Piecing things together

Nick | 01/30/2014 | 6

There are so many moving parts in our olympic lifts that it’s very easy to get stuck thinking too much.  This is why we like to break these lifts down into pieces and work on each part on its own and then start to put them together.  The clean pull give us the chance to do just that.  We’ll be taking the clean from the ground up until the shoulder shrug and that’s it.  The cool thing about this is that we overlap some of the other drills we do for this lift.  That’s right – on our way up to the shrug we’ll be hitting both the hang position and  the high hang before we reach full extension of the legs and shrug the shoulders.  Not only should we be thinking about hitting those positions cleanly on the way up, but this also gives us a chance to focus on maintaining our back angle as we pull from the ground to the knee, not allowing the hips to beat the shoulders up (or “stripper lifting”).

On a different note, as we approach the competition season for CrossFit, I find it important to keep everything in healthy perspective.  This article

here

has some great points about how to not let our egos get in the way of improving ourselves.  Take a look!

STR:

Clean Pulls
3-3-3-3-3

* The 5 working sets should start around 105% of your max clean and not get heavier than 125% of your max clean or heavier than you can maintain your back angle and still hit your hang and high hang positions.

WOD:

EMOM 12
5 hang power cleans (135/95)
ME ring support hold until :40
rest :20

*Score is total time in ring support.  Scale the ring support so it’s something you can hold for most of the 20-25 seconds you’ll have to work on it each minute. Some great scales are a ring plank hold, wall climb hollow hold, plank hold or even a hollow body hold (or hollow tuck hold) which can be an incredibly useful stimulus when done with a high level of intent.