Crossfit Girl's Gone Bad

Ladie's Night Crossfit

Put a bunch of hot, sweaty chicks together with some tractor tires, a couple of "prowlers", some weights and rowing machines and you've got a recipe for punishment. That would be Crossfit Centurion's Girl's Only WOD. 

My friend Cindy belongs to a Crossfit gym that hosts "Ladie's Nights" where they invite women to come get their fitness fiyah on and become familiar with a little bit of what a Crossfit Gym has to offer. Its also a chance for all the girls to get together for a little post WOD (Workout of the Day) "happy hour" with some socializing and a potluck of goodies, mimosas, wine and other spirits. But before the "happy" commences you have to get sweaty. Good and sweaty. Think serious suffering sweaty. Really. Like you want to roll over and die after you're done kind of suffering sweaty. Those girls don't jog on a treadmill for a half hour and then call it a workout. Um. That wouldn't even be considered a decent warm-up by Crossfit standards. In fact, I will go out on a limb to say that most warm-ups at a Crossfit gym would easily be mistaken for a brutal workout by your run-of-the-mill gym chick. Yes. I said WARM UP.

So for those of you who have no clue what Crossfit is... I know how you feel. About seven months ago I decided I needed to seek professional advice about how to fix my barefoot running form and all the issues I was having. Interestingly, the Crossfit gyms and trainers were the only ones who had experience or knowledge in the area of barefoot and minimalist running. So, not having a clue what Crossfit was I started looking into it.

Lucky for me, Christian Peterson (a.k.a. The Maple Grove Barefoot Guy) decided to blog about his love for this type of training back in January. This was his explanation which I think sums it up pretty well:

"Crossfit is a strength and conditioning training program that revolves around the concept of high-intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT workouts involve short sets of high-intensity exercises punctuated by equally short periods of rest. The exercises performed during HIIT should be done at as close to maximum intensity as possible. The theory behind HIIT is that you can get a better bang for your buck doing 10 minutes of exercises at near maximum effort than you can with 30 minutes of exercise at your normal intensity.

Crossfit uses a wide variety of HIIT exercises, including standard weights, body-weight, Olympic lifts, and cardio to achieve an advanced level of general fitness.  Crossfit claims that instead of specializing in a particular discipline like running, or weight lifting, or biking, it allows users to be generalists; able to achieve a high level of performance in lots of different areas of fitness."

Even though my own workovers tend to resemble Crossfit in many ways, my coach, Seth, has made it clear that he does not program Crossfit workouts for me. I realize this now, but in the beginning it was hard to tell. They were (and still are) serious punishments. 

So what did we do at this Girls Only Event? Well, the WOD was scaled back because of time and people constraints. There were about three different Crossfit Gyms who attended and there must have been 50-60 women total. It was an incredible turn out! Unfortunately, we couldn't all participate in the WOD at once. There just wasn't enough equipment. So we did it in two waves and the drills were limited.

The warm-up consisted of walking drills (crab walks, toy soldiers and other randomly named drills), tire flipping relays with three or four women to a tractor tire and pushing a 45lb prowler. Yeah. When I first heard the name "Prowler" it conjured up images of little old ladies pushing tall men dressed in black out of bedroom windows. I had no idea.

Our WOD consisted of only two rounds of max repetitions (as many as you can do in the time allotted) of each of the following (completed in 1 minute intervals with a 1 minute rest between the rounds):

• Wall Balls - (pushing a heavy ball about 20 feet up the wall by squatting then jumping up while throwing the ball straight up)
• KB Swings - (Kettlebell weight swings between your legs partially squatting then standing) 
• Box Jumps (Jumping up onto stacked weights about 2 feet high)
• DB Push Press (Dumbell pressing weight over the head powered by bending the legs and pushing up)
• Row - (Rowing machine at a set distance or calorie) 

This was a good workout. One round was plenty for me, but to be honest I felt like I had it in me to go three rounds. Let's just say, if you do it right, by the time the first round is done you will want to die. You will be sucking burning air and be barely able to breathe. That's how it should feel. But look on the bright side. It only takes five minutes of pure torture to get through the first round and get a good workout, right? And you get one minute to rest before you start the whole tortuous process all over again. That's cool, right?  Because its only going to last another five or ten minutes and you're done! So when all is said and done you have compressed a whole hour of workout into about ten minutes of workover. Do you see why I call them workovers now? 

Don't get me wrong, I still love running, but if you're a mom and have no time to run a twenty, ten, or even a six-miler, then this kind of training is the shizzle. And bonus if you're a masochist, like me, and kind of enjoy the suffering (and especially the accomplishment afterward), then you may have just found a new love for training. Plus you get to lift weights and be all badass. Now, that's totally worth it.
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