CrossFit Journal - Issue 55.pdf - CrossFit Journal - Gozluk

March 2007

ISSUE FIFTY-FIVE

March 2007

Putting Out Fires

Lon Kilgore

page 1

Perception

The Commander of Our

Movements

Eva Twardokens

page 4

The Suitcase Deadlift,

Dumbbell Style

Michael Rutherford

page 9

The Business of Guerilla

Fitness

Doug Chapman

page 11

Performance and Health

Tony Leyland

page 13

UC Riverside Women’s

Basketball

Off-Season Strength &

Conditioning

Josh Everett

page 15

Using Worldwide Erg

Data to Fine-Tune Your

Training

Judy Geer

page 19

Popular Biomechanics

Mark Rippetoe

page 22

Putting Out Fires

Pulling Positions for the

Snatch

Mike Burgener, with

Tony Budding

page 26

The Left Hook

Becca Borawski

Lon Kilgore

page 29

Honolulu Fire Department, Hawaii; Orange Country Fire Authority and Oakland

Fire Department, California; Woodinville Fire and Life Safety District, Washington;

Marietta Fire Department, Georgia; Parker Fire District , Colorado. What do all of

these ire departments have in common?

Kettlebell Clean

Jeff Martone

page 31

continued page ... 2

The Grinder

CrossFit FRAGO #8, “SHANE”

page 34

March 2007

Putting Out Fires

...continued

You’ve probably already guessed part of the answer: They use

CrossFit, oficially or unoficially, to prepare for the rigors of their

profession. But there’s more. In ireighter competitions around

the country, it seems that whenever CrossFit-trained personnel

enter, they end up at the top of the ield. We might even say that

ire companies like those above dominate the competition.

world (and competition) motor challenges.

So, OK, they are more eficient neurally and metabolically. But

how does this reduce oxygen consumption? The single largest

contributor to this reduction is an improvement in body control

across a variety of movement patterns. CrossFit establishes and

develops motor pathways relevant to sport and occupational effort.

A well-developed motor pathway reduces the amount of external

work done by the body and thereby reduces oxygen consumed.

Think of it this way. Remember your irst ring dip? Remember

how wiggly your arms were and how much anterior-posterior and

medial-lateral movement there was? Now fast-forward to today

and your mastery of the ring dip. How much wiggling is there now?

The movement is more coordinated and each repetition takes less

time than those irst few brutally hard and spastic dips. Regular

CrossFit training has eliminated the extra work you used to do

when you used a bunch of extra muscles to stabilize your body

on the rings. Reducing the amount of working muscle reduces

metabolic cost (calories burned and oxygen consumed). This

will result in either the ability to perform an activity for a longer

period of time or, in this instance with ireighters, in consuming

less oxygen per unit work.

For those of us familiar with CrossFit and its results, this success is

not terribly surprising. However, we have observed a phenomenon

in these competitions that is curious indeed. In the parts of the

competitions that require contestants to use oxygen tanks,

CrossFit-trained ireighters consumed less from their oxygen

bottles than other competitors. At irst this seems odd—winners

using less oxygen? The conventional understanding is that the more

it you are, the more oxygen you can consume (i.e., the greater

your VO 2 max), the higher levels of exertion you can sustain, and

the faster you can get the job done. Doing the same amount of

work in less time should require at least the same amount of

oxygen, if not more. So why would these athletes show a reduction

in oxygen consumed? This lies in the face of all accepted wisdom

on the subject.

A well-developed motor pathway reduces

the amount of external work done by

the body and thereby reduces oxygen

Another factor that contributes to the improvement in eficiency

is the increase in strength that results from CrossFit training. It is

not intuitive, but it is strongly evident in the research literature

that strength training increases running performance without

increasing VO 2 max. It is frequently thought that strength training

somehow improves running economy by subtly altering technique.

However, I ind it dificult to believe, except in instances of gross

strength imbalances and deicits, that one could hone technique

for a speciic skill with a general activity. I would propose that after

you get stronger, the aerobic activity now represents a lower level

of intensity and requires fewer motor units (less active muscle)

to accomplish the same amount of work. Less muscle activity

requires less ATP and requires less oxygen.

Did the CrossFit-trained ireighters somehow become better

at oxygen handling? Is there some kind of elaborate respiratory

adaptation occurring that is related to an improved aerobic

capacity? It is really tempting to look for some elegant explanation

involving gas transport kinetics, enzymatic energy of activation,

and a whole bunch of other scientiic jargon. Let’s cut to the chase

though and say that the short answer is “no” to all of the above;

it’s not nearly that complex an explanation.

So, my explanation of the observed phenomenon in the ireighter

competitions is that CrossFit-trained ireighters become more

neurally eficient and stronger. Both of these phenomena contribute

to a lower muscular demand for oxygen and leave more of it in

the bottle. Both also contribute to winning competitions. While

these results are from competitions that simulate the real world

of ireighting, they point strongly to the fact that CrossFit training

prepares ireighters for the rigors of the profession better than

other training systems.

The irst point to consider is

that CrossFit-trained ireighters

are more eficient machines than

their competitors. They are performing equivalent competition

work at a lower metabolic cost compared to their rivals

because they are performing less extraneous work. This is an

adaptation in neuromuscular eficiency rather than an oxygen

kinetics phenomenon. Traditional physical training used by

lots of ireighters is often limited to linear aerobic movement

(running) and linear strength training (machines). Neither of

these modalities is applicable to the multiplanar challenges of a

ireighter competition course—or, for that matter, to the actual

job demands of a ireighter. CrossFit training, with its hugely

variant exercise menu, develops multiple motor and metabolic

pathways in every plane of motion and articulates well with real-

Firefighters

http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/Parker-fire.wmv

But let’s go beyond the individual ireighter. Let’s consider the

missions of ire departments. Within the context of those

missions, maximizing the safety of employees is important, as

is having equipment and personnel capable of safeguarding the

public. Administrators are also concerned with the iscal bottom

line as they have only so many dollars to provide a critical public

service. If we think about these ireighting competition wins

from the administrator’s perspective (beyond the PR perks), two

Online Video

March 2007

Putting Out Fires

...continued

observations of speciic interest arise here:

And beyond the realm of ireighting, just think of the stunning

importance of this—of being able, merely through effective physical

training, to actually decrease the amount of oxygen required to

fuel physical activity—for divers, astronauts, mountaineers, and

anyone else who needs to work in low-oxygen environments. The

implications are potentially staggering.

1. Because they can do more work in less time, these

ireighters can be in harm’s way for a shorter period

of time.

2. By expending less energy and consuming less oxygen,

these ireighters are able to do more repeated bouts

of work.

So the relevance of CrossFit to administrators is that their

ireighters can do more work in less time, have a higher overall

work capacity, are less likely to be injured, and consume fewer

purchased resources (oxygen). This means healthier, more effective

ireighters at a lower operating cost. Everyone wins: ireighters,

administrators, and the public.

Lon Kilgore , Ph.D., is an associate

professor of kinesiology at Midwestern

State University, where he teaches

exercise physiology and anatomy. He has

held faculty appointments in exercise

science at Warnborough University

(UK) and in kinesiology at Kansas State

University. A nationally ranked weightlifter

from age 13, he has extensive practical

experience as an NCAA strength coach

and as coach of international-caliber

competitive weightlifters. He is a coaching

certification instructor for all levels of

USA Weightlifting’s coaching development

system and has been a member or Chair

of the USAW Sports Science Committee

for 9 years. He was also a primary proposal

author and researcher on the USOC

Weightlifting Performance Enhancement

Team project and is a member of the Board

of Certification for the American Society

of Exercise Physiologists. In addition to

numerous articles in both academic and

popular publications, he is coauthor of

the books Starting Strength: A Simple and

Practical Guide for Coaching Beginners and

Practical Programming for Strength Training.

Perception

The Commander of Our Movements

March 2007

Eva Twardokens

This article was originally written specifically about the role of perception in alpine skiing. It was written by my father, George Twardokens (“Dr. T.,” as

he is known), and was published in the journal Professional Ski Instructors of America . We wanted to bring some new concepts and prescriptions to

the CrossFit community to get “black boxed” and refined. This article uses some of the words of my father’s article verbatim and removes most of the

skiing specifics to discuss the importance of perception in training for all types of athletes, as well as soldiers, police, firefighters and others who depend

on their physical readiness.

Athletes looking to improve their skills often concentrate on how

they move, but they’d be wise to focus also on which movements they

select and how quickly they respond. Training to reduce response

time through enhanced perception—as if by instinct—can make for

better performance on demand.

PERCEPTUAL

INPUT

WHERE IS IT?

WHAT IS IT?

Perception is a topic that’s generating wide general interest these

days. In his bestselling book Blink : The Power of Thinking Without

Thinking , Malcolm Gladwell examines what happens inside a person’s

brain during the nanosecond between when it receives stimuli and

then prompts decisions and actions the person isn’t even aware

of. Gladwell scrutinizes the way the brain absorbs information

immediately and then generates responses that we often consider to

be intuition but that, in reality, are part of a complicated process of

neural actions and reactions.

STIMULUS IDENTIFICATION

HOW DANGEROUS IS IT?

WHERE AM I

RELATION

TO IT?

ADVANCE?

STOP?

RESPONSE SELECTION

“When you walk out into the street and suddenly realize that a

truck is bearing down on you, do you have time to think through all

your options? Of course not,” he writes. “The only way that human

beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have

is that we’ve developed another kind of decision-making apparatus

that’s capable of making very quick judgments based on very little

information.”

RETREAT?

DODGE?

RESPONSE PROGRAMMING

Retrieval from skills

repertoire in the brain and

alerting the selected program

into action, e.g.,

Gladwell could be describing the skills used in military, LEO, and

athletic endeavors. Typical athletes and soldiers don’t perform

movements by consciously thinking their way around every obstacle,

through every movement, or over every hurdle. Instead, they rely on

a combination of sensory input, subsequent motor responses, and

learned skills for a safe and hopefully effective performance.

RETREAT!

While trainers and coaches have spent decades trying to help

students refine their motor responses, it’s still standard to talk

about the body and the mind as separate entities. For example, most

movement analyses consider only the performer’s motor output. In

reality, however, the majority of skills are composed of a triad of

factors—i.e., the individual’s sensor-motor-feedback loop.

MOTOR OUTPUT

Motor Pattern= movement pattern

Spinal Cord= nerves, pathways, reﬂexes

Muscles=sequential movement in the joints

Environment= interaction between human and physical elements

So what, exactly, is perception? In essence, it’s the sensory input

identified in the brain as a recognizable impression. It is first step

in the acquisition of skills. Perception is critical to the selection of

motor response, or the movement component of a skill.

FEEDBACK

There are three basic stages of perception (figure 1):

1. Human sensations from receptors.

2. Measured outcome (e.g.,time)

3. Evaluated outcome (e.g., rank)

1.) The identification of the stimulus: What is it?

2.) The selection of the response: What to do?

3.) The response programming: Get ready; go!

Figure 1

March 2007

Perception: The Commander of Our Movements

...continued

The elements influencing outcomes are:

Now, the questions are: Can we improve perception? If so, how?

The answer is yes, we can improve perception through training.

There are numerous options in how you can train perception, but

I suggest keeping it simple.

1.) Reaction time (RT): Neural processing of unexpectedly

presented stimuli.

2.) Movement time (MT): The physical response.

3.) Response time (RES): The sum of the reaction time and

the movement time.

The best way to begin is to work on some basic movement

categories: advancing, stopping, retreating, and dodging. Remember

that we are not training the movements themselves here, but the

decision of what movement to make and the ability to make that

decision and response quickly. Here are a few proposed ways to

start perception training and also incorporate some CrossFit

moves.

Deficiency in perception may lead to incorrect selection of the

appropriate movement in response. Proficiency in perception is

a hallmark of master performers in the fields of MIL/LEO and

elite athletics. This group of people can make the appropriate

movement choices quickly and accurately, which can be life saving,

tactical, or victorious.

A muscle-up is a three-stage movement in which it is possible

to stop the trainee mid-movement and have them make a

decision. The three stages consist of the pull, the transition, and

the dip. The trainer could have the trainee begin the movement

and, at the transition stage, give a signal whether to advance

or retreat. Remember, the more simple the signal (such as a

thumbs up or down), the better the training, since we want

the response to be fast. In the field, the trainee would make

the decision whether to advance or retreat based the stimuli

perceived in the situation—for example, seeing an advancing

opponent, an enemy with a gun, or a room full of fire. The

bottom line is that the signal is all about interpretation, and

you don’t want to be teaching your trainees how to analytically

interpret things, but how to react immediately to the stimulus.

With the muscle-up, unless you are working with a super-

advanced athlete (or gymnast), you will probably be working

with one rep at a time. Let the trainee rest after each rep

of whatever response programming they have performed

(continuing or discontinuing the completion of the muscle-up).

Five to ten reps should be sufficient to benefit the trainee.

The transition stage, where the signal of thumbs up

or thumbs down should be given.

The trainer gives the thumbs up signal and the

trainee continues with the dip portion of the

movement.

The trainee gets the thumbs down and retreats,

letting himself down.

Online Video

Muscle Ups

http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/PerceptionMUs.wmv

http://media.crossfit.com/cf-video/PerceptionMUs.mov

CrossFit Journal - Issue 55.pdf

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