The Savage Society

The Content Rundown
I. Welcoming New CrossFitters to our Family

II. WOD Details for Jill

III. Enrique and Jefe (Muscle-Up skill work, Brutal bodyweight WOD)

IV. Taco and Chalupa attain one hell of a milestone, their way of celebrating the two week anniversary with CrossFit.

V. Here are some Pictures of a snowshoe adventure up a mountain with my bro Derek. There is a comment (with a tag of "A NOBLE") on the affiliate blog about us the other day that had some nice words of encouragement about us becoming official, turns out "A NOBLE" used to sleep at the base of Monadnock which is exactly where Derak and I were. Just wanted to put up two pics and let A NOBLE that there is an open door here for training anytime the feet happen to hit the east coast again. Now everyone go look at the picture of Derek picking on the Mountain after discovering his Elite Fitness... no one likes bullies, Derek.

Welcoming Some New CrossFitters to Our Family

Today was about the busiest I have ever been with things that needed to be eviscerated right off the CFNH to-do-list. I sort of enjoyed the stress involved with trying to balance everything out for renovating the gym because the antagonists were a couple new faces that came by to check things out and maybe sneak in some training.

After exchanging a few e-mails I lured David in around 7:30 to hang out for a bit and talk about where he was and wanted to go with his fitness development. Basically the session ended with me overly excited again after learning about his experience as a competitive cyclist and adventure race bike rider (mix of roads, obstacles, and trails... doesn't it just beg to be trained for with CrossFit?).

I can't wait to get started with this new facet of athleticism and I think David is going to be blown away by the potential advancements he will see come to fruition in his off season with us. I am going to be starting another Fundamentals progression series of training with him at 7:30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays so if there are any other crazies that feel like really putting some work into your foundation of knowledge and skills then let me know via the comment section, e-mail, or phone. This stuff is fun as is but it becomes a fun as hell adventure if you get together in groups to take it on, not to mention the added speed with which you acquire new skills and concepts when there are others around for you to observe while executing technique.

See you on Thursday, David, welcome to the family!

Our second guest got her exposure to CrossFit from Enrique, and it says a lot about the depth of his conceptual understanding of the fundamentals when she shows up with a nearly flawless Overhead Squat. Jill was definitely ready to get to work when she showed up and despite my usual hesitancy to throw people into a WOD right after meeting them I felt like her history and base of athletic ability (not to mention a noticeable hunger for training) would allow me to give her some skill and fundamental work and then work her through a simple triplet WOD (which I based around some things she identified to me as lower on her proficiency scale).

Down below you can see the WOD and the score that she earned, and the crazy part was the fact that she kept recovering so fast if she happened to get out of breath.

Skillwork & Warm-ups

She spent a lot of time practicing the Overhead Squat today and got to learn all of the different parts that comprise the "Burgener Warm-up" drill (Snatch-centric with applicability to everything explosive in movement). Learned about how to develop Pull-ups and use rings in several different ways to assist in a broad range of ability improvements.

Jill's WOD

3 Rounds of the following

Overhead Squats (pvc) 21-15-9

Ring Pull-ups Variation 12-9-6

Burpees (CF Games Standards) 15-12-9

Score 8:13

Being Gassed didn't even matter to Jill, her OH Squat form remained impeccable and she strung her burpees together as well as any of our other "fire-breathers". Great job, Jill, welcome to our family!

Rosemary Comes to Visit

Shortly after Enrique, Jefe, and Jill showed up I got a call from Rosemary who I have been keeping in contact with for about a month through e-mail. When she originally wrote to me Rosemary had just jumped headfirst into the pool full of Kool-Aid and was taking some nice big gulps (she started training with WODs like Murph, sounds like our kind of crazy).

Even though things were a mess in the garage I didn't mind letting her come by because she had been asking to come see what we were up to around here for quite some time and I wanted her to meet some of these guys that I have so much fun training and being around.

I'm pretty sure she thought I was just some "weird bearded guy with a gym in his garage" at first (paraphrase quote from Hore-Hay's description of what his workout class was when his girlfriend asked) but once I got her to start talking about her experience and history in CrossFit she probably figured I had been walking upright for at least a week and a half. My favorite part of meeting new CrossFitters because it really lets me get right to helping everyone with all the stuff that I hated figuring out on my own so much. Jill and Rosemary both felt weaker in the Pull-up/Muscle-Up area and had made some comments about our rings so I hauled them down and went to work trying to share some techniques and training points that I thought would give them both the most mileage in their development. I had a great time working through the progressions with them and covering some fundamentals from the Squat series of movements... another lady CrossFitter that comes through the door with a perfect Overhead Squat, I could feel the envy from the guys.

It was great to finally meet another CrossFitter that I hadn't been able to put a face to for so long, welcome to the family, Rosemary.

Oh, sidenote: She found us because of Brad who came down the other day for Viking Fran (Don't think I don't hear you dipping your oars with this WOD all the way down there in Virginia, Maj H.) . It turned out that both Jefe and I had already met this guy awhile ago and it was a bit like a reunion. The CrossFit world is a lot smaller than we think.

II. Taco & Chalupa WOD Results

Both of these CrossFitters took a serious crack at one brutal WOD today. Both Taco and Chalupa have been religiously following the outline of programming and instruction I helped compose for them when they asked for a true "developmental CrossFit indoctrination process".

If you look back a few posts you can see that it hasn't even been that long since they came in for an hour and listened to me talk about all the things we consider elemental to CrossFit. That same day they spent 4 minutes in bottom-to-bottom Tabata hell and finished their CrossFit New Hampshire welcome session on the floor with serious doubts about regaining walking ability.

Since a few days ago I have been getting a lot of feedback from other people who are familiar with Taco and Chalupa about the progress they have made. The general consensus is that everyone is blown away that someone could come this far in such a short time. This WOD is partly the product of such reactions, which were muttered during observations of the guys performing technical movements during the WODs. The Foundations have been well laid due to the simple diligence of the athletes. They dragged themselves in day after day with nothing more than a promise of "death by repetitious execution of proper fundamental techniques".

The most fun I had was teaching the med. ball progressions to these guys, and now that they have such a solid grasp of the movement (they were executing it extremely well while gassed the other day during "Fight Gone Fundamental") I decided to bring out this WOD for two primary reasons. One, I wanted them to see how powerful the rower is in smashing your metabolism to little inefficient bits, and two, if you combine these three movements you get a power clean to the front squat and push jerk progression with a load of 75lbs. Watching this WOD get taken apart with both intensity and technique makes me think that it might be time to really ratchet up the learning curve for these two.

Taco & Chalupa's WOD

Warm-ups and Skillwork involved repetitions of the 9 fundamental movements and short rowing segments with time spent refining technique. Once there was a nice sweat going and the heater had the place at a balmy 80 degrees it was time to hit it.

3 Rounds for time of

500m Row

Deadlift (75lbs) x 21

Front Squat (75lbs) x 15

Push Press (75lbs) x 9

Scores

Taco 22:51

Chalupa 13:46

Enrique & Jefe's WOD Results

The mainsite WOD today was 30 Muscle-Ups for time and both these guys can perform between 1 and 3 reps of the movement successfully. Despite this fact we still didn't attempt to tackle that WOD as RX'd and instead cleaved the training session into two portions.

Part I. Skill Development/Technique Refinement

-Short Rowing bouts with a heavy emphasis on the proper technique

-Sets of max rep Muscle-Ups and Assisted Muscle-Ups when needed

Part II. Neck and Neck WOD (7 tenths of a second difference in scores)

21-15-12-9-6-3 rep rounds of the following

-Pull-ups (Full range of motion to count, extension at bottom is everyone's nemesis)

-Ring Dips (Shoulder must break parallel with elbow and full extension for the rep to count)

-Burpees (CF Games Standards)

Scores

Jefe 13:26:00

Enrique 13:25:03*

(This is not a joke, that was the actual time difference...talk about some crazy competition brewing in here)

Hiking Pictures From Sunday