Empower Weekly WOD: Week Beginning September 15th 2025

Monday, September 15th 2025: Make Up Day

See last week’s WODs

Tuesday, September 16th 2025

Thruster
3-3-3-3-3-3-3

I hate sets of 21 thrusters at 95lbs as much as the next person but give me a short, heavy set of thrusters and I am in my glory. Few lifts are such a pure expression of power and explosive strength transfer from lower to upper body. Especially when pulling from the floor, a heavy set of thrusters uses every muscle in your body and weakness anywhere will undo you.

At the 2018 CanWest Games, my favourite event was the 2 rep thruster max. We had unlimited attempts in 10 minutes to get our best lift. At the time, my thruster 1 rep max was around 215lbs, but with the roaring of the crowd, I somehow found it in me to squat clean 225lbs and put it overhead twice!

Didn’t lift quite that much this time around but was still happy with my performance. I started at a challenging weight (165lbs) then moved up 5lbs every set. 185lbs was my best/easiest lift, a millimetre difference in the rack position on the squat clean made it feel like the bar weighed next to nothing. Based on that I went up to 190lbs for my 6th set. I was able to complete it with good form but felt physically drained after so decided to complete my final set at 175lbs, which felt like the right choice. Moral of the story is listen to your body.

This workout is scored for total volume. Personally, I prefer lifting from the floor competition style with a squat clean if your coach allows it.

Here’s Dimitry Klokov setting the thruster world record at 192kgs:

Wednesday, September 17th 2025

4 Rounds:
2 Rope Climbs
100ft Sprint
4 Squat Cleans @225lbs
100ft Sprint

On Sunday, you had the opportunity to master pulling yourself under the barbell in the squat clean using a lighter load. Today is when all those light practice reps pay off! Today’s squat clean load is heavy. You should be aiming at 80+% of your one rep max here.

The day I understood the squat clean for the first time was the day I saw my coach squat clean 295lbs. He just stood up with the bar then dropped under it and caught it in the front rack position and stood up again. “Oh,” I thought to myself, “it is just a deadlift and a front squat.” If I can deadlift it and I can front squat it, I should be able to squat clean it (my historic front squat 1 rep max is 275lbs and my historic squat clean 1 rep max is 265lbs, so it’s pretty close).

It’s a deadlift with a bit of acceleration at the top followed by an immediate retraction of your hips as you pull yourself under the barbell to retrieve it in a front squat position.

But here’s a thing many people miss. If you are death-gripping the bar, you will not have the speed necessary to get under it. You need to relax your grip to allow the turnover to happen.

Thursday, September 18th 2025

5 Rounds:
10 Squat Snatch @55/75#
30 sec Chin Over Bar Hold
10 Squat Snatch @55/75#
60 sec Plank Hold

A twist on last week's Squat Clean, L-Sit, Bar Hang workout. Same format, different movements. No L-Sits so I was a happy camper. So much easier.

30 seconds is perfect for that gym class classic, the flexed arm hang. This is an opportunity to build your strength at the top of a pull up position. If you haven’t yet developed the strength to pull yourself up, use the J-cups or a box to get yourself over the bar and then hold.

A one minute plank is a bit too easy so I upped the ante by doing a ring plank hold to get the added benefit of developing my shoulder stabilizers. Kelly Starrett offers good advice on how to practice an effective plank and the importance of good belly breathing in this position. I found this useful for the workout. Whether you use rings or not, I find the high plank position has superior transferability to other skills and better replicates positions we naturally find ourselves in than planking on the elbows.

The squat snatch is very light so, it is a great opportunity to practice mastering your bar path and pulling yourself under the barbell rather than riding it down. Rather than racing through the workout, muscling this movement with brute strength, use this as an opportunity to hone your squat snatch skill into a thing of beauty.

Friday, September 19th 2025: Make Up Day

See previous WODs

Saturday, September 20th 2025: Empower Team WOD

TBA

Sunday, September 21st 2025

2 Rounds:
1000m Row
50 Thrusters @65#
30 C2B Pull Ups

CrossFit: “Intensity is the independent variable most commonly associated with maximizing the rate of return on favorable adaptation to exercise.”

The above statement has been proven true time and again. The athlete capable of producing the greatest intensity across broad time and modal domains can reasonably be considered the fittest and the greater the intensity you train at, the fitter you will become. With two provisos:

1) You are building intensity upon a solid foundation of skill and consistency
2) You are recovering sufficiently between bouts of intensity

You see, while intensity may be the cure, too much of anything can turn into poison. If you are training 20+ days consecutively, not every one of them can be intense. I hit some pretty good numbers during this training stretch, including some of the heaviest thrusters and squat cleans for volume that I have performed in recent years. The real win was little to no hip pain during or after which felt like something worth celebrating. When your body is feeling amazing, you just want to keep the wins rolling. Until the wheels come off.

Or, alternatively, you could be proactive and intentionally reduce your training intensity for a spell to give your physiology time to consolidate gains. And if you do this intelligently, you can use your low intensity WODs to broaden your fitness base and make yourself more resilient to injury.

You see, most folks mistakenly believe that scaling workouts necessarily means making them easier but it is possible to lower intensity while increasing difficulty. Here’s how:

For the row I just backed off the intensity going 50% effort in round 1 and 70% effort in round 2. I was using it as a warm up to the other movements.

50 thrusters at 65lbs is a weight that you can blast through at high intensity. On a bad day it shouldn’t take me more than 2 sets to get through these. Instead, I performed 2 sets of 10 keg thrusters at 25lbs and 1 set per side of 15 single arm kettlebell thrusters at 45lbs. Note that the loads used were lower than the Rx automatically reducing the workout intensity. But because of the awkward nature of the implements used, my sets were also performed more slowly and my breaks between sets were longer, further reducing intensity by extending the time taken to accomplish the work. Essentially, I performed less work in more time.

But it was anything but easy. The keg is awkward both because it cannot be racked requiring constant grip and shoulder work and because the water sloshes around challenging all the core muscles of your trunk and your shoulder stabilizers.

Single handed kettlebell thrusters load your body asymmetrically challenging your core muscles. It also forces each arm to work independently so you can assist your weak side with your strong side.

The outcome is that though this workout is performed at a much lower intensity with lighter loads at slower speeds, it develops core and overhead strength and resilience far superior to what you would develop with a barbell. By laying down collagen layers of protective fascia in this way, you make yourself more resilient to injury and increase your potential for sustaining intensity in future workouts. Instead of working the peak of the pyramid (power output) you are broadening the base.

Instead of kipping chest to bar pull ups, I worked strict pull ups opting for strength development over speed. This was clearly harder and slower than the Rx’d option but also reduced the intensity and the opportunity for injury.

The point is that while intensity is the hallmark of effective programming, it does not mean you have to chase intensity every day. And scaling the workout to reduce intensity does not mean you have to make it easier. A scaled workout need not be considered a throw-away training day. It could be utilized to develop athletic attributes that support intensity and move your fitness game forward. If you’re not sure how, ask your coach!