My "Little Room"

This image and the article that was posted with it about the lactate shuttle was something that brought me into the Crossfit Endurance fold. I have learned more by chasing down the couple of resources they posted (for free to the public) and following where they led me than I ever have in college. Looking at these three pictures and learning what they represented was VERY fascinating to me, and in the end it helped me understand new and radical concepts of fitness which I am now trying to bring to you.
(The article: http://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/brooks/ )

Little Room
Well you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it's really good
you're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started in your little room
- The White Stripes

Right now I am in my little room about to smash the windows because I can't figure out a good way to make this spreadsheet fit on the webpage. Could be worse by far, I just really want to add some fuel to the competition aspect of things which will let some of the website followers participate in training even though they might not currently be attending training sessions. This quote definitely fit what I am doing right now though so I thought it appropriate to lead off the post with, 2 months ago I would never have thought that I would be trying to start an affiliate here in NH. Well, maybe I did know it and I just didn't tell the conscious side of me what I was plotting. Either way I am constantly amazed that I finally found a way to bring all of the things I have been doing and experiencing together under one roof. It pleases me to no end when I get to see everyone out there making gains and progress from the information I have been posting.

The Next Lesson:
The next batch of knowledge I wanted to toss out to you is broken down below. It covers how I am rotating the training as far as what we are working and how we are working it session to session. The progress and rotation of training the fight team is experiencing is very much akin to what the regular Crossfit program preaches (it was excellently laid out in a few different Crossfit Journal articles and videos which I highly recommend if you can afford it). So far there will be 4 sessions listed (including tomorrows) and if you break them down they would look like this

1. Initial fitness test
2. 5 movements scored by reps performed in time constraints
3. Triplet of body weight exercises repeated for total rotations in time constraint
4. Tomorrow will be a crossfit endurance workout after the instruction on the rower and it will involve a repeated single element effort for time (8 sets of 250m for time with :45 rest)
and part II of training will be a couplet (2) exercises, one with a barbell and the other with body weight repeated for a time score

I will be able to go into much greater detail once we are certified and affiliated but I never want our training model to seem like everyone following the messiah with blind faith. The reason I am posting this is so you can see what each workout involved for modes of training and exercise and how often each one will be coming up. As we go you will see a pattern start to emerge. If you download the list at the top that has all the movement types broken down into categories (I modified how Crossfit and other programs categorized exercise types because I wanted something broader and easier to comprehend) you can compare it to the workout schedule and you will find that even though two sessions may not have the same name they will have the same types of stimulus and similar scoring emphasis (time, reps, points, rounds, etc.)

To Illustrate this we can look at a recent workout we all did called Candy, which made everyone attempt to complete a set number of reps and rounds as fast as possible (for time). Below are two variations of "Candy style training" that are challenging you in similar ways:

Barbara: 5 Rounds for time of
20 Pull-ups
30 Push-ups
40 Sit-ups
50 Squats
and
Cindy: As many rounds as possible in 20:00 of
5 x Pull-ups
10 x Push-ups
15 x Squats

This is just to give you an idea of the infinite level of variability you can use in training, which is a very important component in what we are going to be doing here and will exponentially affect your training results. This spin that I showed you on a workout we did involves three simple body weight movements and doesn't even begin to tap into the other variations for training format. Imagine where you could go for variety once you start mixing in all 5 different categories of stimulus (again from the list I linked at the top of the page).

Another reason I wanted to lay this out was to cover a question that I am repeatedly submitted from a bunch of different people: how can we train endurance/stamina without running boring long distance all the time?

I could speak on this topic for hours, but I want to direct everyone that is interested in this to the Crossfit Endurance website which is linked on the right side column. The main Crossfit page involves the same philosophy but sometimes it helps to put things in context by seeing how it applies to a single type of exercise. Read what they have to say (10 minutes of your time) http://www.crossfitendurance.com/about/faq.php and look at a good 10 days or more to see how they rotate training (scroll down just like how we run things on this page). This is how you should be building up your abilities, not by running distance every morning and adding 10% each week...that sounds like purgatory or maybe even hell to me so I can't imagine what it would sound like to you.

Ben just gave me a 20:00 time trial result and now that he has that information we can scale all of his interval and tempo workouts off of that data with a little bit of math. When the time comes to perform a 5k time trial he will do much better than he thinks he can at the moment, and even further down the road when he runs his 20:00 again he will shatter his current PR. Breaking a Personal Record is not only a great way to feel good about what you are doing it will allow you to also continue to modify training to your current levels which keeps your improvement curve nice and steep. To put things another way: Let's keep making large strides forward, and the more records we break the more fine tuned our large strides forward can become.
This is how athletes follow the Crossfit Endurance website and use it to train for 50 mile races while only allotting about 6 hours of training a week (an example of this situation had someone with little to no training background finish his 50 mile race by training for only one month during the course of which there were only 3 runs that you would consider "long distance")

You can expect a great deal more information on this subject and the subject of training variance in our regular program, but this might be enough food for thought today. I recently realized how long some of my posts were and it sort of flew in the face of my goal to not scare people away with over zealousness. Crap.
On another note, just because I am covering a lot of general physical fitness models here doesn't mean that specificity has no home in the Society here. There are athletes among you with specific goals and that is extremely important to me. I want to point out that I am only trying to lay a base of fitness, a foundation of ability before we delve into the aspects of training that will take you to your victory, in whatever realm of contest it lies.

Ranking Update:

For the time being all the scores from workouts will be added in a results section that I will amend to the end of each post once they are submitted from those that participate. This will let everyone have their scores posted and participate in the competition of training, and it lets me keep everyone updated and included until I get Google Apps up and running. The reason I want to hold off on posting an embedded leaderboard is because I think it will look much better and detailed if I actually make a whole sub page for it. I have an idea in my head that I want you all to be able to see but I need to acquire some more technical know how before I can take it and make it accessible for everyone. There is a version of how I want things to eventually look on my wall (which I included above to give you an idea) it is my original leaderboard that I made with a laminated print out and dry erase board markers. It is based on the two printable links at the top that I made available for everyone that cover training hierarchy of skills and the types of exercises and training stimuli broken down into five categories.

Addressing Your Requests for Resources:
I wanted to get some resources out to people that have been e-mailing me specific questions so the following section will be dedicated to that.

1. The link below is about percentage charts that a lot of Olympic lifting programs use in training which allows for maximal strength gains. This article also explains how this is related to and differs from the percentage charts that the Westside Barbell Club follows. I know there are some of you out there that love old school strength and power sports so I will make a big effort to include as much about that as possible for resources to use. I find it interesting how every form of training that has been found beneficial can be easily adapted to fit any type of specific goal. It goes to show that even involving something as complex as the human organism there are certain laws that govern the best routes training can take for efficiency in adaptation to stress.
http://elitefts.com/documents/prilepins_chart.htm
2. The next link will take you too a nice resource that covers multiple creative methods for training wrist strength, which was a recent topic question I got from some of the MMA guys. Wrist strength is obviously a crucial component in being able to handle the constant impact of throwing your knuckles against someone elses' body parts with as much force as we can develop, and you can bet on some serious development in striking power and the ability to maintain that power over the course of a fight.
http://http//64.233.169.132/search?q=cache:3ICkFdrSWp4J:www.fightersreview.com/mma-training-and-conditioning.php+developing+wrist+strength+for+striking&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us
3. The third link is a tool for learning about physiology and biology, which will help you by allowing you to train with a greater depth of understanding. I just wanted to make the resource available because there was a time when I would have killed for something like this.
http://http//www.getbodysmart.com/ap/muscletissue/quizzes/menu/animation.html
4. The next site is an incredible resource for learning the types of exercises, it has slideshows, videos, and a seemingly unlimited number of program and movement development tools. It is all free unless you go to the "store" section, which I thought was pretty badass.
http://www.exrx.net/

This should keep you all entertained for a little bit, there is much more to come but until I get some feedback on what you want to learn about I will have to keep jumping around with the topics. I know I say it all the time but feedback about the site (criticisms included) is always more than welcome because it will only make us better as a whole.

19 Days, Mr. Bartolo