October 2024
Upcoming Events:
Snatch Clinic: 13 October 9 AM-11 AM – open to all CFI members. The cost is a donation of any amount to 305 8th Street – a group home for adults with mental disabilities.
Halloween WOD: 31 October All Day! Wear you costume to workout, best costume wins a prize!
Anniversary Week: 4-9 November – Fun filled week of activities and throwback workouts. Any previous member is welcome to train all week- no drop in fees.
CFI 15th Anniversary Party: 9 November 6PM at CFI. Please RSVP to event on Facebook or to Jess or Steve.
From the Desk of the Gorilla:
15 Years of CrossFit Impulse – Let’s Celebrate with Alumni Week!
CrossFit Impulse is celebrating its quinceañera, and we’re throwing down with a week of special programming for Alumni Week starting November 4th, leading up to the big party on Saturday, November 9th at 6PM.
Anyone who’s ever trained with us can drop in all week—no drop in fees. We wanna see your face! Hump across town, catch a flight, whatever you gotta do, get some workouts in, and relive the “good ole days.”
The Anniversary Party on the 9th is going to be epic. We’ve got door prizes, a raffle, and some surprises to recognize those who’ve been grinding hard for years. You won’t want to miss it.
Got favorite photos or memories of the old days? Send them to me directly or drop them in here: https://shorturl.at/ZjB2M. We are working on something cool for the party and wanna see all the cool old school stuff!
Mark your calendar and get ready to celebrate 15 years of relentless growth. Let’s make it a week to remember!
-Steve
The Iron Pen
In October the temperature will be changing, but it’s always gainz season at CrossFit Impulse.
On Mondays we are going to build your lower body strength in 115C with back squats. Assistance exercises will be walking lunges and partner glute ham raises. You ready to bulletproof your hamstrings? These assistance exercises will do it.
Tuesdays will be a long conditioning session, usually with upper body gymnastics.
Wednesdays we will work a 5-week cycle of squat snatch in 115B, first from the hang to reinforce correct bar path, and then move down to the floor, all in sets of 3 reps and fewer. This will be paired with a short conditioning workout. We will close this cycle with a Snatch Party in November to find a new max.
Thursdays we are back in 115C and you’ll see front squats, pressing, and pulling. This will sometimes be paired with short to moderate duration conditioning.
Friday and Saturday will be classic CrossFit in medium-long duration. You’ll see heavy deadlifts at minimum every 3 weeks—sometimes every 2 weeks.
The Long Haul:
In November we will close our squat snatch and back squat cycle. We have a special week of throwback workouts November 4th -8th for the CrossFit Impulse 15th anniversary. Then we are going to have a short, 4-week block focused on deadlift. We will hit it light, then heavy, then light, then heavy, for each of the 4 weeks. That takes us into December where we will close the final 3 weeks of the year without a formal strength cycle. The holidays make attendance a challenge for many due to personal travel and how each year’s work holidays intersect with the weekly calendar. So we will pick up our next strength cycle when life resumes as normal in January.
January we will turn to building boulder shoulders with a push press cycle combined with ab and core work for accessory. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t think of ignoring the pull to that push, and we will hit pullups on Thursdays when we are on the rig.
February will bring us back to squatting via front squats. And we will learn how to channel that squatting into our Olympic lifts via cleans on Wednesdays. The end of February and beginning of March will bring us the 2025 CrossFit Open workouts on Fridays.
Now that we’ve built raw shoulder and front squatting strength early in the year, we will turn to adding speed and coordination with jerks. I also have a plan on how to improve our footwork on power cleans so that we fail a power clean by being driven down into a squat clean. As power cleans get heavier most CrossFitters left to their own devices jump wider, and wider, and WIDER. This is fine as long as your MCL and ACL can handle it. Problem is, it’s really tough to figure out what they can handle until they break. Your quads are well prepared to accept a power clean that becomes a squat clean. Your knee’s ACL and MCL are not always prepared to be loaded heavily while standing like a starfish. So we are going to work on that.
That’s the next 6 months. As we progress through the first quarter of 2025 I will observe, learn, and plan the remainder of 2025. The dichotomy of working on the racks in 115C on both Mondays and Thursdays is new, and I want to take some time to learn how to manage that best. I also want to observe and learn from the needs of our gym populace. What do we need more help with? What do we enjoy and have the most fun with? Why is the bike evil? These are questions I will seek to answer, and I would love to hear your input. What movements would you like to see more of? Less of? What style of workouts crank your tractor? Let me know. Just walk right up to me at the gym and say, “Jeff, I really like [insert your opinion]. Can we see more of it?” Fun fact: I get so few of this input that the little input I do get has almost a 100% success rate of being incorporated. I actually remember that for a couple years Kaitlin Craig was the only person with the stones to give me constructive feedback. Her suggestions were always reasonable, so they always got incorporated. Now I do need constructive feedback that is actionable. I can’t do anything about the fact that I have freckles. But I challenge you—present me with reasonable, measured opinion and I will surprise you with how far it goes.
Knowledge Focus:
Each month in this section I’m going to give you a snippet of things I have learned through my reading and experience on strength and conditioning. Nothing you read here is a precise blueprint for how I design our training. I apply the Bruce Lee principle to everything: Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own. So if you read the next section and say, “Oh, I guess we’re doing Westside Barbell conjugate method now…” No. That is not the correct conclusion. But what I cover in this section each month does inform my choices on our training. And by taking a broad enough survey of science and history to inform those decisions, I hope I can design the best training possible. As James Mattis said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” If we read history, the answers to most problems have already been discovered.
Now let’s step into one small corner of strength training history. Louie Simmons was a powerlifting coach who built some of the strongest men and women the world has ever seen. In the 1990s and 2000s his gym, Westside Barbell, became known as the place to train if you wanted to set world records in the sport of powerlifting. Louie is most famous for developing the conjugate method of training. He is not famous for being a concise communicator, so when anyone says “conjugate method” they could mean many different things. Here’s what I took away from the conjugate method by reading and listening to Louie, and how I apply it to our training.
There are three ways to get stronger in resistance training:
1. Repetition Method. Perform many repetitions with a light or moderate load. We do this all the time. Most people in the world who resistance train use only the repetition method. This speaks to its effectiveness. This also speaks to the opportunity people forego by using only the repetition method: there are two other methods that they never use.
2. Dynamic Effort Method. Move a light weight at maximal speed. How light is light? Usually about 30-50% of your 1RM. This also includes plyometrics like box jumps, jumping lunges. or clapping pushups. This can also include accommodating resistance like using chains and elastic bands on barbell lifts to change the resistance throughout your range of motion. But spoiler alert, until you’re already very strong, bands and chains are a waste of your time. Let me be clear: they are fun as hell and they look badass. I love bench pressing with chains. It’s a fun and unique challenge. But if you’ve got one hour a day to train, and you don’t yet bench press your body weight for reps, then you will make more progress faster by hammering traditional bench press variations and assistance work than you will by taking 30 minutes just to setup the perfect banded bench press workout. So we use the dynamic effort method, but primarily through non-barbell means.
3. Maximum Effort Method. Lift maximal loads for very low repetitions—1 to 3 reps. If you vary the exercise weekly, you can do this without burning out your central nervous system (CNS). For example, you can max back squat one week, do a heavy single front squat the next week, do pause overhead squat doubles the next week, and if done at low volume (1-3 reps) you’ll get stronger and still have plenty CNS left for other training. Most of the world never uses this method, because as Louie said “You cannot exert maximal force against sub-maximal weight.” That means no matter how much you want to, you can’t exert the maximum force you’re capable of against a 95/65 lb barbell. In order to exert maximal force and build strength with this method, you have to give your body a maximal load to push against. We use this when we work up to heavy singles, doubles, and triples in different lifts often. I purposely don’t give you the time or rest structure to hit a true max, unless we are testing at the end of a cycle. The goal is to handle heavy weight consistently, even if it’s not a true max. This is perhaps the best tool that we use to get stronger.
Those are my three biggest takeaways from Louie Simmons’ conjugate method and how I apply them to our strength training.
Louie’s lifters were also notoriously juiced to the gills with anabolic steroids, and they competed in powerlifting classes that use assistance clothing like squat suits, bench shirts, and deadlift suits to increase your lifts. And this is where we apply Bruce Lee. We don’t have to accept every sentence in a book to learn something. And also don’t kid yourself. Every one of the best Westside lifters could take nothing but creatine and whey protein for a couple months and then roll out of bed cold in a pair of tightey-whiteys and squat 600 lbs. Don’t kid yourself into thinking they weren’t brutally strong in raw form.
Finally, let’s close with some wisdom from Greg Glassman circa 2005, in his article “Virtuosity.” I implore you to click the link and read the whole thing. It’s only 1.6 pages of text and it’s SO dense with wisdom.
“There is a compelling tendency among novices developing any skill or art, whether learning to play the violin, write poetry, or compete in gymnastics, to quickly move past the fundamentals and on to more elaborate, more sophisticated movements, skills, or techniques. This compulsion is the novice’s curse—the rush to originality and risk. The novice’s curse is manifested as excessive adornment, silly creativity, weak fundamentals and, ultimately, a marked lack of virtuosity and delayed mastery. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to be taught by the very best in any field you’ve likely been surprised at how simple, how fundamental, how basic the instruction was. The novice’s curse afflicts learner and teacher alike. Physical training is no different.” -Greg Glassman
If you’ve been paying attention, right now you might be cursing me saying, “Jeff, what was all that bullshit about bands and whips and chains and now you talk about how simple our training should be?!?” Bruce Lee, remember? Over the next year we are going to use some of those techniques to get strong in basic lifts: back squat, front squat, pullups, deadlift, clean, snatch, overhead pressing, bench press, and jerk. And we are going to use classic CrossFit conditioning, with a dash of creativity and fun. Because another thing Bruce Lee said was this:
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
We are going to hammer fundamentals. We’ve got 10,000 reps to do. Let’s get started. Next time in the knowledge focus I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned from Mark Rippetoe and Jim Wendler, and how I apply it. Thanks for reading!
-Jeff