The Shoulder Killer (and some goals)

Well, at least there was no egregious amount of pounding pavement today. On the other hand, my shoulders are done.

Yay for Mondays!



I checked my log for the last metcon that we did push press in and I used 55#. Didn't seem that bad, so I grabbed the bar and did some 45# warmups then added on two 5# plates. 15 reps of these? The last time I did this the metcon was 2 rounds, totalling 20 PP. Multiple rounds of 15 reps @ 55# was not going to happen, especially if I wanted to get through more than 2 rounds. I was already dreading the knees to elbows. Back down to just the 45# bar I went.

That turned out to be a good decision, because knees to elbows sucked the life out of my shoulders. It's one thing to get your knees up there (and no, I haven't mastered toes to bar yet so this was not the easiest task), it's another thing to hang on while doing a semi-kip to help get your knees up there. I'd say my knees made to my elbows about 30% of the time. The other 70% of the time, they got pretty close. It's a horrible feeling seeing your knees so close and yet still so far away. At my best I was getting five reps in at a time. Then after all that to get down and do pushups! Holy freakin' canolli! The only time to catch my breath was the situps. The only non-shoulder intensive exercise of the entire WOD. Thank goodness I stayed with the 45# bar, I might have died otherwise. Not really, but I would have had horrible form and that's never a good thing.

15 min AMRAP: 4 rounds + 11 PP (45#)

I'll take that.

And now for the other part... a couple of weeks ago, I decided on some goals to set for myself. Long term, I'd like to participate in next year's open. Short term, I have to master the skill sets first. Which leads to my first couple skills to tackle: kipping pullups and unassisted ring dips.

Goal date: June 9th (my birthday!)

That gives me a little over two months to get these down. And while it may not be a strict pullup, I'm fine with kipping. I've never been able to do any sort of pullup in my life. It's been a goal of mine for a long time and I've done work before to get me to a pullup but I've always been discouraged and given up. Not this time, it's gonna happen and hopefully by June. I've been practicing after almost every WOD (couldn't today because my shoulders were shot) and I've gotten to the point where I'm off the green band and able to kip with the blue. I'm working up in the reps, right now I can consistently do 5-8 kipping with the blue band. Next is to transition to the red band. Hopefully, that will happen by the middle of April.

Unassisted ring dips is going hand in hand with that. Right now, I'm using the blue band to do these in wods. Which, I'll admit, is a little easy when I start... but after about 20 or so reps... not so easy. I've been doing negative ring dips (jump up and slow lowering to the bottom) to build my lat strength up. I've done these before on parallel bars, so I know that I can do this, but the rings add a whole other dimension of unstability. Still, it's gonna happen one day.

Until then, I'm gonna keep practicing.