Sloppy Transitions

Workout date: 1/5/16

Muscle-ups were on the menu Tuesday night and that meant finding something else to do since muscle-ups are not currently in my repertoire.  Nor will they be any time in the near future.  The WOD itself was very Amanda-like, with clean and jerks taking the place of squat snatches.

9-7-5
Muscle-ups
Clean and jerks (205/135)

I decided to show up about 20 minutes early for class so that I could get some double under practice in.  The focus continues to be efficiency via smaller jumps.  I'm starting to see some small gains there as I've been able to do a set of 15-20 reps and not need a lot of time before continuing on to a new set.  When double unders are programmed in a WOD, they tend to show up in large quantities.  Since I don't have the ability to do a huge amount of these in one set (at least not reliably), I need to get used to finishing a medium-sized set and moving on to the next set.  The drawback?  Jumping differently takes some time to get used to.  My typical set has been smaller than it once was, but I have faith that I'll get back to doing medium-sized sets reliably with more practice.  And if I can occasionally knock out that big set where I forget to hit myself with the rope?  Even better.  During this practice session, I managed a couple sets in the 20's, with my best set being 31 reps.

As I watched the end of the 6:30 class, I saw Matt B hating the workout.  I got to talk with him when he was done and the biggest issue he had with the WOD was that he was told he couldn't do jumping muscle-ups as a scale.  Instead, he was doing banded transitions.  This was a bummer for me as well, as I had used jumping muscle-ups as my scale in previous workouts with muscle-ups.  If I had to guess, it was probably over a year since I last practiced the banded transition.  I would need a crash course in transitions if I was going to do them in this workout.

The 7:30 class was sparsely attended again, but instead of another two-man workout, we had a special third guest.  Faby has committed to doing one WOD per week and he decided that this would be his selection for the week.  Maybe he saw the clean and jerks and missed the whole "muscle-up" thing.  He was taking on this workout RX, while Cline and I searched for scaling options.  I would be using 175 for my clean and jerks in addition to doing the banded transitions.  Cline went with the 2:1 scale of banded dips and pull-ups along with 135 pounds for his clean and jerks.

As we warmed up, Coach Rachel tried to help me get the hang of transitions, but I was a woefully unprepared student.  Nothing about it felt natural to me.  I didn't have that moment of clarity where I suddenly said "hey, I remember how to do these now!"  More than anything, I was just awkwardly flopping around on the band underneath the rings.  I relayed my concerns to Rachel that I might not be able to do a single transition properly and that it might be best for me to do the dips and pull-ups scale instead.  However, Rachel impressed upon me that if I was ever going to get muscle-ups, I needed to work on transitions.  Begrudgingly, I agreed to attempt transitions for the workout.

We got started and things were a mess right from the start.  In some of my attempts, my feet would hit the floor, at which point I would end up using them to jump up into the top of the dip.  Not only was this the jumping muscle-up that I was not supposed to be doing, it was the cheater version of it.  In a normal jumping muscle-up, you jump through the transition point, then come out of a dip to finish the rep.  I was jumping all the way to the finish of the movement, not working any of the muscles that were supposed to be used in this workout.  I did have enough common sense not to count any of those reps, but as I wiggled around trying to do a transition correctly, I realized that I was still at 0 and more than a minute had elapsed on the clock.  Not good.

Finally one light bulb went on in my head.  I knew I shouldn't be jumping, but the bigger issue was skipping the dip completely.  And why was I ending up at the finish of the movement so quickly?  Because I was focused on moving vertically rather than horizontally.  When doing the transition properly, you are supposed to basically throw yourself forward (not upwards).  If you've done that correctly, you will then need to dip out to complete the movement.  Because I had been focused on going up, I was tilting my body into a vertical position, causing my feet to hit the floor and resulting in a jump that I wasn't supposed to be doing.

I was still on 0 reps, but I instantly felt better because I had figured out a big part of what I was doing wrong.  I began pulling my body forward and ended up in the proper position, finishing those reps with a dip out.  I had some no-reps where I got into the proper position and could not dip out.  But at least there was progress.  Cline was already on his clean and jerks, but I was slowly getting through my first round of transitions.  As I neared the end of the first round, Faby finished up his 9 muscle-ups.  Eventually, I joined the two of them over at the barbells.

I wasn't sure how heavy I wanted to go on the clean and jerks.  Initially I thought 185 might be worth a try, but then I watched how tired the crew was in the 6:30 class when they got to their clean and jerks.  They seemed to be struggling more with the barbell then they were with their muscle-up scales.  Perhaps I needed to rein it in a little bit.  165 seemed reasonable enough, but Rachel told me it looked easy when I did it.  So we agreed on 175.  And that was probably the correct weight to use.  When I began doing my clean and jerks, I moved fairly quickly, but I could also tell that my arms were a little drained from the transitions.  My clean form has never been the greatest, but I was having more difficulty with them than I had bargained for.  A big part of the clean is having fast elbows, so that the barbell ends up in a solid front rack position.  My elbows were not coming through very well, leaving me in an awkward position before I jerked the weight.  (I am the king of getting myself into awkward positions.)  As a result, my jerks were shaky.  I got through the 9 reps, but I became concerned about the 12 that were still remaining.

Being the idiot that I am, I immediately fell back into bad habits again as I returned to the rings.  Feet hitting the floor, jumping up into the reps.  It was like my memory had been erased while doing the clean and jerks.  After no-repping myself a bunch of times, I finally got back into doing the transitions semi-properly.  And let me be clear, even the "good" transitions I did probably fell under the "range of motion" category than real transitions.  But they were much better than the crap I had been doing early on in this workout.  It took a while, but I got through the second round of transitions, heading over to do clean and jerks with Faby, while Cline was in the midst of his final round of dips and pull-ups.

I had the same issues with my cleans during the round of 7 reps.  Plus I was beginning to fatigue.  That meant more rest between reps.  The last thing I wanted to do was start to get that bar above my head and then have my arms give out on me.  I made sure I felt comfortable doing the lift before I attempted each rep.  With 7 clean and jerks completed, I headed back over to the rings.  This time I didn't forget what I was supposed to do, completing a couple of my best transitions right off the bat in the final round.  I did have some struggles dipping out of a few reps, leading to no-reps that felt like a waste of energy.  After each of these, I would take my time, shake out my arms, and try again.  With my last transition complete, I jogged over to my barbell.

The clock was showing about 14:15 and Rachel had told us to try and keep the workout under 15 minutes.  I didn't think I could do 5 clean and jerks at 175 in 45 seconds, but I was going to give it my best shot.  I completed a rep, let the barbell drop from the top, took a second to get my setup right, then went into the next rep.  Did five in a row like that, hoping that I was moving fast enough to beat the clock.  I did not.  Final time: 15:04.

I cheered on Faby as he finished his muscle-ups.  While watching him, another (possibly more important) light bulb went on in my head.  Rachel had been stressing to me how hard I had to pull with my arms to do the transition properly, but it was a struggle for me no matter how hard I pulled.  I was chalking that up to my lack of arm strength (which is legit), but then I noticed what else I was doing wrong.  When Faby did the transition in his muscle-up, he had a big pop of the hips to assist him.  When I was doing my transitions, I was laying on the band like a corpse in a morgue.  No wonder all of that pulling wasn't working.  I was only using half of my body!  Moron.

Did I do this workout properly?  Not by a longshot.  I'm not sure how many of my "good" reps should have counted, but I can tell you that I no-repped myself more in this workout than any other one I've done in my 3 years of Crossfitting.  I'd like to think I learned some things as I failed over and over again, but I am a long way from doing a muscle-up.  And to be honest, it is something I put no time into practicing.  So in the end, I wasn't upset by this workout, but I also don't know how much I gained from it.

Wednesday preview: Another strange WOD, this one a combination of rowing and GHD movements.  Plus, some back squat work on shaky legs.