Control Your Breathing, Control the Workout

JT Scott | 02/24/2019 | 4

When preparing for competition or to beat your benchmark score in a workout, the concept of “pacing” gets discussed a lot. CF Open 19.1 on Friday might have really driven that message home to a lot of you, too! It’s important to have a gameplan going in. But how do you know your capacity in order to set the pacing and breaks? How do you train your capacity to recover quickly in those breaks and get back to the work? The answer is to work those intervals, control the time, and focus on controlling your breath.

If you’ve been around a while, you’ve heard me say “Control Your Breathing, Control the Workout”. (Pic somewhat related: “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World”. Bonus points for getting the reference.) If you are hyperventilating or heaving, there’s no way you’re going to stay in the fight or recover well during your rest period. Today’s WOD piece is about exploring that time in between: finding the discipline to choose the exact number of breaths you take in a rest period, slowing your breath and heart rate to make the most of those breaths, and then having the determination to charge hard at the next set of reps.

This is a format you haven’t seen before at CFSV, but it’s an oldie out of my box of tricks from many years ago that I found really useful in bringing more mindfulness to my metcons. It’s a Burpee Breathing Ladder!

How this works: do one burpee, as fast as you can, then take one deep breath at the top. As soon as that breath is done, hit the deck for TWO burpees as fast as possible, then two deep breaths of rest. Then 3 burpees, and 3 deep breaths of rest. Etc etc etc, until you get up to 9 super-fast burpees and 9 controlled, counted breaths of rest. Then work your way back DOWN the ladder until you finish with 1 burpee.

The “for time” element is really all about how fast you can cycle your burpees. The bigger challenge for some of you might be controlling your breathing and ONLY taking the prescribed amount of breaths between sets, and charging even harder on every set of burpees to get them done fast. Slow that breath, control your heart rate in the rest periods, and attack the burpees like you were set on fire and needed to repeatedly stop and drop!

Coming out of this exercise, you’ll be nice and warm and have plenty of time to settle in to the meat of today’s work: 5 heavy sets of 5 reps of Back Squats. The warmup sets don’t count – we want 5 sets that are REALLY heavy. Not necessarily sets across, though – so warm up to a heavy weight, do 5 reps, and be prepared to have your coach “gently encourage” you to add some more damn weight before attempting the next set. 🙂

WOD:
1 -> 9 -> 1
Burpee Breathing Ladder
* same # of breaths as burpees after each round

STRENGTH:
Back Squats
5-5-5-5-5