Linda, one of Playground's newest heavy hitters, ripping out "Fran". You did awesome today!
WOD:
“Joshie”
Complete three rounds for time of:
40 pound Dumbbell snatch, 21 reps, right arm
21 L Pull-ups
40 pound Dumbbell snatch, 21 reps, left arm
21 L Pull-ups
Post time to comments.
These are squat not power snatches.
What are we trying to achieve when we CrossFit? There are the normal generalized answers, like:
“I want to lose a few pounds!”
and
“I want to to look awesome at the beach!”
and the ubiquitious
“I want to get back in shape!”
There’s nothing wrong with these reasons, but they don’t speak to the point of what we are doing when we engage in any given CrossFit workout.
Similarly, the “official” CrossFit answer that we’re working
“to increase work capacity across broad time and modal domains”
gets the right word in there, but is a little bit fancy pants for what we’re getting at here. What we’re getting at is pretty simple: CrossFit is about work. It’s not exactly a revelation if you’ve ever done one of the “girls” or maybe a Fight Gone Bad, but there it is.
So what do we mean by work? Work is the amount of power the athlete puts out over time. We can measure it empirically, using nifty fancy-pants physics terms like watts and joules and horsepower. And measuring this stuff empirically yields some interesting results.
Let’s use Fran as an example.
Scenario one: as rx’d Fran:
If we use the handy dandy Performance OutPut Calculator from Catalyst Athletics, we can get avoid doing too much math and see what kind of work we’re doing.
Let’s make it nice and easy – let’s say we have a six foot tall athlete who weighs 180, who does Fran, which is 45 reps each of 95 pound thrusters and pullups. Let’s figure this athlete does the work in 8 minutes. According to the Performance Output calculator, here’s what we get for work:
Power Output
157.9 watts
0.21 horsepower
116.46 ft-lbs/sec
Which, hey, it’s a workout, and our athlete is sweaty and tired, and probably patting himself on the back for doing the workout as prescribed. But at the end of the day, putting out .21 horsepower over 8 minutes isn’t all that impressive.
Pay attention, because this is where it gets interesting…
Let’s say we take the same athlete and we drop the weight for the thrusters down to 70 pounds, and because of this, our athlete can knock grace out in five minutes. Here’s what we get:
Power Output
233.63 watts
0.32 horsepower
172.32 ft-lbs/sec
Whoa… what happened? Our athlete dropped the weight used by 25 pounds, but knocked 3 minutes off the time it took to do the workout. In doing so, the amount of horsepower the athlete put out went up by 150 percent. And you can rest assured that the athlete was laying on the ground gasping for every breath at the end of that five minutes in a way that wasn’t happening when our athlete was doing it as prescribed.
What’s the moral of the story? It’s pretty simple. The point is work, and work is power over time. While we all want to do the WODs as prescribed, the power output of a given workout is what matters. One of the most important things you can do with CrossFit is to be honest with yourself, and realize that it may be possible to work harder (and therefore achieve better results) by scaling the weights to a point where the decrease in your overall time more than makes up for the lesser amount of weight you are moving.
