Through that mental framing, here are some of the most common issues and misunderstandings I see in regards to gymnastic movement from within our community. These are in no specific order and certainly aren’t items that all are guilty of, but hopefully there will be some piece in here that clicks either for your own training or for your interaction with your clients and athletes.

Issue #1: A Lack of Knowledge of the Human Body and Basic Movement

What I mean by this is, not having a basic understanding of base-level physical terms for body positioning and joint movement. Look, I’m certainly not saying that everyone at your box needs to sound like Stuart McGill, Gray Cook, or Kelly Starrett, but they need some type of rudimentary understanding of the human body’s positions and movements. I would say that at a minimum, people should be familiar with flexion and extension, internal and external rotation, and anterior and posterior pelvic tilt.

Issue #2: Not Being Able to Create Body Positions and Movements

This piggybacks on the first issue. Not only do you have to know the positions and movement, but you have to be able to create them with your own body. Having those you work with be capable of creating shifts in body position by way of your verbal cueing requires that the clients know what it feels like to fire those those muscles. Whatever terms you want to use with your own clients and in your own coaching is fine, but there needs to be an understanding. Clients and athletes need to know what they should be thinking of or concentrating on to create “X” and how that should feel once it happens. “Tuck your pelvis under,” “Give me more posterior pelvic tilt,“ and, “Imagine trying to pee over your shoulder and behind you,” all accomplish the same goal, but both you and the individual you’re working with need to be on the same page. You need to both have understanding of the terminology you’re using, the desired effect you’re looking for, and how it should feel.

Issue #3: Not Having Defined Standards for Movements and Range of Motion

Another common problem I see on a regular basis is clients and coaches not having consistent and clearly defined range-of-motion (ROM) and movement standards. Yes, I understand part of that is the nature of the beast that is CrossFit as a sport and competitive endeavor – continually changing and evolving standards for what constitutes a “good rep” in a given movement. But what I’m referring to is when we ask three different individuals from the same gym what the range of motion requirement for a given movement is and we get three different answers.

As coaches, we need to realize that competitive exercisers are the minority of our community, and Games-level athletes are a fraction of a fraction of that competitive minority. I’m not particularly concerned with what the ROM requirement for a muscle-up-to-ring-handstand-push-up will be at the 2014 Reebok CrossFit Games as it relates to the demographic that I’m speaking on. What I would like to see is that a gym’s 6:00am class and its 4:30pm class are both looking for the same depth on their dips.

I suggest you sit and talk with all your coaches about the ROM requirements for all the gymnastic movements in CrossFit that you want to standardize for your gym. If you realize you’ve got five or six coaches who have been looking for and requiring different things in a given movement, imagine what that means for the 150 clients spread between five classes a day. If we’re going to compare performance, we need to make sure we’re all competing in the same variants of the same movements. Here’s a starting point if you’ve never thought much about this.

Issue #4: Not Being Able to Maintain Positioning Through a Range of Motion

So now that we’ve talked about ROM, I can finish out by highlighting a piece that ties back into the first couple points: not understanding or being able to maintain proper positioning through a range of motion. Most people can be brought up to speed pretty quickly on basic anatomical positioning cues. If you’re worth your salt, you should be able to create most positions and physical relationships in fairly short order as well. The tricky part once an athlete understands what you’re talking about and can create it within themselves is being able to maintain “X” in a dynamic movement. It’s great that your clients can hit scapular retraction and depression, but can they maintain it during a kipping swing? It’s fantastic that your athletes understand what neutral spinal position is and what it feels like, but can they create and sustain it under load?

For the most part, these things can become second nature and outside of excessive fatigue should be able to be automatically maintained. However, as a starting point, keep in mind that in regard to positioning, very little is arbitrary. Maintaining the positioning and activation that you’re looking for in a dynamic movement is something that will take deliberate work for most of your clients during their developmental stages. Make sure that you, as the coach and example to your clients, are also not guilty of turning into an anatomical disaster with your gymnastic positioning and movements when they are required to travel through a ROM.

That’s a brief start to some of the big picture items that I see with many coaches, clients, and athletes when it comes to gymnastic movement. If you found value in this discussion, I’d love to go a little bit deeper. We could even start highlighting common individual movement errors and the most productive fixes. If you like this idea, please post to the comments below.

Photos provided by CrossFit LA.

The post The 4 Most Common Issues in Coaching and Learning Gymnastics appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It might be nice to think in advance about some of your potential New Year’s resolutions and think about what else needs to be adjusted or restructured in order to support these goals. Now, not everyone needs the following three things, but for the vast majority of people that my wife and I have worked with, they are often the differences between success and failure.

1. Have a Real Goal

This is absolutely where I see most people begin the road to not reaching their desired outcome – they don’t really know what they want. Huge swaths of my friends and family will cry out on New Year’s that they “resolve to lose weight!” Well, that certainly leaves quite a margin of error. Do you want to lose weight by having your legs removed in terrible a ring handstand push up accident? No, of course not.

“I want to lose weight by reducing my body fat.”

Much better, but there’s still room for improvement. Do you want to lose just a tiny bit or a life-threatening amount? Turns out neither answer is that great. Goals need to be even more specific.

“I want to lose weight by reducing my body fat by 5%.”

There we go, now are you okay with that happening over a period of five to ten years? Probably not. We need to establish a timeline for the goal. This is also a beautiful piece of the process because it forces you to start wrapping your head around being honest with yourself about how quickly you can meet your goals.

“I want to lose weight by reducing my body fat by 5% before July first of this year.”

Fantastic improvement in the goal above just by truly defining it. When in doubt about structuring a goal, see if you remember hearing at some point the SMART mnemonic for goal setting. Make goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

2. Have a Real “Why” for Your Goal

Any time we set for ourselves, there tends to be a far greater degree of success when there is a genuine reason for reaching toward that destination. Wanting to drop a few pounds doesn’t carry much weight when it’s something you only arbitrarily want to do out of a sense of obligation. Wanting to lose some weight because type 2 diabetes runs in your family, you want to be a better role model for your children, and you want to be as attractive as possible for your spouse are far better reasons that will help keep you pressing forward when motivation and willpower are lacking.

This extends to performance-based goals as well. Don’t aim to “get stronger” because you just want to feel like you’re making progress. Do it so you can qualify for the American Open and be a better human being in general.

3. Have a Support Network or Know Where You Can Turn

For some of the people my wife and I deal with, even after guiding them toward making high-quality, meaningful goals, they still fall short of reaching the level of success they would like. It’s often not because they don’t have the willpower or means to reach a goal solely on their own, but because they are lacking someone to support them in their journey.

What’s even worse than lacking a support network is being surrounded by people or situations that work against your objectives. It’s one thing to have a spouse who doesn’t want to go gluten and dairy free, but who is still willing to make minor substitutions and compromises to help you achieve your desires. It’s a wholly different thing to have a spouse who orders pizza three nights a week while you’re fighting for those rocking abs.

Again, when it comes to performance, support networks work the same way. You’ll never reach your snatch or clean and jerk potential when your workout partners refuse to touch a barbell. I’m not saying to get a divorce and get all new friends, but find some people willing to join you in the struggle toward a common interest.

Conclusion

I know this list could go on almost endlessly, looking for where we can continually hone goals, make plans, evaluate performance metrics in consistent timeframes, and so on. But the reality is that for the vast majority of people the above three items will greatly improve their odds of success. Do I know by how much? Sure, eleventy percent. No, not at all. Setting and reaching goals is a deeply personal experience that has plenty of unique mental and emotional factors. But even though we all process and handle things differently, having a New Year’s resolution based on a high-quality goal with a purposeful motivation and a support structure can only improve our odds of success.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post 3 Things You Absolutely Need to Achieve Your Goals appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I would venture to guess that most people understand there are many inflammation responses going on in the body at any given time. The acute inflammation we get from the physical stimulation and demands created by our training programs is generally a good thing, pushing the body toward repair and healing. However, outside of our exercise-induced inflammation, we are also bombarded by other physical, chemical, and biological agents and stimuli that contribute to chronic inflammation. While the acute inflammation from exercise is nice to keep in check, it is the sum of all stressors of chronic inflammation that we really need to concern ourselves with. Chronic inflammation can eventually potentially lead to multiple conditions and diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, and even some cancers.

Anti-Inflammatory Supplements

Since we’ll tackle additional recovery measures and restorative means in another article, let’s look at some supplements we can use to stave off excess inflammation and see if we can’t pick up some additional benefits along the way. A search on Breaking Muscle for “fish oil” shows there is already eight pages of results, so we’ll go ahead and pass on that one since it’s been covered in depth already. Instead, the first supplement we’ll check out will be a quick look into green tea.

Green Tea

One of the good things about looking for links between green tea and inflammation is that this potent plant is being used in a plethora of medical and scientific research pieces as we speak. Susanne M. Henning, Ph.D., R.D., adjunct professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles has finished a block of research that intended to study the influence of green tea on prostate cancer. A study group consumed six cups of brewed green tea daily for three to eight weeks, depending on the timing of their prostate surgery, and the control group did not consume green tea. Post-study serum prostate-specific antigen concentrations were considerably lower in the group that consumed the tea.

Researchers also established that in the green tea-consuming patients, nuclear factor kappa B (NFKB) was greatly reduced. As NFKB is a serious indicator of inflammation that is linked to cancer, autoimmune diseases, septic shock, viral infection, and improper immune development, it is an exceptionally good thing to keep down. Additionally, scientists from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio have identified that the green tea polyphenol epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) decreases the expression of interleukin-8, a protein that causes inflammation. They also identified an inverse relationship in that the higher the dose of EGCG, the greater it decreased the expression of interleukin-8.

Ginger Root

Another item to supplement in the battle against inflammation also starts with the letter “G” – ginger root. Both the American Association for Cancer Research, in its journal Cancer Prevention Research, and a University of Michigan study identified that ginger may have potential as a colon cancer prevention agent. They also found that supplementation with ginger root reduced colon inflammation markers. Aside from colon cancer, ginger has also been shown to work against skin, ovarian, and breast cancer. And for a benefit a little more in tune to our exercise pursuits, the University of Georgia found that adult exercisers who took two grams of daily oral supplementation of ginger had a reduction in exercise-related muscle pain by 25%.

Green Tea, Ginger, and the Athlete

I realize what I have presented here in regards to green tea and ginger is predominately concerned with cancer (not that fighting cancer is ever a bad thing). But if you look at the relationship that exists between cancer and inflammation, anything that lowers cancer risk factors through reducing markers of inflammation is more than likely going to help out your swollen traps and lats, too. If we consider that ginger can potential reduce our muscle pain by 25% along with the green tea EGCG and interleukin-8 relationship, green tea and ginger might present a potent one-two punch against joint and muscle aches from our training.

It is also worth keeping in mind that your body has a finite number of resources that can ever be dedicated to physiological functions. The less overall inflammation your body has to contend with, the more that it can focus on healing your exercise induced, localized, acute inflammation.

References:

1. Henning, Susanne. “Green Tea Reduced Inflammation, May Inhibit Prostate Cancer Tumor Growth.” American Association for Cancer Research. (accessed November 21, 2013).

2. Suzanna , Zick. “Phase II Study of the Effects of Ginger Root Extract on Eicosanoids in Colon Mucosa in People at Normal Risk for Colorectal Cancer.” Cancer Prevention Research. (2011): pp 1929-1937. (accessed November 21, 2013).

3. Wheeler, Derek. “The green tea polyphenol epigallocatechin-3-gallate improves systemic hemodynamics.” Shock. no. 3 (2007): 353-359. (accessed November 21, 2013).

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Hey guys, can we chat? And by “guys,” I mean the boys, girls, men, and women of the CrossFit community. Did you guys see the workout video from “Diemond Dave’s Judy Chompin’ Weightliftin’ Dojo” on YouTube? You know, this one:

Those snatches are pretty bad, huh? Probably not something you’d want to see from yourself, your athletes, or your clients. These are bad not only from a performance and efficiency standpoint, but also are a needless injury risk. I think we can all agree on that. Now, we (the CrossFit community) are not expecting all of the folks in your gym to look like James Tatum or Ariel Stephens, but we definitely won’t allow a continual display of hideous, mutant starfish sexual maneuvers. We all see weightlifting movement like that from time to time, and when it happens, I think we would all agree the athlete needs to reduce the load and work on building a better foundational movement. I’m not asking for mastery, just a true understanding of what’s going on in the movement and the means to execute it in a more technically competent fashion.

Beyond a solid understanding of the basics, most of us, as well as our clients, spend a significant amount of our training time and energy in pursuit of weightlifting skill and the related movement strength pieces. I’m also venturing a guess that we’d all agree that gaining strength and proficiency in weightlifting movements does a ton to improve our CrossFit performance. So why is it that the concerns in regards to range of motion, technique, skill, and foundational strength in the weightlifting movements tend to be so easily brushed aside when dealing with the gymnastic components of CrossFit?

Maybe it’s because high-level CrossFit is all about moving weights? Wait, 50% of the events at the 2013 CrossFit Games had some type of gymnastic element. Or how about this gold nugget from Jacob Tyspkin of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club: “Gymnastics is of particular importance for females. In the 2012 CrossFit Games, six of the top ten girls, and all of the top three, had a gymnastics background.”¹

Then maybe it’s because we’re not concerned with gymnastics at the highest levels of our sport and instead we’re just concerned about the basics. So what about this part from Greg Glassman’s famous World-Class Fitness in 100 Words, “Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds.” Hmm, that’s 50% of the movements listed in that hundred-word gem.

Well then surely it’s because most of us live in the “middle” of CrossFit land, the classics, “The Girls.” Darn, wrong again. 76% of standard CrossFit benchmark Girls contain gymnastic movement. So, if gymnastic movement is foundational to our pursuit of world-class fitness, is present in an overwhelming majority of our benchmark workouts, and is a huge commonality in being genuinely good at The Sport of Fitness, then why are we okay with our community standards for gymnastic technique and range of motion being so far from what we demand in barbell driven movement?

Yes, I’m talking to you. You with the three-AbMat-scaled, snatch-width grip hand placement, palms rotated to 90 degrees, butchered and disjointed kipping handstand push up. It would never be acceptable to say that cutting half of the range of motion for a strict press or push press would be okay, but it’s done with boring regularity in our community when we look at gymnastic movements. Do we really need to look to the double-green-band, half-range-of-motion, pseudo-kipping ring dip? How about the massive-spinal-overextension, legs-splayed-wildly, lower-body-dominant kip that bombs forces much greater than bodyweight onto an inactive shoulder girdle?

I think part of this stems from an ignorance about prerequisite strength and protecting our bodies. I think that’s a piece of the puzzle, but honestly I believe that for the most part we as a community know better, but choose to ignore it. We scale load, but not range of motion and technique requirements in our weightlifting pieces. But we don’t do the same with gymnastics because we’re lazy and impatient.

Creating good scaling and progressions for gymnastic movements that replicates proper movement patterns and sought-after technique takes creativity, knowledge, and skill. However, I believe the bigger factor is that many people are not prepared to accept just how much more consistency, patience, and dedication it takes to earn and own your gymnastic movement. People don’t want to go the long, hard road of graduating through progressive variations of movements, and to systematically expose themselves to greater demands of skill and strength over months or even years. They want to check that little Rx box without evaluating a long-term risk and reward relationship.

For most people, spending a couple months figuring out double unders is about the longest they have ever spent developing a movement in their life. Trying to get people to dedicate many times that amount of time and effort on developing strict, full range of motion, technically-correct gymnastic movement is one hell of a hard sell. Keep in mind I’m not talking about gymnastic wizardry, simply a strict pull up, ring dip, and handstand push up as a start, while also reaching for a strict muscle up as a gymnastic priority. And if you start looking toward intermediate and advanced gymnastic movements, then you need to start coming to terms with spending multiple years in pursuit of movements and holds.

This isn’t just a call to beginning and intermediate CrossFitters. When you look to the number of DNFs in the “Legless” event at the 2013 Games, it obvious we need to set a higher priority for gymnastic skill and strength bias in the community at all levels. Will it take time and dedication? Absolutely. But here’s the thing, we’ve all got the time. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t plan on arbitrarily stopping CrossFit in a year or two. Most of us are hooked for life. Aside from that, there is literally no downside to these pursuits. Becoming stronger, better, and more efficient at foundational gymnastic movements doesn’t reduce your ability anywhere else. It will improve your strength, control, coordination, spatial awareness, movement quality, sequencing, and mobility with no tradeoff – aside from taking the time and effort, and holding yourself to a higher standard.

Be better at the basics. Be virtuous.

References:

1. Greg, Glassman. CrossFit Inc., “World-Class Fitness in 100 Words.” Accessed October 24, 2013.

Jacob, Tsypkin. Juggernaut Training Systems, “A System for Developing Competitive CrossFitters, Part 3.” Last modified June 10, 2013. Accessed October 24, 2013.

Photo 1 by Sgt. Quentin Johnson [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo 2 by English: Staff Sgt. Clinton Firstbrook [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo 3 by English: Cpl. Jennifer B. Poole [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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