Nutrition Challenge Wrap-Up

I owe you a much overdue update on BCF’s Winter Nutrition Challenge.

As a refresher, BCF – my crossfit box – began a 6-week nutrition challenge on January 24. The challenge generally followed Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint.

Participants were divided into teams, awarded points for eating well, attending WODs, completing weekly challenges, sleeping for at least 7 hours, recording what we ate daily, and setting and achieving a physical goal at the gym. We lost points for cheating.

Summary of the Challenge

Coach Sarah kicked off the challenge a nutritional seminar where she explained the ground rules and provided some interesting background regarding the body’s response to carbohydrates, sugars, and processed foods. Our guiding principle came from Crossfit’s founder, Greg Glassman, and his definition of “World-Class Fitness in 100 Words”:

Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.

Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast.

Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense.

Regularly learn and play new sports.

Benchmark WOD: Fight Gone Bad

Crossfit creates benchmark WODs for athletes to track their progress. Fight Gone Bad is one of these benchmarks. It consists of three rounds of five, one-minute stations. Athletes attempt to complete as many repetitions as possible.

For those unfamiliar with Crossfit workouts, here’s a quick primer on how to read a workout.

1. Workouts generally are completed for time, total repetitions, or total number of rounds.
2. Most boxes will list weights/heights for men and separately for women (e.g., box jumps 24/20 would mean men should use 24 inch boxes and women should use 20 inch boxes)
3. Scores with “rx” reflect that the athlete completed the workout as written; scores without “rx” reflect that the athlete made scaling modifications to the workout.

Fight Gone Bad

3 rounds, one minute stations

• Wallball shots 20/14
• Sumo deadlift high-pulls 75/55
• Box jumps 20
• Push press 75/55
• Row (for calories)
• Rest

Count total repetitions across all three rounds. For rowing, count calories. Rest for one minute between rounds.

Trying a Blog and Trying for Paleo

This blog isn’t going to be anything fancy – at least to start. We’ll see where it goes and whether I actually post. This past October (2012), I was researching gyms in the area and specifically looking for some higher-end gyms that also offered pools. Although I couldn’t find any near by, I did come across a number of reviews and discussions for nearby Crossfit “boxes.”

I’ve heard Crossfit mentioned here and there over the last couple of years and did catch some of last year’s Crossfit Games on ESPN. I thought … what the heck? And signed up for the “Foundations” course at my local box – Ballston Crossfit. It is a 2-week/3 days per week introductory course to the foundational moves of Crossfit. I started, and I was hooked!

My first, official WoD (Crossfit lingo for “Workout of the Day”) was specially developed by the owner of BCF in honor of Hurricane Sandy (this was as the Hurricane moved up the East coast, brought rain and winds to the D.C. metro area, and closed schools, the government, and most places in the private sector – before bringing utter destruction to New Jersey and New York). The “Hurricane Sandy” WoD was certainly one way to be introduced into Crossfit. Yes, I did significantly scale that workout 🙂