CrossFit Journey Part IV: A typical WOD session at CrossFit Bare

Content by: Guy Lawrence

By Guy Lawrence

What is CrossFit? I’m still struggling with this question when I get asked. But when I tell people the first thing I do in the morning is check the CrossFit Bare website to see what today’s WOD is, I usually get two responses that go something like this:

  1. Uh? Don’t you think that’s a little obsessive? What’s wrong with you mun!
  2. Wow…Really! What’s a WOD? Tell me more…

This post is dedicated to the latter…

Guy: Hi this is Guy of 180 Nutrition and today on my crossfit journey I wanted to take you through a typical WOD which is a workout of the day here at crossfit Bare. Now, wht’s inspired this is that Cassie my coach has just entered me into a competition in October. Now, A – I never thought I’d be doing that and B- it’s not as daunting as it sounds as it’s divided into three categories which is intermediate, advanced and also there is a beginner category for somebody like myself which is definitely where I’ll start. What we have here is the whiteboard which is the cornerstop of crossfit. Everyday we walk in here and this displays the workout of the day. So what’s on here today is what our fellow crossfitter Khan or KP as he’s known as has written for us. The idea is that this is scaled from beginner, intermediate or advanced and we just wanted to show you the different things that we can do so crossfit can cater for anyone.

Khan: How are you going guys, alrighty so like with any class we’re going to start off with a warm up today and our warm up is going to be broken down into two components. We’ve got the initial two minutes of double unders and single skips which guy is going to kindly demo for us in a moment followed by a bit of mobility with the spiderman complex followed by pass throughs. These are basically going to prep the joints, prep the body for the movements to come. Alright Guy, let’s go.

Guy: Nice t-shirt mate…

Khan: So Guy’s got the rope here and we’re going to start with the single unders followed by the double unders. Its the same sort of movement just a vary degree of the exercise. So we’ve got the beginner, Guy’s kindly de-robing for us there (nice t-shirt mate). So he’s going to start off with some single unders which is just a basic skip, one jump one rotation of the rope. Now the more advanced version of the exercise is the double under as just as it sounds it’s going to be one jump but two rotations of the rope… Ideally you’ll go a little bit longer than that though… beautiful. Alright from here were going to go straight into the spiderman complex. So Guy is going to drop down and start for us. Now you’ll notice what he is doing is opening up the hips here, we’re going to have squats, we’re going to have cleans, we’re going to have box jumps later on in the workout so we want the hips nice and open nice and mobilised beforehand. So dropping nice and low here, we’re gonna drop the inside arm down as well. Beautiful Guy, we’ll hold that for a little longer though, now we’re going to swap legs. Just do some little circles with the back leg here to really open up that hip joint. Beautiful from here we go on to the pass through, we’re going to use a dowel for the pass throughs, and this one’s to open up the shoulder joint. There you have it guys, that’s going to be the standard warm up that we start up with for most workouts.

Alright, next up in the workout is going to be a strength component and our life for today is going to be the clean. We have got 4 different types of the clean to cater to 4 different types of athlete. First up we’re going to have Guy run through the med ball clean which is the beginner version of the exercise and then we are going to have Josh who you may remember from the last video that we made go through the hand clean, power clean and squat clean.

Part 1 – Med ball cleans

med_ballComing over to Guy first, now Guy is going to demonstrate the medball clean, very nice Guy. Then we have josh over here, Josh, nice shirt mate. Now Josh is avery strong guy and this is light weight for him and he’s just going to use the weight at this level to demonstrate perfect technique. OK Josh so take it away with the hang clean, beautiful. And now for the power clean, so he’s going from the ground this time, very nice, one more. And lastly the squat clean, this is the most advanced version of the exercise which Josh makes look very easy there.

Alrighty, next up we’ve got the workout of the day or the WOD as it’s written. Now you’ll see that we’ve got three different WOD’s written up, they are all basically the same workout just three different levels. We’ve got level 1 which is the beginner version of the workout, level 2 which is the intermediate version and level 3 which is the RX or as prescribed version for the advanced athletes. Now Josh, Guy and myself are going to run you through each of the three different exercises and each of the different levels.

Part 2 – Box jump

180_nutrition_crossfit_box_jumpGuy: OK, so I’m basically going to do the level 1 step-up, which is essentially a step up and if we wanted to take that a little bit further we could take that into a box jump. Josh is going to show us a level 2 box jump look like.

Josh: Jump up, full extension and off, up, extend and off

Guy: And Khan, 30 inch box jump

Khan: then come into full extension at the top, down and up.

Part 3 – Front squat

180nutrition_crossfit_front_squatJosh: Ok guys hey it’s Josh. I’m going to be coaching Guy and Khan through the squat so we’re going to be going from the beginner level which is the air squat, I’m going to show you the goblet squat and the the front squat. So first of the all the coaching point for guy is weight on heels, heels heels heels. We’re going to sit back, arse back and squat through. You’ll see how his hip crease goes below the knee, perfect nice.

For the goblet squat, use a kettlebell or a dumbbell, hold it high and pull the belly button towards the spine. Sitting back, heels, heels heels, perfect Josh (LOL).

Use that front rack position with high elbows. Perfect, well done.

Part 4 – Gymnastic rings

CrossFit gymnastic ringsGuy: Now we are on to the last part of our WOD. We’ve covered the power and we’ve covered the strength, and now we are into the back section of the gym which is the gymnastics component. We are now going to show you three ways to essentially master the muscle up. I’m going to show you level one which is simply a ring row.

So that’s the first exercise to master. Now if you come over this way, we have Josh who’s going to show us level two.

Josh: we are going to do a pull up first. There is the strict pullup or the Kipling pull up. After that we do is move onto ring dips. So I get myself nice and stable and use what’s called a hollow body position. With the hollow body dip down and up, down and up.

Guy: essentially, these two movements have to be mastered before we move onto level three, which is the muscle up. And mister KP himself is going to demonstrate that for us.

Khan: we are doing a strict muscle up today cause we don’t have much room to do a kip muscle up. This is harder than the kip muscle up.
So bum on the ground, hands turned out sitting in a nice L position like this. Then we are going to turn the hands in whilst pulling ourselves up, and the muscle up is going to look something like this.
And up onto the rings like so, finishing in the top of the ring position. And then back down, hands out at the bottom, and back up like so. You can see how the initial part of the movement is a pull, and the second part of the movement is a ring dip. And that’s why we master the other to levels before we master the muscle up.

Guy: Khan has made that look very easy, which is essentially a very difficult exercise to master, believe me!

Khan: thanks mate.

Guy: So we’ve just gone through the three levels of the workout and after the WOD itself we always finish off on a bonus and a mobility and I’ll let Khan explain that before we finish up.

Khan: Thanks Guy, so the bonus we’re generally going to work on a bit of skill or a little bit core. Today we’ve got three different exercises to run through and then mobility we’re going to roll out the quads. Mobility is something that Guy is going to cover in another installment for you Guys.

Guy: So essentially that’s normally the last five minutes and have a bit of a cha,t and hang out and high five ourselves of how wonderful we’ve done through the workout over the last 45 minutes or so. So as you can see it can all be completely scaled and can be done by a variety of people so I’m just going to continue and try and master these for the competition in October, which I’ sure we’ll cover later in the blog. Until the next time, I hope you learned something from today, thanks.

Check out our Ultimate Guide to Post Workout Recovery for CrossFit Here

Guy Lawrence

This article is brought to you by Guy Lawrence. Guy is a qualified fitness trainer with over 10 years of experience in the health industry. Guy worked at the UTS Fitness Centre in Sydney Australia where he specialised in exercise nutrition and obtained his Certificate in Exercise Nutrition and Certified... Read More
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3 Replies to “CrossFit Journey Part IV: A typical WOD session at CrossFit Bare”

Man!!! I have utter respect for all those that do any rings discipline workouts. Hat down to you boys. You guys rock xxDani

Lou Lou says:

Looking forward to hearing how your mobility mission progresses Guy. Discovering the rumble-roller and lacrosse ball has revolutionized my approach to workouts and movement in general.
Athletic performance rests upon not only a strong but also a supple body – took me many years of having a ‘quick stretch’ before I grasped that true mobility leads to better performance and more gruelling workouts can be undertaken efficiently!

180nps says:

So true Lou Lou! I’m lying on some kind of object daily working on my mobility 🙂 its working wonders for my CrossFit. I’ll be covering it in a few posts in the future…

Thanks for dropping by… Guy

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