Great Day For My Lifts And A Slight PR ON An Old Vault WOD
I had a good night’s sleep last night. It started out with me actually falling asleep fairly quickly. I wasn’t expecting to fall asleep easily or sleep well due to gas from pork and sauerkraut for the second day in a row, but I slept great. I love that stuff, but it does cause gas. I usually say let the fating commence when we eat it.
I only had Brooke for a short time today since her mom went to work later today, but we still had fun. We headed off to the bus stop and I came home when she got on the bus. I got changed to head out into the garage and get shit done.
Up first for today were my relatively heavy back squats at the two hundred and forty pounds. It has been a little while since I got under heavier weights like this due to small things coming up and causing me to play it safe and keep the weights lighter. It’s better to be safe than sorry! Today’s weight while not near my max for these five reps was a little intimidating having not been that heavy in a while, but it really did feel great. The squat set that I recorded with my phone looked outstanding. They looked a lot easier than they felt. I pretty quickly got through them. I definitely feel I could have done extra sets today, but chose not to for today. I stuck with the programmed three sets of five.
After I completed the back squats, it was time to move on to the strict presses. For the shoulder presses today, I had to do three sets of five at one hundred and twelve pounds. This is only a moderate weight for my presses, especially with my shoulder feeling great, finally. The presses ended up looking and feeling good today. I kept the rest to a minimum and threw in two extra sets for five sets of five and had zero issues getting through them.
Finally, for my lifts today, I moved on to the power cleans. I did five triples at one hundred and sixty pounds with no problems what soever. They felt pretty easy, but the video I took showed them looking much easier than they felt. My timing was right on the mark. I did try to press that weight after my last set, but I aborted when it got just over my head. The video showed no reason to do that. The bar was still moving well. Oh, well. The cleans were fun today.
I ate something for lunch and drank my protein after I was done and digested for a while. While I was resting I was hunting down a WOD to do. This week’s WODs have been mostly ones that I don’t feel I’d get as much out of as I could so I’ve been doing older ones.
I did the same thing for a WOD yesterday, too. That one was row a thousand meters then do a hundred alternating dumbbell snatches then row another thousand meters. I used the forty pound dumbbell for that one and felt good about it. Obviously, the time I had for a score was significantly slower than when I did it a few months back or whatever it was and only used the twenty-five pound dumbbells. I still got it well within the goal time and felt great with pushing out of my comfort zone for a change. I’ve been neglecting to do that at times. Every so often I have had good reasons, at times to hold back a bit, and other times it was just laziness or not feeling like pushing myself. Given that my shoulder is feeling better after being not the best for close to a year, I wanted to test it out and push myself weight wise with this WOD. I kept the sets of snatches at ten each until I did the last twenty. I know now that I could have done bigger sets, but I wanted to avoid coming out of the gates too hot and not be able to recover.
Today I felt like I wanted to do a WOD with body weight lunges in it. It’s been quite a while since I’ve done those, and didn’t want to get too rusty on them after I struggled with them for so many years. The WOD that I was thinking of was a vault WOD from 2020. I knew it had been a vault WOD, but couldn’t remember when it was from. It’s a burner still, and I ended up doing it with a few seconds of improvement over my previous score. That was a pleasant surprise for me today because being rusty on the lunges. I took the lunges at a slower and steadier pace rather than trying to go all out on them. I knew I had five rounds of forty of them to do.
Slamming my knee into the floor like so many Cross fitters do is something I like to do my best to avoid, so I try to be more controlled with them. That only makes them harder and burn more! Wanting to do things as safely as possible has slowed me down at times since I started Crossfit. It has kept my injury free and for that, I am thankful that when I was first learning this stuff in the gym it was always preached to use proper for instead of getting sloppy and fast.
After I finished the WOD, I drank a ton of water and then went out on the patio to relax in the bright sunshine today. It’s a little warmer than yesterday but much less windy, so it was nice to get some fresh air. It’s also very dry out, so that helped dry the sweat off me.
Music today was Motorhead.