Happy Veterans Day (officially yesterday) to all our Armed Forces personnel, whether here at home with us or off in the field serving. On that point, while it’s always nice to have Brendan Berry and Mark Minukas join us for class, it was truly a special occasion to welcome them – both veterans – on Sunday in honor of the holiday.

Speaking of Sunday, the warm-up should’ve given everyone a good idea about what was to follow for the strength portion of the day’s program.

The first 3 sets were designated as warm-ups – basically a programmed opportunity to start light and make larger jumps while priming the body to the movement. This way everyone was given 5 sets of heavy working sets for the day. Roughly two months ago, we programmed a similar workout, except the deadlifts were broken up into three singles per set, rather than touch&go reps as they were this Sunday. Included with the follow-up blogpost (“DEAD, WARMED OVER“) to that workout was a check-list of reminders on set-up and execution.

Now, you could go back and check out that list, or – on the heels of last Sunday’s post-closing quote from Mark Rippetoe – you could read through coach Rippetoe’s thoughts on set-up and execution of the DL, explained (and titled) as Coach Rippetoe could: “Are You Ignorant When it Comes to the Deadlift?” 

Once the deadlifts were done, the bars were stripped and put away, and everyone headed down to the court with one bumper plate per person for the day’s metcon. Working in between the sidelines, everyone completed, for time, a descending ladder of plate burpees and OH lunges.

For the plate burpees, position the plate in front of you, perform your regular burpee, but instead of jumping and clapping, simply jump on to the plate and then back off again. For the OH lunges, pick up and press the plate overhead, and then keep it pressed out overhead as you lunge the prescribed number of steps per leg (i.e., the round of 10 meant ten steps with both the right and left leg, or twenty total).

To finish things off, class worked through a quick cool down to get the lactic acid out of the legs and help bring the heart rate down, followed by some much needed stretching.

Hopefully everyone was able to get out and enjoy this weekend’s awesome fall weather. Speaking of awesome an Fall, a big congratulations to Mark and Sarah Minukas on the birth of their baby daughter, Audra!

Be sure to check back for more discussion posts this week, as well as a few much requested interim workouts. See you all next Sunday!