Ever have anxiety dreams about CrossFit?   I did about this WOD!  L-Sits are never good for me and in my dream the WOD got longer and longer with no end in sight.  Nevertheless, it turned out to be a perfect example of how I break down my daily WOD in order to emphasize skill development.

Right now my WOD emphasis is conditioning (I’m moonlighting a strength program in Monday and Wednesday Open Gyms so don’t need to go too heavy in the WODs but do need conditioning).  21 hang power snatches at 115lbs is not a heavy weight for me but it is too heavy to do unbroken.  75lbs is too light.  I decided to do 105lbs with the goal of unbroken sets.

First round I got 19 reps done then had to set the bar down.  Too heavy.  Obviously 95lbs would have been the correct choice.  At this point many athletes would take some weight off and resume at 95lbs but this would be a mistake.  If I’d started at 95lbs it would have worked but now, fatigued from doing 19 consecutive reps at 105lbs, there was a good chance I would not be able to go unbroken at 95lbs either.  And then what?  Retreat to 85lbs?  After fatiguing at 95lbs I might fail there too and end up at 75lbs.  In general, this is a poor training strategy.

Instead, I revised my plan of unbroken sets and changed my goal to 2 sets per round.  Round 1 was 19+2.  In round 2 I chose a more tactical 14+7.  But by round 3 it was obvious 12+9 was a superior strategy.

The result was I got practice stringing together consecutive hang power snatches.  I learned that 95lbs is a weight I can realistically do for 21 reps in a row, 105lbs is not (yet).  And I discovered 12+9 was a great strategy for breaking up sets of 21 reps at that weight.

For the squats, my goal was to finish each round under a minute.  Squats done at this speed are quite potent!  In most WODs I use the squats to recover from push ups, pull ups or something else so I rarely sprint them.  It was tough but I managed 57, 54 and 55 seconds per round so I now know that this is possible for me.  I also discovered I could sprint the first 35-40 reps before I needed to struggle and that I could hold a one-squat-per-second pace for exactly 26 seconds before I started to fall behind.

I do not yet have a good L-Sit so I did a W-Sit holding myself off the floor.  The first round I had no clear goal and required 5 sets to get through but based on that I determined 3 sets per round a challenging but attainable goal and was successful in rounds 2 & 3.  The discovery here was that a 20 second W-Sit Hold is a realistic goal for me and that 25 seconds may be attainable.

My finish time was an unimpressive 49:10 but though slow, I got quality practice learning several lessons while developing my skill and self-awareness for future reference.  This one was a great example of how you can approach new, non-benchmark WODs to get the most out of them.  EnjoyJ