I want some CHALK!!

So...what to do with crossfit? What to do with lifting? What to do, what to do? I know a few things, crossfit and the extra lifting this last year helped (i believe) my psoas injury, and prevented other nasty things like my ability to get ITBS. GRANTED recently the psoas injury has started to whine in new and curious ways like: knee pain. Bizarrely when I release the trigger point associated with the psoas injury the knee pain will go away. At least I know this is not a new injury, but i'm a little frustrated with the stupid injury. It has been over a year by now. Not a fan. Fortunately it isn't as terrible as it was a year ago, its just become this nagging injury. Sigh.

I'm flirting with the idea of a strength program that most crossfit affiliates (mine included) subscribes to...Starting Strength. I haven't bought the book or really read much about it, just generally looked up the affiliated wikki on it and have gone with that. In someways I'm pretty familiar with the concepts and the lifts as my crossfit affiliate mixes a lot of this general idea of lifting with our workouts anyway. If we have a general met-con day where we have a prescribed workout for time, we will generally lift heavy for one specific lift before the met-con. And on days where we just lift...well...we just lift.

I like it because it is simple. Not too many lifts. Just mainly linear progression in strength in a specific manner with some simple lifts. I won't have to spend a zillion years on five hundred weird machines that I can't remember how they work anyway most of the time and constantly thinking: was this the position I had it in last time?? Generally there are just three lifts for a particular day and really only 5 I have to keep track of: back squat, deadlift, push press, bench press and power clean. I'm starting with a modified program that isn't specific to the book, mainly because I didn't want to bench press and/or do power cleans today, maybe in the future. I wasn't going to my crossfit affiliate so I didn't want to scare people with the power cleans. Granted I also confused power cleans and squat cleans where you end up in a squat position below parallel...I *really* think that would have scared a few people with a squat clean, but maybe next time I will mix in power cleans...although all the jumping does draw more attention to oneself. I'm such a dork. :-)

But back to my gym...I haven't really ventured into the weight room at this gym all that much. I swim there and last year would go to the spin classes and maybe an occasional yoga class so I don't really know my way around when it comes to weights. Few observations:

Only TWO barbells...three if you count the one attached to the smith machine (that's what they call that weird contraption where the barbell is attached to it? right?)

Why is every guy obsessed with doing curls? OK maybe not every guy, but 9 out of 10 were. I am still not certain when a person actually uses that muscle in that capacity...much less loaded with a lot of weight. Also many people seem to think that range of motion is over-rated. Again, something I don't understand. I really just wanted to tell one guy, go lighter and use your full range of motion. It might save you from a trip to your PT in the future.

I pretty much felt like a big dork with my weight lifting shoes, but I still went ahead and wore them. They are waaaaaaay easier to lift in than running shoes. So I just sucked it up that I felt like a dork because I knew I would be wearing dorky lifting shoes and not moving much weight...so i'd look dorky for no good reason. Oh well.

So I did my standard crossfit warmup:
Run 0.5 mile on the tread mill and then 2x of the following:

Stretch the hip out
10 squats
10 push ups
10 sit ups
10 back extensions ( I couldn't find this machine, next time I may just have to do 'supermans' on the ground...so I skipped it)
10 assisted pull ups ( I HATE this contraption at the gym. Give me a rubber band, a straight bar and let me do kipping pull ups any day of the week. This crazy thing you have to kneel on and you don't even get a straight bar. I didn't like it. )
10 assisted dips
repeat

Then
3x5 back squats
5x1 dead lifts
3x5 push press

The way they talk in the wikki site about how to find this initial weight to start off with was to start with an empty bar and do the lift and then add weight and do the lift again, basically until you slow down with the weight and then that is your starting 'round' of the set. So it is better to start a little light so that your future progress can be linear and you don't stall early on. Granted i'm a weakling so I ended up with these weights:

Back Squat: 65 lbs
Dead lift: 135lbs
push press: 40 lbs

The thing that sucks about this gym...NO CHALK. I didn't realize how helpful chalk was until I couldn't have any. boo

Funny thing happened while I was trying to find my deadlift weight. The bars at this gym are sorta rough, and weird to get the plates on and off. I'm used to smooth bars, these have all sorts of ridges on them and they made me struggle to get them on and off. I was trying to get the 25lb plates off and put the 35lb plate on and I couldn't. Now I'm feeling like a bigger dork with the dorky lifting shoes. I'm sure someone was thinking: Look at that girl who is wearing lame lifting shoes and can't even get the stupid plate off the bar.

So...of course i can see out of the corner of my eye a guy has come over to help me and then asks me if he can help me. I let him. I do appreciate when people help me when i'm struggling, but I just felt so lame that I kinda wanted to hide when he came over. He is in the middle of helping me get the plate off and I see he sorta takes a double take at the weight i'm racking on the bar: 45lbs on each side...so total weight with the bar of 135lbs. I kinda giggled to myself. I am kinda a weakling so I have never really thought about it. It was kinda funny though seeing that I couldn't even get the big plates on the stupid bar. Nice one.

I'm still in the process of working out the details of my base building phase with my coach and what that entails, but I think i will be able to shove 2-3 days of this program with 1 crossfit day and then a whole lotta base building stuff that he has planned in the mix too. Should be fun.