Yesterday we went for another great CrassFit workout. After a short break of one week without workout (attendees were either sick or had no time – I wouldn’t go for it all alone, did kettlebell complexes instead ) we got into gears just fine.

Unfortunately, Harald and Dominik were absent, for good reasons: Harald is back to Graz and Dominik occupied with heavy manual labor – so it was only Rainer, me and Peter.

We did the following workout:

Pre-Fatigue

5 x 5 Frog Jumps uphill
5 + 5 Turkish Get-Up (with water bottle or 16 kg kettlebell, according to level of expertise)
5 x 2 Lengths rope climbing

For the frog jumps, it is especially important to gain momentum with the right arm work. Look at how Peter is doing the jumps and what impressive horizontal leaps he can take. This is due to long training (he is an active track & field athlete). Lead the arms from down below up and forward and time the movement of the hands with the movement of the feet to achieve maximum leaps.

The Turkish get-up is one of the best exercises to train your abdominal strength but also one of the most dangerous. I highly recommend that you start training it using no weight at all. Start to add resistance only when you have learned the technique! It is important that the shoulder is resting in its socket and the arms are straightened toward the sky – and the look is always facing the hand reaching out of the clouds.

Start slowly and always part the movement into steps. Watch Peter’s form – he is doing great!

Finally, the rope climbing was the first exercise I couldn’t film due to the darkness – I will make sure that I take a good source of light with me in future to enable video capture also amid night hours.

Metabolic Conditioning

5 rounds of:
5 L-pull-ups (easier variation: tucked in knees)
16 Lunge walks
10 L-push-ups
200 meter running

The darkness and other circumstances prevented us from documenting this one. To explain the L-pull-up and the L-push-up, I will provide videos.

The L-pull-up works abdominals as well as the back and arms – it is a lot harder than a regular pull-up. Tucked in knees are the easier version that I used, due to the inability to perform an exercise this hard.

Watch this video at 3:00. Here you see a variation of a push-up with legs up the wall. This is how the starting position of a L-push-up looks like – from there on, it is like a handstand push-up: Descend like you are to ram your head into the ground and push yourself up again. Any wall or elevated platform is fine for doing this – just keep in mind to have a right angle between legs and torso.

We shortened the run a bit due to the circumstances and used it for regeneration issues. In total, this was the easiest workout of the CrassFit series up to date and will be remembered as such. The preparation was suboptimal and will be augmented next time.

Well done, night figthers!
There was nothing left to feel, when I fell into the night...

I am looking forward to next week’s workout. It will be a major test for metabolic and muscular endurance, I guarantee Hopefully, with good lighting assistance to be able to capture it properly.

Train on and stay strong,
Simon