Look At Me, Neil!

Workout date: 11/17/16

The workout programmed for Thursday night was one of those that made me think to myself, "I guess I should go, but I ain't gonna be able to do a lot of that stuff."  On cardio-focused days, you can slow your pace down when you get tired.  On strength days, you can use less weight when you're not feeling powerful enough to handle all that is asked for in the WOD.  But on skill days, you either have the skills or you don't.  Yes, you can substitute a scale instead, but with a lot of the skill work, the scale tends to be a completely different movement from what you were meant to do.  For example, if you're meant to do handstand push-ups and you do seated dumbbell presses for your scale, then technically you're training the same muscles.  However, you're not upside-down pressing out your body weight.  Instead, you're comfortably sitting upright pressing out much lighter DBs.  Same idea when you substitute ring rows for pull-ups: the stimulus for the two exercises is similar, but the two movements feel worlds apart from one another.

The Thursday WOD had two movements that had no chance at doing: handstand walks and ring muscle-ups.  To give myself a smidge of credit, I will say that I have walked on my hands across one mat at the gym.  It only happened one time and it almost certainly was an accident.  It did happen though.  I haven't accidentally done anything that has resembled a ring muscle-up.  Although through the magic of Ryan Samson's photography, I would change that before the workout even began.

First things first, here's a description of Thursday's WOD:

3 rounds:

30 ft handstand walk

10 clean and jerks (155/105)

followed by

2 rounds:

400 meter run

7 ring muscle-ups

I guess I should have been happy that I could do the clean and jerks and the running.  3 rounds of clean and jerks at 155 was the equivalent of doing a heavy version of Grace.  I figured that would take me about 5-6 minutes.  Because I would be tired from the first part of the workout, I thought the runs would take me about 5 minutes total.  That left the two scales I would have to do.  My initial guess was that we would be doing either "wall walks" or handstand holds (typically 30 seconds worth) as a scale for the handstand walk.  The wall walks (where you start in a plank, then walk your body backwards up the wall, before walking back down) would take longer than 30 seconds, assuming we'd have to do 3-5 of them per round.  At 5 per round, that could take 1.5-2 minutes.  As for the muscle-ups, we'd likely do either jumping muscle-ups or dips plus pull-ups.  If it was the latter, we usually did double the reps, so I'd have to do 14 dips and 14 pull-ups per round.  That could take 3-4 minutes.  My crude mental math left me in the 20-25 minute range for this workout, which seemed to be a problem as most of the earlier times for the day hovered around 15 minutes.

Where had I gone wrong?  Turns out that I didn't get either of the scales right.  Coach Giulz told us that if we didn't have handstand walks, she'd like us to try "wall walk ins" as a scale.  I had never done this before and they were much harder than they appeared.  For the wall walk in, you flip upside-down in the same manner you would for a handstand hold.  The difference is that you plant your hands much further from the wall as you kick up.  There is an uneasy initial feeling that you are too far from the wall as you go upside-down, but eventually your feet meet the wall.  From there, you try to walk on your hands towards the wall.  Each time I did one of these, I took 3-4 steps on my hands before coming back down.  It was quicker than a wall walk, but also more taxing on your shoulders.  We were going to do 5 of these per round.

As for the ring muscle-up scale, Giulz wanted us to work on transitions.  I've done these before and they can be very quick, but it is also easy to be lazy, do a crappy one, and count that as a rep.  What I had learned from past experience was that I needed to use my legs and hips more and not simply rely on my arms.  For the transition, you hold on to rings that are not very high off the ground and lay underneath them with your feet propping your body up.  The remaining description of the movement isn't going to be the greatest, but here it goes.  From there, you do a mini-hop with your feet to imitate the kipping movement you would do if you were way above the ground.  As you send your feet down, you pull the rings towards your body and quickly rotate over the rings.  Then you press out of the dip like you would at the top of a real muscle-up.  This scale would definitely be faster than doing jumping muscle-ups, but it was on me to perform quality reps.

I had only two partners in class: Neil and Julie Foucher.  Giulz had us practice getting upside down for the wall walk ins and Neil was having some initial trouble.  (Julie was not getting upside down due to a condition hinted at by her Pregosaurus t-shirt.)  I heard him collapse against the wall a few times as he tried to do a handstand hold.  He must have been looking down at the floor as he tried to go upside down (you should be looking back through your arms) because I heard Giulz tell him, "look at me, Neil", as he came down from a failed attempt.  When I came back down from the wall, I decided to joke around with him about this advice.  I yelled out "LOOK AT ME, NEIL!", not realizing he was in the midst of another attempt.  Right as he went to plant his hands, he started laughing and crashed into the wall.  Oops!  I almost injured the poor guy by making him laugh as he was about to go upside down.  Always make sure your classmates aren't in the middle of doing something if you're going to crack jokes!

From there, we went over to the rings to practice transitions.  And surprisingly, I was pretty good at them.  I guess I had learned my lesson from scaled muscle-up WODs of the past.  I was quickly rotating over the rings and pressing out without too much of a problem.  Giulz and Samson told me that how I looked at the top of these practice transitions is exactly how I would look when I got my first real ring muscle-up.  That was all well and good, except my feet were about six inches off of the ground.  Samson had been taking photos and assured me that he could eliminate the floor from the photos he was taking.  He laid flat on the floor and aimed his camera my way.  I told him that if I was selling this as a muscle-up, I was going all out.  The result is below:

Just me, being a jackass, per usual

Amazing photo, right?  Samson does some excellent work.  You can't tell that the rings I'm using are very low to the floor.  And it looks like I got my first muscle-up because I started celebrating like a maniac at the top of the rep.  The people in the front of the gym wanted to know what was going on because they heard some idiot yelling and could see that Giulz and Samson were cracking up.  I let them know I was faking my first muscle-up.  Samson posted the picture on our gym's Facebook page, which led to a lot of people asking me if I had gotten my first muscle-up.  (Note: They were asking with that "seriously, you got a muscle up?" tone which is equal parts astonishment, skepticism, congratulations, and depression all mixed together.)  I re-assured them that I had not.

With the fun and games out of the way, it was time to get to the workout.  Giulz set the clock and we got started on round one.  As I moved through the wall walk ins, I noticed how much shoulder strength it required.  It crossed my mind that I might not be able to do 15 of these even if I didn't have those 20 clean and jerks sprinkled in between sets.  I did 3 of them without much hesitation before slowing down and taking a small break before the 4th walk in and again before the 5th walk in.  I was behind Neil and Julie right from the start.

I thought the effort needed on the wall walk ins would be detrimental to my success on the clean and jerks, but that really wasn't the case.  Doing a couple of the clean and jerks seemed to loosen my shoulders.  After doing 5 reps, I paused for a break, but my shoulders were feeling better.  I was winded from the work I had done up to this point, but I had some renewed hope that I could get through 2 more rounds of wall walk ins.

When I got back to the wall, I did 2 walk ins before needing a break.  I could tell this wasn't going to be something I could rush through.  If I tried to get upside down before I was ready, I was simply going to fall over and need to start again.  So I waited and then did the next walk in once my arms felt better.  I was losing time here, but I felt like I'd make some of it up when I got back to the barbell.  I didn't pay much attention to the clock because it felt like I was going slow and I didn't want to become frustrated in the middle of the workout.  After a second set of 5 wall walk ins were complete, I did 10 semi-fast single reps of the clean and jerk.  The jerk, in particular, was beginning to feel heavy because I was struggling to fully lock out the rep as I sent my body under the barbell.  I didn't fail on any of the reps, but I was starting to become concerned.

My third round of wall walk ins was similar to my second round, although I had one rep where I became very shaky as I tried to walk towards the wall, so I had to speed up my "steps" before coming back down on to my feet.  I was able to go 2-1-1-1 again and when the third round was complete, I felt relief as I was almost certainly done with the most difficult part of the workout.  As I began my last set of clean and jerks, Neil headed out the door for his first run.  Not long afterwards, Julie followed him out the door.  I doubted that I'd be moving very fast on the run, so I accepted that I would be the last one done in this workout.

After wrapping up my 30th clean and jerk, I went out for my first jog.  None of us were moving all that fast at this point.  Neil was way ahead of us, while Julie had a decent-sized lead on me.  Neil would be out for his second run before I got back into the gym for my first set of transitions.  While I wanted to do my transitions quickly, I didn't want to sacrifice my form as I completed them.  They weren't as good as the ones I did in the warmup (amazing how much better I am when I'm fresh!), but they weren't sloppy either.  With 7 transitions in the books, I headed out the door intent on making up some ground on Julie.  I didn't catch her on the run, but I was only a few seconds behind her as we came back to the rings.  Neil had long since finished.  I told myself that I wasn't allowed to take any breaks between reps.  Transitions don't really take that much out of you and I only had 7 reps remaining.  So I started knocking them out one after another.  The competitive side of me was happy to catch Julie at the tail end of the workout.  And it was also happy that I kept my time reasonable when early on I didn't think it would be.  Final time: 17:53.

My biggest takeaway from this workout was that I should practice wall walk ins more.  They certainly build up your shoulder strength and they make you get comfortable with something that feels rather uncomfortable at first.  With enough practice, maybe the day will come when I can walk across the length of two mats at the gym on my hands.

Friday preview: The final test day for Annie arrives and I am eager to put my double under practice to the test.  I completed Annie in under 10 minutes for the first time back in February.  With better double under form, could I trim that time all the way down to less than 8 minutes?