For this week I am filling for my buddy and fellow trainer Raf over at Redline Fight Sports in Central Square Cambridge.
Last nights class was pretty awesome. We had 8 people and loads of body weight exercises.
Everyone was split into teams of 2 and had to complete the following in a 15 minute time period.
Partition as needed, only one person working at a time:
200 Toes to bar (scale – Intermediate: knees to chest, Beginner: Sit ups)
100 Body Weight Squats
50 Push ups
(when finished jump rope until the whole class is done or 15 mins is up)
I believe being able to move your own body proficiently with no load is important.
You need to be able to do this before you get under the bar. Otherwise you have no connection, no relationship with your body, it’s muscles and how they move.
To finish class we did 8 rounds of 30 sec work / 30 sec rest of hitting the punching bag.
This was a great burnout for the class.
As a trainer the problem for me here was communication. I didn’t have a white board to write the workout on and there was lots of other classes going on at the time as well.
Some people were new and some individual time with them would have been well spent. This is where I believe an on ramp class would help. I had to cue and correct on the fly. I am able to due this pretty well and I was lucky to have people in class that are great listeners, but this is not the way I want to introduce people to new movements. It’s also not fair to the veterans of the class if I stop the whole class to fix one member. I will have to think a bit more about this.
After class I went home and did an individual version of the work out, only I didn’t have a pull up bar so I went for a mile run then found a tree branch I could use:
3 rounds of:
20 toe to branch
10 body weight squats
5 push ups
I forgot my stop watch so I didn’t time it. The toe to bars were the hardest thing. My hands still hurt from the tree bark. After watching the Crossfit Games I got a bit of fire under me to get back to training regularly. The speed in which the games participants did their toes to bar was impressive. Especially after doing this and checking out where I am with this movement. It was humbling. And awe inspiring.
Rich Borgatti 