Deth

Fitness and everything else

My Legs Will Hate Me Tomorrow After Today In The Garage Gym

Today, fairly early in the morning, I worked through my normal strength that was scheduled for this day. It went well., really well for me.

It started out with some nice, moderately weighted back squats to get me warmed up. They felt, really, excellent today! I did them at 230 pounds today, which is around where they typically start feeling heavier, but that turned out to not the case at all today. They were fast and smooth. I would go so far as to say they were all explosive.

The strict presses were at a still somewhat light feeling 112 pounds. They felt and looked perfect to me. Even though my highest weighted sets haven’t gone up I feel like I am getting stronger and more efficient with theses.

Lastly, for this normal strength, today was power clean day. Today I had to do 5x3 at 180 pounds. Last failure was at 185 a couple of months back, so I didn’t know what to expect with these. Last week’s power cleans were pretty tough, but I felt my timing was off with the pulls. This week they were easy and smooth. Very explosive cleans for sure. Both quick with the pull and quick pulling under it, meeting the bar at the right time and spot. No crashing at all. I am definitely having to start to pull under them pretty good, but that’s to be expected.

A while later I was still feeling pretty good, and I’m certainly well rested after not really doing anything yesterday, I decided to do my 20 rep front squats. I figured it shouldn’t be too bad at 155 pounds, and it wasn’t a problem at all. No sign of my upper back wanting to round as if it has always done in the past. Who knows, maybe after all these years I’ve finally solved that. Being able to and keeping a full grip on the bar certainly has helped significantly in that area since I gained the mobility to do it a couple of years ago. Little fixes add up.

Now onto the most horrible part. I was going to pass on today’s WOD and do it tomorrow, since it’s a nightmare scenario for me. All things I am not that good at or can’t do very fast.

30 of each, overhead lunges, pull-ups, clean and jerks and front rack lunges then rest two minutes and do it again. First things first I don’t have a ton of space to do the lunges in the garage, so I decided to use the shorter training bar. After setting it up, it clicked that I can do them out on the patio. I was already set up, so I didn’t switch bars, and I think that probably did cost me valuable time. But I did know from the beginning the that is a WOD I would not realistically be able to do fast.

To a point, lunges are a struggle for me with my poor eyesight throwing me off balance, but they have improved. The overhead variety I have only done 2 or 3 times. The first was the nightmare of the Crossfit open WOD a few years back, where I could only get a few at a time with a very, very unstable overhead position. I remember doing them in a Street Parking WOD last fall/winter too, but I am not sure. Today, I was very stable with them, all things considered. The patio is slightly uneven, so I had a few messed up steps due to that. There were too many distractions outside today, so I had trouble focusing a bit. I had the strobe effect in my one eye from the super bright sun and breeze blowing the tree, so it was just a lot of flickering on the outside of my cloudy cornea. The other issue was that of course shortly after I started, one of the neighbors decided it’s a perfect time to mow the lawn and have their whiny barking dog out there the entire time.

The pull-ups went about as well as I could expect. I’m not doing 30 of them strict, and my bar is too low to really kip. I wish our ceiling were a lot higher than it is, but we’re fortunate enough to have what we have and be able to make the best of it. I can semi kip with my legs bent, but it’s a lot harder to do, and I feel it would be better not to slam my feet into the floor.

The clean and jerks were a slow shitshow because of the ridiculously light 75 pound bar. I refused to let myself just reverse curl the bar. That’s how bad habits start, and I already have enough of those to try to deal with. I don’t need to create any more things to fix than I already have.

The front rack lunges went about as well as can be expected. I am more conformable with those than the overhead variety. They just feel better since our old gym used to program them fairly often, although I have to say today I felt much more comfortable and stable with the overhead ones than these front rack lunges. I got through them by picking away at them with smaller sets.

I ended up well past their goal time, I was happy with my result. I did do the RX weight. Using any weight with the complications that that brings into the picture with lunges though would be slow and careful, so it made no sense to scale it to go faster. It’s the sort of WOD where knowing my body and my personal weaknesses, they’re just not fast for a WOD with these movements, let alone high reps of them.

I haven’t sweated like that in a while, nor have I felt my body just radiating heat for hours after a WOD, like I felt with this one. Basically, my heart rate went above 170 after the first minute or so of work and pretty much stayed there for the entire 34 minutes of the WOD. It’s been a while since that has happened. It was a difficult workout for me but rewarding, and I am glad I did it today and got it over with. I know, realistically, I would spend the entire week trying to convince myself why it’s not worth doing it. I can say with absolute certainty that it wasn’t a Carl friendly WOD, but it’s done.

We’ll see how fun the steps are tomorrow!