After Sunday’s CNS-taxing Snatch review, the prescription for Tuesday night was simplicity. For the warm-up, class utilized the court to take advantage of the extra room, and concentrated on waking up the back, shoulders, and chest. This was all preparation for a few rounds of Pull-Ups.

STRENGTH – 5x Strict Pull-Ups
Programming followed an If-Then style, based on past or perceived max effort ability:
IF you had no strict pull-ups, THEN you did 5×3 Negatives;
IF 1-4 pull-ups, THEN AMRAP strict pull-ups, switching to band-assisted pull-ups to complete 5 reps;
IF 5-9 pull-ups, THEN AMRAP strict pull-ups;
IF 10+ pull-ups, THEN AMRAP strict pull-ups with weight.
Congrats to Dan who did the workout using strict Muscle-Ups (no kipping allowed), and to Jen and Sara, who replaced the pull-ups (due to medical reasons) with 6×3 double presses, where each rep = 1 strict press from the front & 1 from the back. We don’t just pay lip service to the scalability of CrossFit workouts, we put it into practice; we can, and will, make it work for you.

MET-CON – 3min-2min-1min AMRAP of 6 DB snatch (each arm) & 6 box jumps
For this partner met-con, we used a descending timed-interval set-up, meaning that partner 1 did the AMRAP for 3 min, and then rested while p.2 (partner 2) did the AMRAP for 3 min, then p.1 did the AMRAP for 2 min, then p.2 for 2 min, then p.1 for 1min, and finally p.2 for 1 min.

Mini vs. Max Explosion – If you felt like the box jumps were a little more taxing Tuesday night and required a touch more concentration than usual, you were right.
The point of the met-con design was to emphasize the explosive requirements of the Olympic lifts and their ilk, including transfer and assistance exercises (such as DB snatches). Remember, even though the DB snatch is a truncated snatch movement (usually done from a high hang position), it still requires you to recruit a vast area of muscles in a coordinated fashion in order to produce a movement which is explosive enough to move the DB in a smooth, singular motion. So, while the explosiveness required by the DB snatch doesn’t seem to be all that great, when combined with box jumps, which require a much larger range of explosive motion, the effect is amplified.

Longtime friend of CFDC, Katie Heinrich (formerly of CF Oahu, now of Kansas State CF), rocking the DB snatches – it was great to have Katie in class Tuesday and look forward to having her back the next time she’s in D.C.

Great work all around, including some very powerful and smooth DB snatches from people who I know attended Mike Choi’s Olympic snatch session this past Sunday, which is something I don’t see as coincidental. Please post reps for the pull-ups and rounds for the met-con to comments, as well as any thoughts or questions.