So Monday I went overboard. Tuesday was definitely the payback.

WOD for Tuesday 061912
Muscle Ups
2-3 reps on the minute for 12 minutes

I’d watched and shared some muscle up instructional videos recently. It seems Jack saw them too. He coached us on the 4 components of a muscle up that were explained and demonstrated in those videos and we practiced those.

All four components start seated on a band in the rings. The first element is to lie back and get prone in the rings and pop your hips up to meet the ring with minimal use of the arms. Sounds easy right? I found it really tough to initiate the action from my hips without at least some arms. I also discovered that if I didn’t stay really rigid and concentrate I was inclined to end up inverted. Really not helpful on a muscle up.

The second component was practicing a really fast sit up through the rings. That portion of the maneuver seemed to work for me reasonably well.

The third stage was trying to curl the feet and legs in tight to the body so that after the sit up move the body is curled into a very tight ball. Sounds logical, but I found my feet wanting to drop often.

Fourth was to intentionally add a bit of a kick to push yourself upright to the locked out top position of the ring dip.

I really liked working these elements individually and then trying to string them together. I’ve got miles to go before I ever pull off a muscle up, but having a way to train to feel these various elements at some level was really cool.

The one question that occurred to me after the WOD was “at what stage do these elements come into play in an unassisted muscle up?” I’m presuming these are the actions you try to string together after the initial pull up? But that wasn’t clear. I guess what I’m wondering is, “how do you get your body parallel to the ground in order to start that first move of popping the hips up to the rings?” Seems like a fairly critical piece of information.

METCON
4 Rounds For Time:
12 KB Swings (70/52)
8 Pullups
Sand Bag Shuttle Run (10/15/20m)

So here’s the explanation for the Shuttle Runs, straight from the CFD site. *For shuttle, sprint 10ms with sandbag and back to the line. Sprint 15m with sandbag and back to the line. Drop the sand bag and sprint 20m and then back through the line.

Monday I went way overboard and demolished myself trying to use too much weight. I was determined not to repeat that mistake. So I scaled to a 62# KB. The swings for the workout were fine. They all went unbroken.

Pull ups were the place where I paid the price for Monday’s efforts. I had ZERO grip and my shoulders were tired on Tuesday! I don’t think I ever got more than 4 consecutive pull ups and I did the final set of pull ups as jumping pull ups. It was just that kind of day.

The pleasant surprise of the day were the sprints. Specifically the 20M sprints. Not sure if it was simply the luxury of dropping the sandbag after the 15M sprints or what, but the 20’s felt really quick! Even the last one. Going in to this WOD I didn’t expect that the running would end up being the highlight of the workout.

Finished the WOD in 9:38 and enjoyed it a lot. That being said, Really enjoying Wednesday as a rest day.