Yes, I know, Regionals are already in full throw, but I finally got around to checking my draft folder on this blog and decided to just publish this anyway.
So, like every other year since 2007, I’m putting in my annual sweat equity to the CrossFit Community… The CrossFit Games season (now in the form of the “Open” workouts) is in full-swing and every year, like I have since the very first Games, I compete alongside everyone else to see where I stack up. For me, it’s a semi-religious obligation, not unlike Lent. For example, I have done the Open while getting cortisone shots for a ruptured L5 disc (you crash helicopters and you’re going to have some wear and tear), and after blowing out a hammy (at 44, I was a bit overzealous going for a back squat PR).
For 5 weeks, I agree to register, compete, throwdown, and then post it online for the world to see, much like I used to do (for years) with my main page comments on the daily WoD. Starting in 2005 or ’06, I would do the main page workout, “post scores/times/reps/loads to comments,” offer advice when I could, ask questions only after researching the site for answers, groan when something “bad” came out (one of my personal goats) of the hopper, and encourage others with words and perhaps my personal example. I post my scores for the world to see to drive me to give a little more, for the cameraderie of the competition, as an example for my kids, and for dozens of other reasons, including the simple joy it gives me to compete, even well into my forties.
So, here I am again…
Recently, there was a bit of a kerfluffle over the Games workout 14.3, which was an ascending ladder of deadlifts, both in weight and reps, with 15 box jumps in between each set of deads. It looked like this (male weights):
As many reps as possible in 8 minutes of:
10 DL at 135 lb; 15 box jumps (24″)
15 DL at 185 lb; 15 box jumps
20 DL at 225 lb; 15 box jumps
25 DL at 275 lb; 15 box jumps
30 DL at 315 lb; 15 box jumps
35 DL at 365 lb; 15 box jumps
(and if you finish all of that, automatically pass GO, collect $200, and take a card from ‘Community Chest.’ While you’re at it, have a beer on me.)
A few affiliates immediately protested that they wouldn’t subject their athletes to any such a workout as it was “dangerous.” I was surprised to hear that. In fact, not only was I surprised, I was befuddled. And the more I thought about it, the even more puzzled I became … almost “… until [my] puzzler was sore!” [with a nod to the legacy of Mr. Theodore Geissel.] I was surprised to hear a coach at a local box where I competed tell athletes he would not allow a “redo” of the event because of the risks involved and how you couldn’t improve your score anyway, and that it would “wreck you.” He had done it twice and assured us of this “fact.” Naturally, I did it twice in 3 days: once on Saturday morning and again on Monday afternoon.
I’m not taking shots at that coach or those affiliates; they can do what they want. I used to be one, both an affiliate and full-time coach (back in the day) and the Affils are how this culture and movement is transmitted. They’re wildly important to CrossFit’s success. But it struck me, as it often does on the internet, that the quickest reactions (and the loudest) tend to be the least well-reasoned, perhaps not by accident.
So, some thoughts on the workout (caveat: I had nothing to do with its design. Maybe because everyone knows I compete every year, they don’t tell me the events in advance.) First, a lot of the huff and chuff was about how injurious this would be to people’s backs. I wondered if the affiliates who reached this conclusion were also adamantly against “Diane” and wouldn’t let their athletes do such an “inherently dangerous” workout, either. I can’t recall there being much stir over that CF staple, yet look how they compare:
Diane = 21-15-9 of 225 lb DL and HandStand PushUps (HSPU), for time.
This is 45 DL interspersed with 45 HSPU…which (perhaps not coincidentally) is strikingly similar to the first three rounds of the Open Workout 14.3. In 14.3, by contrast, the first 25 deadlifts are actually significantly lighter (10 x 135 and 15 x 185) and it is only in round 3 that one has to do 20 at 225, which is the opening round in Diane (plus 1), followed by another 24 DL at 225 in the succeeding two rounds. Does no one see how “dangerous” Diane is by comparison – at least through the first 3 rounds? If not, then why not?
The complaints about it being dangerous, when questioned, seem to center around the age old “lifting while fatigued” issue, as well as the possibility of lower back injury. I wonder why that is any more of a concern than the concern of dropping a weight on your head when doing overhead work fatigued, be it thrusters in Fran, (try dropping 95 lb of steel on your head and see how you feel), or mid-weight snatches (135 lb for 30 reps in “Isabel”), much less heavy overhead work when doing split jerk triples out of the rack or some other combination. In other words, assuming the validity of the argument, why is this particular “danger” such that an Affiliate feels the need not just to opt out, but to make a public declaration of why and the “dangerousness” of the workout?
This whole thing has almost become like a CrossFit IQ trick question for me, kind of like the old “which is heavier, a thousand pounds of lead or a thousand pounds of feathers?”
You need to be able to answer exactly why this is exceptionally “dangerous” – as compared with any of dozens of other workouts that one could make the claim against – as well as answer specifically how this workout somehow steals the minds of athletes everywhere so much so that they cannot open their hands when they realize a DL is going badly? I find the DL the easiest lift to “bail” on of all of them. I find (as a relatively slow lift) I have more than adequate time to feel my form starting to break down and decide to either stop the pull or bail by simply opening my hands – poof! Instantly the problem is solved.
Bailing on a fast lift (snatch or a jerk) or even a slow lift with the weight either over my body (press) or on my shoulders (back squat) is a much trickier proposition, whether fatigued or even fresh.
A few final points. 14.3 naturally weeded out people who were “out of their league” with each succeeding jump and the metabolic ticket demanded to move up each time. I have a 475 DL (nothing legendary by any stretch). I made 2 reps at 315 due to time, not strength, limits. If someone can do “Diane” as rx’d, then this workout presented no danger at all. If someone couldn’t do Diane as rx’d, then it was incumbent on them to do what every individual has to do when lifting heavy weights, potentially ones near your 1 rep max: do it intelligently.
Any athlete who has insufficient proprioception (i.e. awareness of what their own body is doing) to be able to let go of a deadlift when their back starts to round, has essentially conceded they are unable to even know what their own body is doing and wants to blame a workout for that failing. Here’s a thought: if you can’t tell whether you’re “sitting up straight” or not, or (similarly) whether your back has the necessary lordosis when deadlifting, you probably don’t belong deadlifting at all. You haven’t learned the most essential part of the lift, which is something that is covered in excruciating detail in every Level I I’ve ever sat in on (and I’ve been to many), and which I have never seen a CrossFit trainer fail to point out in all of the hundreds of Affiliates I’ve visited, dropped in on, in my years in this Community. You can’t talk about the deadlift without mentioning that the most important aspect of it is how safe it is provided you maintain lordosis. It is safe to post-maximal efforts. That is, I can make a 1RM PR attempt perfectly safely by maintaining proper form and simply stopping the moment I feel that form start to break down. Ta-DAH!! I could walk out to my garage now and attempt a 500 lb DL (a 15 b PR for me), even with my ruptured disc and 44 year old spine, and I could do so perfectly safely.
If an Affiliate has people that can’t do that, then those people shouldn’t. But if an Affiliate is blanket claiming NO ONE in the gym can do it, and the Affiliate forbids it, then in my opinion, there’s a coaching problem, not a programming problem. There’s also a failure of understanding if the same Affiliate has ever programmed Diane and didn’t raise these same concerns. The first two “rounds” of 14.3 were warmup sets for anyone who could get to 275 and had designs on 315. Anyone for whom they were “difficult” would be very quickly “opting out” well before the weights got “big,” and anyone who can DL into the mid 400’s should be pretty safe at those weights and given the amount of experience necessary to get to have a 450 DL or more. That cohort should be more than capable of recognizing when to let go of the bar. Thus, so far as I can tell, 14.3 wasn’t inherently more “dangerous” than any workout and carried with it built-in limits that made it, in my opinion, safer than a lot of workouts.