My First CrossFit Class
I went to my first CrossFit class today. It was at 6AM in Rancho Park, which is a big, beautiful public park in West L.A.
First for warmups we did an 800 M run. Then 3 rounds of
- 10 pushups
- 10 pullups
- 16 lunges
Next we did some light stretching.
The actual workout consisted of 3 rounds of:
- 400 M run
- 30 high jumps onto a park bench
- 12 wall throws of a 6 lb medicine ball over a high wall
The workout was challenging, but enjoyable. The sun came up in the middle of the workout and burned away some of the haze and I was really grateful to be outside, rather than hunched over a desk or in some crappy weight room.
In CrossFit, you’re supposed to keep track of everything and continually try to achieve personal records. I finished the workout in 18 minutes and 24 seconds which is pretty lame. I think I was two or three minutes behind the fastest person. I think I could shave a minute off just by working harder on the negatives and by making faster transitions.
Anyway, I decided to do CrossFit because I want to raise my intensity level for tournaments. My other workouts are helpful but they serve different purposes. I do interval hill runs (5 minutes run, 2 minutes walk) up Runyon Canyon which is a challenging cardio workout. I also do kettlebells. Right now I’m doing a ballistic workout with very heavy weights and very low reps (no more than 3) as I’m trying to improve my explosiveness.
CrossFit fills in the gaps and provides very good all-around strength, conditioning and agility training. Also there are other people around so it’s not as crazy-making as working out by yourself.
It seems that a lot of fighters do CrossFit. Especially BJJ fighters. Apparently the “Fight Gone Bad” workout was devised to prep BJ Penn for a fight in UFC.
I’ll let you know how it goes.