April Highlights

Motivation

Motivation is a term that refers to a process that elicits, controls, and sustains certain behaviors. Motivation is a group of phenomena which affect the nature of an individual's behavior, the strength of the behavior, and the persistence of the behavior. For instance: An individual has not eaten, he or she feels hungry, as a response he or she eats and diminishes feelings of hunger. There are many approaches to motivation: physiological, behavioural, cognitive, and social^[1].It's the crucial element in setting and attaining goals—and research shows you can influence your own levels of motivation and self-control ^[2]. According to various theories, motivation may be rooted in a basic need to minimize physical pain and maximize pleasure, or it may include specific needs such as eating and resting, or a desired object, goal, state of being, ideal, or it may be attributed to less-apparent reasons such as altruism,selfishness, morality, or avoiding mortality. Conceptually, motivation should not be confused with either volition or optimism.^[3] Motivation is related to, but distinct from, emotion.

Saturday Day #20

Warm up
2 minutes jump rope


Skill
MB clean


TEAM WOD
3 minutes max effort MB clean
3 minute relay
Rest 2 minutes

2 minutes max effort MB clean
2 minute relay
Rest 2 minutes

1 minutes max effort MB clean
1minute relay

Day #19 Friday

SHARP!

Warm up

2 minutes double unders

Dynamic walk

Walking Sampson

Inch worm

Broad jumps

Strict toes to bar

Skill

Floss hamstrings

WOD

2 rounds of:

Row 500m (sprint)

Rest 2 minutes

Tabata Burpees

Rest 2 minutes

Day #18 Thursday

Warm up

Dips

Pull ups

GHD sit ups

GHD back ext

OHS

Skill

Rope climbs

WOD

For time:

2 rope climbs

KBS 21

2 rope climbs

KBS 15

2 rope climbs

KBS 9

I’m Calling for a New Paradigm

Posted on March 27, 2012

I grew up looking at underweight and yet impossibly perfect models on the pages of magazines. It did a number on me. Made me feel ashamed of my fleshy thighs, my broad shoulders, my small breasts. Sparked an unhealthy, decades long troubled relationship with food and my body.

A few years ago, when super-fit, uber lean models started to become popular, I celebrated! Progress, I thought! Perhaps my daughters wouldn’t have to grow up surrounded by such destructive images! Strength a desirable quality? Sign me up!

And as I began my journey towards health, I kept those images close. I replaced the skinny ideal with the super-fit, super-lean ideal as my goal. I began to hear the phrase ‘Strong is the New Skinny’ and was thrilled. I’ve kept a picture of Dara Torres at her leanest on my fridge for four years as inspiration. Crossfit gained in popularity and with it images of strong women accomplishing incredible feats of strength and fitness. How wonderful! Take that, skinny models and the magazines that pushed them on my impressionable daughters!

As I got closer to my goal of a lean, fit body though, something started to change. I began to realize how much time I spend thinking about my diet and my workouts. Don’t get me wrong. In our modern food climate, we need to be diligent and mindful about what we eat, and our lifestyles have become so sedentary and easy that we need to make time to get the exercise that was a built-in component of our ancestors lives. But as I got leaner, I needed to become increasingly disciplined about calories and macronutrients. At some point I realized I’d gone beyond simple mindfulness about food, and had ventured into the sort of behavior that some people might consider an eating disorder. Every calorie, every gram of protein, every micronutrient was being tracked. That’s what I needed to do to continue getting leaner. But oh, did I look great!

Do I want my daughters to grow up healthy and strong? Absolutely. Do I want them to feel pressured to be as disciplined about their diets as I am? Absolutely not.

I think most people can reach a healthy weight and body fat percentage by eating real food, keeping loose track of how much they’re eating and getting adequate exercise most days. I did that! I got down to about 165 pounds and 18-20% body fat fairly easily once I started eating well and exercising. But that wasn’t good enough. After all, I had a picture of Dara Torres at about 9% BF on my fridge. I sure didn’t look like that! Nor did I look like the models I saw in fitness magazines, or the women I saw competing in the crossfit games on TV. I had a lot of work still to do if I wanted to be what had clearly become the standard of beauty and desirability in the fitness world.

Last December, I decided enough was enough. This is ridiculous. That lean ideal is as unrealistic for most of us women as the underweight ideal I grew up with. I was maintaining at about 15% body fat and felt great, looked great, was getting stronger and healthier every day, had a husband who adored my body, and yet when I looked in the mirror I still saw the fleshy thighs. What was it going to take to be what I somehow had absorbed as the new standard of beauty?

Day #17 Wednesday

Micky & Ivan with the high five!

Warm up

Pose running technique

Hold pose & change of support

Pull drill with wall

Lunge drill

Partner pose reinforcement (hands on shoulders)

WOD

75 pull ups

100 push press

Run 1 mile

Day #16 Tuesday

Warm up

Burgner warm up

Shrug

Scarecrow

Muscle snatch

Snatch drop

Power snatch

Skill

Power snatch & double unders

WOD

12 Minute AMRAP

15 Power snatches

30 double unders                

Elbow junk

Day # 15 Monday

Dancer!

Warm up

Inversion to skin the cat

Hand walks

Hollow rocks

Strict pull ups

Strict ring dip to true support

Skill

HSPU

WOD

15 minute AMRAP

9 toes to rings

6 squat jumps (jump tap the pull up bar)

3 HSPU