Guys, I'm not Sage Burgener, so I'll skip the part about how lazy I've been not updating my blog. The thing is, I'm trying to restrict it to when I have something to say. I could, and maybe will, lay out my day-to-day training, but basically it goes like this: lift heavy barbells as prescribed by Crossfit Football, follow TwinFreaks CF with intelligent scaling Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, eight hours of jiu-jitsu weekly to keep me happy and remember why I train, an additional wod Sunday if I damn well feel like it, and an occasional Saturday if there is some reason why I can't take Saturday off like Fight Gone Bad, for example.
Wow. That seems like a lot of stuff. At any rate, it seems like a lot to me. So how do I do it? Firstly I have to prioritize.
For whatever reason, I'm not ruling out ego, it's become very important to me to develop a truly outstanding squat. I'm not talking about the "I have the biggest squat in my little pond" squat, but rather the "did you see what that guy did at his last meet" squat, and that takes some dedication. So above all, I do what Crossfit Football tells me. I have the CFFB strength programming all laid out and explained to me by John Welbourn himself, but I go right off the site to avoid any temptation to tinker with the programming. I just get it done. I bench when I can get a spotter. Ideally I'd like to lift at about 3 or 4 pm, but I do it when I can. For the most part I like to lift alone. I've squatted at 8am, and I've squatted at midnight. The ironclad rule is just this: CFFB posts and I get the workout done within the prescribed calendar day.
Next I do jiu-jitsu. Life and injuries robbed me of jiu-jitsu for much of the last 16 months or so, and I'm happy to have it back. I love it in and of itself, but it's also what lead me to crossfit and what keeps me going to crossfit.
Lastly then, I do crossfit which does indeed take scaling given the other demands I put on myself. There are many ways to scale of course, but I usually look first at the time domain. Since I'm one of those rare people who can say with certainty that my primary sport is composed of six minute matches, it's easy for me to look at weight, reps, and rounds with a view to getting the workout somewhere in the five to ten minute range. Yes, I know. Other people have it harder, but looking at the time domain is a fairly simple idea to keep in mind for scaling.
Then of course one day you're just not 22 anymore and you can't quite do what it is you had intended to do.
Yesterday was a rough one for me. My schedule was supposed to have been crossfit then two hours jiu-jitsu, but I had a friend trying out jiu-jitsu at noon, so I figured I'd skip the wod, go to noon jiu-jitus class then later get in "my" two hours of jiu-jitsu. Eh, probably an okay idea. I help out a friend and I get three hours of total activity even if one of them is in the wrong place. But I got dropped on my head hard enough in the noon class to see the white flash, which probably means a mild concussion, then got kicked in the shin hard enough to get a good purple lump. I figured "my" two hours would go better, but I got a hard knee in the nose. Now jiu-jitsu is almost perfectly safe, and I find any one of these things happens to me about every six months on average, but I got all three in one day.
So today is another day. Crossfit wasn't on the schedule, Crossfit Football gave me the day off, so my two hours of jiu-jitsu should have been no problem. But I still hurt today. My shin hurts, my nose hurts, my head hurts, in short, I hurt. I noticed further that it was overcast and rainy. As I headed out the door, I thought, " hmmm, probably a lot of people will just stay home today and certainly I wouldn't be missed." My second thought was, "it doesn't matter what other people do or don't do now does it; it's about me taking this opportunity to improve." My third thought was, "it doesn't matter what other people do or don't do now does it; it's about fuck I hurt."
In jiu-jitus it's often recommended that if the body doesn't work one should come to training anyway and watch. I like that. You learn by watching, you stay connected with your community, and you get hungry to return.
Ah, but I stayed home and read from Robb Wolf's book "The Paleo Solution." I'm far enough in to say that it is riveting considering its technical depth. I'd guess it takes me no more than another day or perhaps two to plow through. I skipped ahead to the chapter on why not sleeping kills people because that's been a keen interest of mine since my former job tried to kill me. I can say that I understand death from not sleeping on a hormonal level now, and it was nowhere near as hard to get through as say a history of the Federal Reserve.
Guys, our human bodies are awesome machines. They will run about 40 years on Oreo cookies. They also respond eagerly to our efforts to fuel them properly and give them the movement they were made for. Sometimes, though, as much as it pains us, they need to rest. That can be a great time to pull out a book and learn something new.
Yes, yes, I will sometime publish the JamesD syllabus.
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