Sunday 8.21.11

6 rounds

Max Reps Hand Stand Push Ups
Max Reps Strict Pull Ups
10 Single Leg Alternating Bounds 

*Rest as needed between efforts.

Post total reps to comments.

Know when to scale, and when to call it quits.

Here at Crossfit South Bend we scale according to your skill level.

If you aren’t sure what skill level you are at. You need to be scaled on the low end rather than the high end. It tells me what kind of an athlete you currently are. Its better to layer the intensity on in thin sheets rather than dumping it on you in buckets.

If we scale you down, don’t think its because we are out to get you, or because we are trying to hold you back. We are trying to garner a particular stimulus out of you from each workout, keep you injury free, and keep your progress moving along steadily.

After almost 5 years of doing this I can typically tell how good an athlete is when he or she comes in, and how experienced he or she is by how they handle their own scaling, and how they prep for a wod, what they tell me about their past and current training, and how they know, when to scale, and when to call it quits!!

From time to time people will choose to attempt to do the wod posted as either RX’d or at a difficulty level that above that athletes skill level. When they do not have the capacity to finish it in the coaches desired time, It often results in something that resembles a “death march.”

It can happen on a longer time scale, an injury that someone chooses to ignore time and time again, but chooses not to scale the movement that injures that particular body part, thus pushing further and further into injury.

The Death March

In project management, a death march is any of several types of pathologic projects involving a dysphemistic, dark-humor analogy to real death marches, such as being gruelingly overworked, and (often and most especially) being gruelingly overworked for ill-founded reasons on a project that is obviously at high risk of bad outcome (i.e., project failure, and possibly threat of personal and group reputation damage). Thus the name “death march” may be applied to a project that is ultimately successful but involves a home stretch of unsustainable overwork, or (perhaps more often) to a project that any intelligent, informed member can see is destined to fail (or is at very high risk of failure) but that the members are nevertheless forced to act out by their superiors anyway. Both of these themes have metaphorical parallel in real death marches.

I’ve seen it in longer workouts…

The filthy 50

The person is too tired to keep the movement up to standard

Dizziness

Walking from movement to movement

Ignoring Pain with particular movements. Now we aren’t talking workout difficulty pain, know the different between injury pain, and the pain of doing a hard workout.

Sitting down and taking long rest between movements

Breaking large sets into small extremely small rep sets. (having 50 wall balls to do, and doing 1 at a time with significant rest between)

Wincing with pain

You get the idea…

I’ve seen it in Max effort lifts…

Attempting to get a PR too many times. If you are going for a PR of 450 on your deadlift. After attempting and failing 1-3 times. You will not get much of anything out of it after that. Assuming that it was in fact 100% effort in each attempt, if you aren’t going to get it…you just aren’t going to get it. No sense in beating yourself into the ground mentally and physically

Having an injury and wincing with pain with each attempt.

Telling me; Well, my back feels “kinda injured, but i’m going to go ahead and try it.”

When you feel this occuring, there isn’t much to gain during a workout when you are dealing with these issue’s. You will potentially doing more harm than good. There are a few special occasions where it is good to test your mettle and see what you are made of mentally and physically. But for the most part you cannot get anything out of a wod that you have scaled far above your skill level.

We make mistakes, don’t be offended if we scale you halfway through the workout, we are getting to know you as an athlete, if we miss the mark we can correct it halfway through the wod. But you have to give us honest feedback, dont lie to us and say you are okay when you are not.

On the opposite end of the spectrum.

This shit is hard, and we can tell when you are capable of much more than you are doing. So don’t be mad if we scale you up either, sometimes you’d be surprised at what you are capable of, or we are just trying to test the limits of what you are capable of. We can tell the difference between someone who is genuinely giving it their all and feeling horrible, and someone who is just not putting effort in.

-B-