Cindy 1-10-2012

Hopefully your willpower is holding up as we head into the second official week of the Move, Lose, and Cruise challenge.  Remember, you aren’t competing against everyone else.  You are just trying to lose enough of your BF % to get into the drawing for the cruise.  Stay strong!  The thresholds we are having you shoot for are attainable.  But it will take some discipline and planning.  If you go to work with no food for lunch and then start cruising “fast food lane” for a healthy meal, you’re setting yourself up for failure.  Make plans, and execute them.

There are a few people really struggling to give up certain vices such as beer, diet soda, pasta, etc…  Here’s the thing.  It’s 6 weeks.  I hate to say it but… Suck it up!  You can do it!  Success or failure is your choice to make.  And as I’ve said before, extraordinary people make the hard choices.  Everyone else makes the easy ones.  Will you be ordinary or extraordinary?

WOD
Cindy
AMRAP 20′
5 pull-ups
10 push ups
15 air squats

Partner Shuffle 1-9-2012

We didn’t do a partner WOD on Friday. No, we endured Debbie’s birthday WOD. That was a hoot…
But today, we’ll do a partner WOD that I think you’ll enjoy.

WOD
“Partner Shuffle”
3 rounds of 5 minutes of work with 1 minute rest between rounds:

Partners will pick 4 movements they need to work on.

All face cards = 10 reps. Otherwise complete the number of reps on the card.
Both partners must have their reps completed before another card can be flipped.
Your team’s score is the number of accumulated reps.

Example:

When the clock starts, you flip one card. If it’s 8 of spades, partner 1 will complete 8 push press. Partner 2 will complete 8 deadlifts.  Once completed, your team will have accumulated 16 reps.

Debbie Does 43

So this weekend, Debbie turns 43.  I think I can speak for anyone that knows her when I say that she is an inspiration.  A while back I wrote about indomitable spirit.  And Debbie’s got one.  When she first approached me to ask about CrossFit, she was overweight and asthmatic.  We were standing by the coffee pot at work when she asked me what was so great about this CrossFit thing she kept hearing about.  We talked for a while and she decided to give it a shot.  That day, we were all meeting at the taqueria at the corner of Double R and Double Diamond Pkwy to run a 5k for the WOD.  She said she’d meet us out there.  At a quarter past the hour, she hadn’t shown up yet.  So I figured she was not coming.  I took off running.  Later that day, I found out that she did in fact show up late and complete the 5k by herself… inhaler and all.  So although she wasn’t the stud that could crank out handstand push-ups that she is today, I was still very impressed!  Day in and day out, she showed up.  Fat melted away, confidence built, and nearly a year later, she had made incredible progress.  I remember her constantly reminding herself (and all of us) that her motivation was to wear a bathing suit on her vacation in New Zealand.  A month before her vacation, we started a paleo challenge.  It took a fair amount of convincing and goading.  But I was able to get her to participate.  That’s when she really started physical transformation. In less than a month, she leaned out dramatically.  Needless to say, her New Zealand trip was a success  Since then, she’s pretty much turned into a machine.  She keeps getting stronger, faster, and generally more awesome.

What’s particularly inspiring about Debbie is her attitude.  She is an incredibly positive person, and she has a tendency to make those around her believe in themselves in a way they never thought possible.  So tell her happy birthday when you see her.  And feel free to point out that if she wasn’t so darn old, this workout would be a whole lot easier!!

Here’s Debbie’s theme song:

Debbie Does 43
Chipper WOD; at the top of every minute, do 3 burpees.
43 hang power cleans (95/65)
43 pull ups
43 OH walking lunges (45/25)
43 abmat situps
43  push presses (95/65)
43 air squats
43 SDHPs (95/65)
43 double unders
43 “Happy Birthday Debbie”‘s. j/k

Box Jumps, Toes to bar, and pull-ups

Conventional Wisdom and other Rubbish
I find it fascinating how we humans take so many “truths” for granted.  Don’t worry, I’m not judging.  I do it.  We all do.  This tendency transcends race, culture, profession, level of education, etc…  If you want to know if you tend to accept “truths” because everyone “knows” them to be true, look in the mirror and ask yourself one question: “Am I a human?”.  If the answer is yes (and I really hope it is ), then you tend to do this.  It’s in our nature.  We are social creatures that depend on the group to learn about our environment.  This has been both a blessing and a curse over the time man has walked the earth.  Just ask Galileo.  Telling the authorities at the time that heavier objects did not fall faster than lighter objects (in a vacuum) got him in really hot water.  He disagreed with “the group”.  And generally, “the group” doesn’t look favorably on that type of thinking.  Heck, Robb Wolf was ostracized from the CrossFit community for having an opinion.  And CrossFitters pride themselves in only engaging in practices that have empirical evidence to prove their effectiveness.  But again, we’re social animals.  And going against the group will inevitably lead to social consequences.  How many of you believe that the US postal service is about to start charging us for each email we send?…  Nuff said.
So what am I getting at?  First of all, I’m advocating coming out of autopilot every so often.  So what are you going to do differently to lean out for the ML&C challenge this year?  Are you going to follow conventional wisdom?  Or are you going to do something radical like **GASP** cut grains out of your diet **GASP**?!  Or stop drinking diet soda?… EGAD!

Reid’s first post is live.  Read it.  And there’s more coming down the pipe.

BTW, we got more chalk in.  Which will be very nice for this workout!

WOD
20′ AMRAP of
- 18 Box Jumps (24/20)
- 15 T2B
- 12 Pull-ups

Move, Lose, and Cruise Quick Tips, Part 1

I know many of you are entered into the Move, Lose, and Cruise challenge. If you aren’t it isn’t too late to sign up and get measured. I thought I’d share a few tips over the next few weeks on how I was able to drop over 50% of my body fat last year in 6 weeks. This year’s contest is a bit different than last year in that you only need to drop a certain percentage of body fat to be entered to win the grand prize vs. last year’s competition for losing the most percent of percent body fat. So I had a lot of motivation to drop as much fat as possible and I searched around for the best ways to do it.

This was my experiment of one, which obviously doesn’t provide enough data to prove anything scientifically. But I encourage you to be your own experiment of one and try new things to see what works for you.

A little disclaimer: These tips are things that I tried and had success with, but I don’t guarantee they will work for you. Heck, they may not even be safe for you to try. Use your head and consult your doctor if necessary.

Part 1: My diet

I had tried The Zone diet for a month or so before and done Paleo for maybe a week at a time before the challenge but I had trouble sticking to either of them. Also I knew I’d be traveling and eating out a bunch so I knew I had to find something simple and easy to follow. I ended up using the diet Tim Ferris talks about in his book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. No fruits
2. No white carbs – bread, potatoes, pasta, etc. cauliflower is ok.
3. No dairy Just water, black coffee, and red wine to drink (1-2 glasses of red wine per night at most)
4. Basically that leaves meat, veggies, nuts, seeds, and beans for all your meals
5. 1 cheat day per week where all the rules get thrown out the window.

Tim explains the reasoning for each of these pretty well in the book. It made enough sense to me so I did it. I followed this the whole time through the challenge. My first few cheat days were epic but by the end, I had toned them down a bit just so I wouldn’t feel like crap for the next two days.

Many of my meals were chicken, steamed broccoli, and lentils or steak salad with almonds, avocados and black beans. Breakfast was usually bacon, eggs and avocado. Sometimes I just ate 2 raw eggs for breakfast if I was in a hurry. Talk about fast food.

I also took fish oil (lots of it), magnesium, and Vitamin D (5000 IU), and a multivitamin because, hey, why not.

Whatever your diet plans are for the challenge, try to find something you can stick to. Six weeks is a great start, but hopefully you’ll come out of this with changes that you stick with all year.

-Reid

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