Monday 03-16-09 – I lost a fight with a kettlebell.

Posted on | March 17, 2009 | No Comments

So as I noted in previous posts, I’ve been spending a lot more time doing climbing specific training and less time in the gym. I do get one to two gym sessions a week in though, generally adapted mountain athlete ones. Lately I’ve been focusing on power endurance/work capacity. The adaptation is usually because I can’t quite handle the volume those guys can. I think this is because I’m not doing gym work as frequently.

Being the stubborn guy that I am, I’ve tried not scaling them before, and the workouts themselves go fine – but it takes enough out of me that my movement training for climbing suffers the next day, which is kind of counter productive.

Yesterday was a fun one though. Rayna and I did this one together, along with a friend of ours at the gym who thought it looked like enough fun that he wanted to join in for a few rounds.

Warm Up:

3 rounds of:

3x 35lbs Turkish Get Ups each side.
5x burpies

Then (for time)

8 rounds of:
10x Deadlifts at 185lbs
5x 1-arm Kettlebell Clean and Jerk at 53lbs
10x Box Jump (24″ box)
10x Weighted Sit-Up at 45lbs.

Cool Down:

3 rounds of:

5 strict pullups
10 dips
10 push ups.

This was brutal. The KB clean and jerk really slowed me down. I need to revisit my form on these. I have a red and purple bruise on my left shoulder from the belle’ slamming into it – which should have been an indicator that I’m doing something wrong. I have the “snap” through part just fine for KB snatches (i.e. they don’t hurt my forearms) but clearly I’m missing some of the technique to clean them. If anyone has any pointers or good tutorials I’d appreciate it.

As an aside, Rob Shaul the guy who runs Mtnathlete, did 10 rounds of this workout in 24 something. Pretty impressive. It took my longer than that to do eight.