Sunday Story...The Open, Week Two

Week one had us box jumping or box stepping and doing a whole bunch of wall balls. It was 12 minutes, and it pointed out to many of us where some of our training has not been what it should have been.

Now here we are in week two, and we've got a very nice triplet of overhead lunges, dumbbell snatches, and a mix of high-level gymnastic skills done under fatigue. If you've been with us following the Invictus programming, you'll notice that we do a lot of fairly high-level gymnastic skills under fatigue. By fatigue, we mean we've done a bunch of stuff, and then we have to step up to the bar or the rings and perform a skill that is difficult to do but even more difficult to do under fatigue, when breath is coming hard and fast, and heart is leaping through my throat. This is one of the beauties of CrossFit: we ask our bodies to do a lot, and then ask it to do something difficult under the best conditions.

You might ask yourself, "Why is that important?" The answer is simple. Sometimes we must do hard things that require thinking and frontal lobe work, even when our bodies and brains rebel against doing so. We don't want to do those things when our hearts are in our throats, our vision is narrowing, and our fine motor skills are under attack. It's at that moment that there's a separation between those of us who train for this sort of thing and those who don't. If we don't train for it, it's going to be really hard to hop up on those rings or hop up on those bars and get that job done.

Every week is a real eye-opener for all of us. But that is one of the reasons to do the Open!

If you're interested in building muscle and strength, sign up for a free fitness assessment at www.crossfitodyssey.com or reach out to me directly to get started on your journey to extraordinary results.

John Mariotti

www.crossfitodyssey.com

775-338-2412