I hope you’re enjoying the soreness from Week 1 as much as I am. If I have ever been this sore across my entire body, then I cannot remember it. I’ll take that as a sign of impending progress. I hope you kept great records from Week 1, because in Week 2 you’ll be trying to improve your performance on each exercise. On the 8-rep and 20-rep squats that means adding 5-15 pounds, depending on the difficulty of your set from Week 1. It’s important to remember that the 20-rep squat never feels easy. It always feels about the same level of terrible, but you’ll find that you can indeed add weight to it each week and still complete it.
On the rest-pause exercises you’re going to either add weight or use the same weight and try to add reps. Week 2 still introduces new rest-pause exercises, so you won’t have a full set of benchmarks until Week 2 is complete. But you will see press, pullups, and handstand pushups repeated, so you can try to improve those.
This week also introduces the first of many 60-minute row conditioning sessions. Yes, you read that correctly. This is a benchmark that Ute CrossFit has used successfully to build aerobic capacity. Sometimes you can achieve a lot by imitating the best. You’re not expected to row at a blistering pace. Set a conservative pace at the beginning and try to stick to it. If it helps, bring in your favorite DVD (The Lion King, Can’t Hardly Wait, Predator, whatever) to watch in shared misery. This will also give you a benchmark to help with measuring your progress against this set of goals. So how badly do you want to be a competitive CrossFit athlete again?
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