Antagonists and Supporters

JT Scott | 10/20/2019 | 10

Thanks to Jenna for the incredible pushup-strength cycle we just finished and the hard work you put in at the box, a lot of you hit big PRs on your benchmark Cindy workout and we all got better at pushups! Now it’s time to shift gears for a new cycle, this one cooked up by Nick to take us through Thanksgiving and into the year-end holidays.

You’ll pick up on the themes soon enough, I suspect – and I know Nick will have more to say about his thinking here in his blog – but what really stands out to me is that we’ll be doing a lot of “backfill”. What I mean by that is that we’ll be working on developing antagonistic and supporting strength around the pushups. That’s fancy language for “get ready for lots of shoulder and kipping work”. But it’s not all gymnastic: you’ll also be seeing a lot more olympic lift variants in the next six weeks as we work on explosiveness, and tempo work to focus our attention on the eccentric phase of our slower strength lifts.

We call these training phases “cycles” in part because they always come around. We focus on improve in a few areas, then go back to work on the others to bring them into balance, and then push forward again. I’m fond of saying that there’s no such thing as a singular “perfect form” in lifts: as soon as your strength increases, your form shifts and you will need to do more technique work to polish that strength.

All in all, I’m excited for this cycle… and already working with Coaches Mike and Nelly on the first big cycle of 2020 which will feature a focus on raw strength in the big 3 lifts: squat, DL, press.

STRENGTH:
[ Power Clean + Push Jerk ] x3

CYCLE TEST/RETEST WOD:
CF Open 12.4
AMRAP 7
3-6-9-12-…
Clean and Jerk (135/95)
Toes to Bar