First Post

This will be my third attempt at blogging.  The first two attempts came in college when I was still super opinionated about things and wanted to go on rants about things I was passionate about.  Problem was that I quickly ran out of things to rant about, or the energy to write about them.  Probably the latter. 

My hope for this third attempt is that I'll have a place to practice my writing and gather my thoughts about training.  For those who don't know I am a personal trainer for a living so between CrossFit and my career I'm around people exercising all day.  I read about it all the time and am generally very interested in fitness and nutrition.  I also try to be a multi-tasker.  My friends make fun of me all the time because of these two facts.  When they saw the gymnastic rings in my apartment they made this.  Fortunately that's not my actual phone number on there.

Anyway, a group of people are interested in training for the CrossFit games next year and I'm one of them.   I suggested to the group that everyone identify three strengths and weaknesses with the idea of helping each other and I've learned quite a bit since then.  Coach Phil from CrossFit Durham (where I train for the most part, known as CFD from now on) suggested a great volume program which has been working extremely well for my handstand push ups.  The gist is that you pick an exercise you suck at and perform between one and five repetitions every minute for 20 minutes without deviating more than two reps.  I did 21 ugly, busted looking reps on June 27th.  Yesterday I was able to do 54 strict reps.  Thanks, Phil, for suggesting a great program to work on a serious weakness and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to get better at a body weight movement.

The owner of CFD, Dave, who is responsible for most of the programming has had a burpee fetish lately because people aren't putting weight plates in the correct stack and today the workout was a 20 minute AMRAP of 5 burpees, 10 sit ups, and 15 box jumps (24").  This felt like an eternity of sustained hell and I did it with a 20# weight vest and got through 11 rounds.  Brutal. 

I'm going to make a legitimate attempt at keeping this blog going.  I can't promise perfect spelling, grammar, or language but I'm confident I'll learn something along the way.  Thanks for reading!

Paul