Park. Dave would have his back to us as he mused at the whiteboard, thinking about what else to add to the list of ingredients for that day. Watching him, you’d get nervous: “please stop adding to that list!” Then he’d turn around and start teaching us how to do whatever was on the board. We deadlifted and swung kettlebells, did pull-ups and other hard stuff, ran 400+ meters around the outside of the hangar. Dave and Nick learned too as we all went along. They learned from hard-to-find videotapes of powerlifting and weightlifting coaches of the 1980s, then turned around and showed us what to do.

I wrote it all down. I’d been working out at a boxing-fitness gym for three years and had no experience with any sports or any other type of physical training. I was tantalized by the process that I felt was transforming me from a flabby middle-ager back into the muscular body type I’d had as a young person. Ever since age 10 I had valued and desired physical strength. Going through three years of the boxing gym and then finding CrossFit put me right into the world I wanted to live in, and I took notes like a student cramming for an exam without even realizing it. I did all this writing on my blog, FitNotes.net.

Today I added my 602nd post. I recorded my workouts right through my own career change to become a trainer and right through the growth of CrossFit as it became the dominant fitness method that it is today. Here are a few posts from my and Tom’s earliest CrossFit experiences in 2004 and 2005.

August 2004: Getting ready to try CrossFit. ”Seeing the gymnasts [on TV] demonstrate physical skills I can’t imagine having makes me want to push myself to gain skills and strength.”
September 2004: “It’s not a forward squat, it’s a front squat!”
October 2004: “How to climb a rope” This was a popular search phrase for people who landed on my blog in those years — because there were few/no online videos.
October 2004: My first group CrossFit workout. “I found myself standing with the bar hanging down at my thighs and unable to lift it to chest level to rack it when Nick called stop”
November 2004: Tom’s first CrossFit class. “So what do all these funny-named exercises look like? I can’t find a good slide show of the kettlebell jerk so I’ll try to describe it”
December 2004: “Apparent Gains” and my deadlift started getting heavy! “It’s fun to just try whatever they suggest and see what happens”

Two years later, October 2006, I was a CrossFit Certified Trainer, certified by Coach Greg Glassman, who also generously let me certify free of charge. I’m grateful to him–and to the whole transformative process!

P.S. It’s not a cult.

A ladder is: do 1 rep, rest. Do 2 reps, rest. Do 3 reps, rest. Do 2, rest. Do 1, rest. There, you just did nine!

A ladder can be done for any exercise but is especially good for strength drills like pull-ups and push-ups. How high should you go? Stay low enough so you don’t reach your max. The idea is not to see how many you can do, but to get up and down the whole ladder. The result is you’ll ahve done more than your one-set max.

I wanted to be sure you all know how to cancel a class when you can’t come. Log in and click My Info, then My Schedule. You will see your classes listed with a Cancel link for each one. You can use this up to 90 minutes in advance of the class to cancel. An email or phone call is great too, but the advantage of using the online cancellation is that it immediately generates an email to the first person on the waitlist to let them know they have a place in class. This is why the cancellation policy is 90 minutes in advance of class–to give the waitlisted person enough time to arrive.

Procedure:
Each person will declare the weight of their first back squat attempt–maybe it’s your established calculated 1-rep max you’ve been basing your lifts on lately; or if you’re a novice, heavier than what you last lifted for five reps but something you’re confident you can make. Everyone will lift in order of how heavy the declared lifts are, lighter lifters going first. Each person will lift once, then declare what you will lift for round 2 of the squat. If you missed your first lift, you have two options: you can lift the same, or you can plan to go heavier anyway. (But if your form looked awful, we can veto that.) Once again in round 2 everyone lifts in order of how heavy. Repeat one more time for round 3.

We will do the same steps for the shoulder press and then for the deadlift. People will have to be warming up for their next lifts while others are lifting, and we will keep things moving. Your CrossFit Total (score) is the sum of  your heaviest successful squat, press, and deadlift. Last time we had a CrossFit Total was December 3, 2011.

Some of the lifting standards:
Standards for the lifts will be upheld. You are all familiar with these. For example, the back squat has to go below parallel; the press has to be fully extended overhead without the feet moving and without the knees bending; and the deadlift has to be completely finished so that you are standing all the way up. No lift can stop moving or change directions during the lift. There are other details we will discuss.

You are all probably stronger than you realize. Come and test yourself. I hope we will have a full group of 16 people testing their strength at 9:30 on Saturday, April 21. Sign up as you do for normal classes. The 7:30 AM class will be normal CrossFit as usual, and the 8:30 AM intro class is on.

One concern that came up is with feeling like one is getting “weaker” on the paleo diet. In this case, during and after some weight loss on a paleo diet, the person can’t lift as much as before and the workouts seem harder. In general when we lose weight, we don’t lose fat only. There is virtually always some muscle loss. According to Robb Wolf, the way to mitigate this is to eat more protein than you might think you need: he recommends about a gram of protein per pound of body weight. On the paleo diet we don’t want to avoid the good fats, and we want to eat plenty of veggies. If we up the protein we will be full. When we’re full from eating a lot of protein and nonstarchy veggies, we would eat less fruit, starches, and anything resembling dessert. Eating protein reduces muscle loss. You can read about this in Robb’s book “The Paleo Solution” or hear him talk about it in his podcast 125 dated March 26, 2011.

Our youngest participant, Ian, is interested in barbell lifting for strength and is doing Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program on his own at his university’s gym. Ian is the only person in the challenge who got bigger by the end–this showed dramatically in the width of his back in his before and after photos. Good going, Ian! He also makes a great observation in his final food diary: his goal of swimming 2-3 times a week didn’t happen, but “that’s all right since I like it better as a ‘because I feel like it’ activity.” Doing something just for fun and pleasure is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. It’s easy to overlook the value of fun when immersed in our high-achieving culture and our CrossFitters’ habits of wanting everything to be self-improving. Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple is a good writer on the topic of play and its role in health.

Congratulations Marcus on not only feeling great on the paleo diet, and enjoying it, but in losing 18 pounds. We voted on the winners, and you were almost tied for the win.

Frank mentioned eating “too much fruit.” How do you know how much fruit is too much? If you’re lean and healthy and you enjoy fruit, eat all you want. If you’re trying to lose weight and are stuck, give it up for a while, or stick to a handful of blueberries. If you’re trying to eat a low-carb diet, look up carb counts for your foods and cut back on fruit if needed to stay within your carb quota. (Here’s a carb chart.) A low-carb whole-food/paleo diet can be a healthy and effective way to lose weight. If you want to read a lot about low-carb eating in one place, try Dr. Michael Eades’s web site or books such as “The Protein Power LifePlan.”

A few challengers mentioned drinking diet sodas, trying to give up diet sodas, or wondering if it is necessary to give them up. From my reading it seems there’s conflicting evidence on whether artificial sweeteners and naturally-derived non-sugar sweeteners affect our insulin and fat storage, affect our fat storage or health some other way, and so on. Personally, my answer is I don’t know. I don’t drink diet sodas because I think they’re weird piles of chemicals and they’re nowhere near being a whole food no matter how you define it.

Are we trying to eat whole foods based on a belief system or are whole foods actually, provably better for us? There’s a lot of debate about exactly what a paleo diet is and why it makes most people healthier and leaner. It is hard even to define a whole food. Is a steak a whole food? A sausage? A roasted almond? Almond butter? Why do some paleo dieters use alcohol? This vagueness is why it always seems to come down to “just try it for six weeks and see how you look, feel, and perform.” There are in my opinion too many possible mechanisms to try to explain other than in very broad, oversimplified strokes–especially as a lay person! There is also a lot that even the paleo diet researchers can’t agree on, right down to fundamentals such as “Is gluten really that bad for everyone?” Nonetheless people seem to get healthier on a grain-free, legume-free, dairy-free paleo diet so we will keep advocating it.

Melissa mentioned being able to stick with paleo during events like moving into a new home, traveling, socializing, and illness. And she went on long runs without using Gu. This is all fantastic. It’s true you can usually get a steak salad or something like that when you’re out, if you can resist the other temptations on most menus. Everyone seems to have their own way of getting around temptation. Does willpower even exist? The most frequent solution to temptation that I normally hear is “Don’t have it in the house” and “distract yourself by doing something else.” For me, with restaurants, I look at the menu online several hours in advance, make up my mind what I’m going to order and then don’t even consider anything else. This usually keeps me away from the worst or most tempting choices. Usually.

I was impressed with several people who started working on their spouses and kids to get them to eat more whole foods. It seems that left to their own preferences, kids love carbs–plain spaghetti, and so on. Some great resources for getting your kids onto a grain-free whole-foods diet are our nutrition counselor (and mother of a toddler) Stephanie; Stephanie’s web site primarilypaleo.com; and the book “Everyday Paleo.”

And finally, I wanted to highlight Scott’s commitment (in fancy red ink, in his food diary!) to NO SWEETS AT WORK FOR ANY REASON. Keep up the good work, Scott! We’re obliged to spend so much time at work–why should we also be a prisoner of the terrible snacks there? When I made this same commitment several years ago at my last office job, it came in the form of a sudden realization that “I’m at work. By definition this is not a special occasion.”

Some of our challenge particpants:

]]> http://www.crossfit206.com/2012/04/02/paleo-challenge-follow-up-nice-work/feed/ 0 http://www.crossfit206.com/2012/03/19/weightlifting-class-2/ http://www.crossfit206.com/2012/03/19/weightlifting-class-2/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:22:51 +0000 Fran Mason http://www.crossfit206.com/?p=1748 In the Monday night weightlifting class, our coach Jules focuses on the clean and jerk and the snatch — the two lifts in the sport of weightlifting. Conversationally we think of anything involving a barbell as “weightlifting,” but weightlifting is a specific sport and the other lifts, the so-called slow lifts, the deadlift, squat, press, and bench press — those are from the sport of powerlifting.

Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution: “Red Meat: Part of a Healthy Diet?”

Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint and the website Mark’s Daily Apple: “Will Eating Red Meat Kill You?”

Updated:
Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, on this red meat study: “Science, Pseudoscience, … and Meat”

Also LiveStrong’s take on it

Updated again: Robb Wolf’s podcast #124 addresses this as the second question in the podcast. Basically Robb says you can’t even criticize the foods studied because the data that were gathered are worthless; the researchers did not know what people actually ate. This is because they used food recall questionnaires. People were asked at intervals how often they had eaten various things. Robb and other critics say this is a notoriously inaccurate way of studying diet because people have no idea what they ate yesterday, let alone during the past three months.