Check out live.crossfit.com to see Travis and I compete in the CrossFit/USAW open today. Travis will be lifting around 7:00 AM and I will go around 1:00 PM Pacific time. We are both fired up this morning and ready to lift some PR's before we go straight into serious oxygen debt.
Tabata The Following:
Sumo Deadlift High Pull 95/65
Air Squat
Box Jump
No rest between exercises. Score the lowest set of each exercise.
Had a sweet picture of a huge guy leaping up in the air unbelievelably high. Someone complained about copyright infringement and blah blab blah. I say if you post it online, it's free and up for grabs. Anyhow the image was replaced with the current image. (click here for original image.)
First off, Olympic lifting will not make you look like this guy (formerly huge guy.) Look up some pictures of weightlifters in the middle and light weight classes and you will see some amazingly fit looking body types. It just so happens that the bigger you are, the heavier you can lift. Since the biggest people make the biggest lifts, they tend to be the ones that we see the most, but they didn't become this way because they lifted weights, they were born to be huge. So get over it if you think Oly lifting will make you huge.
The reason we Olympic lift is because it improves so many different aspects of fitness at once. How many 360lb people can jump this high? Seriously. This guy is fat, but holy cow what a feat to be able to leap that high at his size. Jumping ability is a huge indicator of a very athletic specimine. If we were to run this huge person through a well rounded battery of physical tests, we would be likely to find that he is only poor in endurance based events. Most any other physical test he would surely perform at a very high level.
You all can appreciate the flexibility and coordination challenges that Olympic lifting poses. Strength, speed, power, agility, balance, and accuracy are all components of the Olympic lifts. Nearly every elite athelte outside the endurance community uses Olympic lifting as a form of cross training for their sport. The difficult thing about Olympic lifting is that you must attain a base line ability to deadlift, squat, and overhead press before you can start to really perform the snatch or clean and jerk. The good news is that while you are working on the fundamental aspects of Oly lifting, you are already begining to reap the rewards that come with this style of lifting. Once you have developed good mobilty and are able to consistently perform correct technique in the foundational movements, you can start adding the layers of complexity that will eventually become the squat snatch and the clean and jerk. Then, even if your still fat, which you better not be, you will be supremely physically capable.
