Todays inspiration came from Facebook of all places. Go figure.

Potential: a latent excellence or ability that may or may not be developed.

“Potential don’t mean shit unless you realize it. What’s holding you back from being great? ” -Louie Simons

A few weeks ago, the CrossFit HQ media team visited us at CrossFit Relentless to tell the inspiring story of our own Brenda Glidden – the video was posted to the CrossFit Journal last night!

After a long morning of flight delays Glenn and I have spent the second half of our day with the Garage Games folks. We stopped at their gym first to get in a quick wod.The gym was everything you would hope a CrossFit gym would be.

Our hosts are a really great group of guys and girls. After our wod they took us out to Andretti’s Go Carts for some racing fun. I have never been on a go cart that hit speeds like the ones we were using here. The facility was amazing inlcuding a huge game room,restaurant and a sports bar overlooking the track. After a few dozen spins around we left and headed our for an awesome steak dinner.

We talked about all things CrossFit of course and spent a couple of hours trading stories and ideas back and forth.Tomorrow morning we head back to meet with the Garage Games crew and see if we can strike a deal that makes our Beast of the east Fitness Festival one of the larger events in the  Garage Games series.

This is a shot from the inside of our hotel. The 3rd largest Marriott in the world. I can’t describe how frigging huge and cool this place is. The picture just doesn’t do it justice.

It’s been a great first day down here and I can’t thank Andy and the rest of the Garage Games crew enough. They have been amazing hosts. Let’s hope we are of like minds tomorrow!

I won’t lie. Going to a competition with our team and dominating it with four 1st place finishes puts a smile on my face. Knowing that 3 of those first place  finishes are husband/wife and mother from the same family makes the smile a little wider. However I honestly don’t care if you come in first or last. Only that you did your best and were personally satisfied with your effort.

There were several performances from this past weekend that didn’t end in 1st palce necessarily that deserve to be mentioned as well.

Amy Martin: She’s an amazing athlete who sometimes needs a little push to reach her full potential. This weekend she allowed me to coach her into risking a little more weight on the power clean event and ended up dominating that event in all age brackets and secured a second place for her division. Nice work Amy.

Rafael Martinez: a competitor with a lions heart for sure. Just a couple of months out of shoulder surgery and he gave every ounce of his being to the competition and set a personal record in his power clean event. Always a thrill to watch you compete Raf.

Dave Larson: Relatively new to the CrossFit competition arena at 63 years old who ended up with a severe cramp in his calf during the first event but battled thorugh to complete all 3 workouts and also set a personal record for his powerclean. It was also great to see his sons and wife there cheering him on. You still have some sharp teeth and a lot of heart for an old lion Dave. Nice job.

Karen Rackliffe: always a warrior who was alone in 1st place after 3 tough events and didn’t need to do the last workout to maintain 1st place. Nonetheless she did what was asked of her and put herself through another grueling event just because. A competitor for sure but at 61 years old it is even more poignant.

Steve Luce: a man who is blossoming into a fierce CrossFit athlete who had the guts to take a gamble based on my advice during the power clean wod. He tied a personal record for this lift but it ultimately cost him some points. Without risk there can be no great reward. Thank you for that Steve.

Annie Majocha: What else can be said about Annie that has not already been said. She is as clutch an athlete  in a pressure situtation as you could ever ask of a person. We had one athlete who had to give up her spot this wekeend and Annie volunteered to step in and compete last minute. She did what she always does. Shows up for the team and leaves it all on the floor. I will never forget that Annie.

If there is one word that could encapsulate all of these athletes it is this. Heart

Glenn and I spent Saturday coaching and cheering for an amazing group of athletes. We do this quite frequently but this weekend was a bit different. The athletes involved this time were all over 40 years old. The oldest in our group was 63 and I saw one guy who was over over 70. We were all at CrossFit Norwalk for a Masters only competition.

The wods ran the mix of heavy Olympic lifts, couplets and triplets. I am in awe of every person who competed both on our team and the other masters athletes who showed up. There is nothing quite like seeing a 60 plus year old woman and a 70 plus year old man whipping old pull ups like candy from a pez dispenser!  Think I’m lying? Look at our own Karen Rackliffe who came in first in the 60 and over bracket and Jacinto Bonilla who came in first in his division. Karen is 61 and Jacinto is over 70!

Altogether we had 10 athletes entered in this competition and out of those 10 here are the results. Anne Sargent..1st in her age bracket, Russ Malz…1st in his age bracket, Kim Malz…1st in her age bracket, Karen Rackliffe…1st in her age bracket, Amy Martin..2nd in her age bracket. Carrie Bowman…3rd in her age bracket. We also had Steve Luce, Rafael Martinez, Annie Majocha and David Larson competing ferociously as well but I did not get to see where they ranked by the time we left for the day.

Keep in mind when you look at these amazing athletes that they are all over 40 years old with several of them over 60! They are proof that you are never to old.

Years ago when I was a trainer at a “normal gym” and first found CrossFit online I also came across another website. Gym Jones. The site was dark and mysterious. Posts about the workouts done on their gym were sometimes purposely vague and somewhat foreboding. These guys were about as serious as they come when it came to training their clients. They trained a lot of pro athletes and special forces personel. Peoples who’s career or lives depended on how fit they were. This past year I even went to a seminar they had trying to understand their methods and mentality a little more.

There was a lot of  ” in your face” attitude about who they were , who they wanted to train and what type of indivdual merited entrance into their world. It seemed arrogant and brash and exclusionary on purpose. I remember one blurb in particular because it seemed to me like a business model built to fail. They seemd ok with that as long as they were quarenteed a person willing to commit to their values when it comes to training. I’ll paraphrase here. It went something like this ‘” We do not have the time or patience to deal with the causal workout person who just wants to lose 20 lbs. We don’t care if you don’t want to be big or bulky. We want to train people who take their fitness seriously.”

At first glance this would seem to alienate people who want to give you money. A silly way to go about being in business for sure. However, having now owned my own training facilities for over 3 years now and having seen the types of people there were refering to . I get it.  What I believe the staff at Gym Jones was trying to say is that we want people commited to getting better. People who wouldn’t waste time by giving half efforts. The type of people who think they need to do 30-60 minutes of cardio and never lift a heavy weight in pursuit of shedding 10-20 lbs. They come one week and then miss a week. The types of people who never seem to  grasp a techinal lift or tricky gymnastic move because they don’t care enough pay attention and be consistent.

This type of trainee effects the mood of the gym. They waste valuable resources like space, equipment and coaching time because they will not commit or because they can’t let go of antiquated training protocols.

We get these people from time to time as well. No matter how much we explain to them and offer them the chance to NOT join our gym inevitably some slip through. While I won’t go as far as to say you are not welcome in our gym because sometimes people do wake up and grow into type of athlete we prefer to train. I will ask this though. Please, take the time and think over your decision to join our gym. If our methods, intensity, community or prices do not work for you in any way please don’t waste our time for a month or two. We would prefer to invest our time coaching the people in our gym who get the importance of being commited to a common purpose.  These people are already paying and have earned the right to be surrounded by people of like mind and purpose.

I found a great article about the deadlift written by  Mark Rippitoe and posted in T-Nation.  Written in Mark’s typical shoot from the hip wit it breaks down the method we have taught you all for doing a proper deadlift. Read on and enjoy.

Are You Ignorant When it Comes to the Deadlift?

by Mark Rippetoe – 12/06/2011
It’s not always apparent, and is often poorly understood. Stated succinctly,  stupid is not your fault – you were born that way. You’re just dumb. You can’t learn.

Ignorance means you just don’t know. Ignorance probably is your fault,    because you’ve failed to inform yourself. This is especially true since the advent of  the internet has enabled the most universal and thorough dissemination of information  in the history of human communication.

The obvious problem is that 95% of that information is wrong, which follows my  popular maxim: 95% of all the shit that occurs everywhere is completely fucked up.  The internet is no different.

But you can, with a little diligence, tease out the facts if you want to. If you’re interested in a subject, it eventually falls upon you to distill the  truth from the bullshit.

This you’ll do gladly, if you’re interested enough to devote significant  amounts of time and effort to it, because an intelligent person realizes that    bullshit is a waste of time. A stupid person might not appreciate this, and    therefore continue to be ignorant of the truth of a matter.

Take the deadlift, for example. It’s the most basic, obvious movement in  barbell training, the one with the most carryover to everyday tasks and the easiest  to learn of all the basic exercises.

You just step up to the bar with a vertical-jump stance width, with toes out and    your shins about an inch from the bar, grab it just outside your stance with your    knees still straight, then bend your knees forward and out a little bit until your  shins touch the bar, squeeze your chest up until your back is flat, take a big  breath, and drag the bar up your legs until you’re standing up straight.

See? One (admittedly run-on) sentence describes the whole thing.

But just because a task can be described simply doesn’t mean that there  aren’t any important details. Fortunately, they can be built into the instructions, if the instructor is clever. Our one-sentence deadlift instruction carries a    lot of important information, and if it’s followed correctly and intelligently,  it’ll result in a perfect deadlift every time.

Let’s take it a step at a time and see what we can learn from this simple  approach to an uncomplicated movement.

The Uncomplicated Deadlift

Stance Width

The stance width of a vertical jump is narrower than most novices’ deadlift,    but it shouldn’t be. A push into the floor should have the mid-foot directly under    the hip joint, and this is the stance width that allows you to push the floor without  losing force to any shear that will develop along a laterally-angled leg (the sumo stance intentionally widens the stance to artificially shorten the legs, and trades    the benefit of a more vertical back for the inefficiency of the angled legs –  but we’re not sumo-ing right now).

Toes

Most people jump with toes pointed slightly out, and this toes-out stance is very helpful for the deadlift. It gets the thighs out of the way of the belly, which helps set your back flatter and it gets the groin muscles and the external rotators  involved in the pull. Konstantinovs demonstrates this when he pulls, as have many  great deadlifters through the history of powerlifting.

Bar Position

Placing the bar about an inch from your shins puts the bar directly over your mid-foot, precisely where the bar wants to be anyway, because that’s the point  over which the load balances.

When you stand up straight with your feet even, where are you in balance? On your  toes? On your heels? Bad idea. In either of these positions, you have to exert more  effort to stand than when balanced in the middle. The mid-foot is the place    that’s furthest away from both those positions of imbalance. This also applies  to the deadlift.

An intelligent person will verify this by watching YouTube videos of heavy  deadlifts where he’ll see that every heavy deadlift travels up in a vertical path,  sliding up the shins from a fairly vertical shin angle. Even if the lifter starts with the bar forward of this position, the bar will roll back to the mid-foot before  it leaves the ground.

Likewise, this same intelligent person will notice that the bar locks out at the    top directly over the mid-foot. Why would you intentionally pull the bar from a position that’s horizontally different from the one you’re pulling it to?   Well, you wouldn’t unless you’re stupid, so that’s where the bar starts.

Grip

Your grip should be designed to make the bar travel the shortest possible distance  to lockout, and this means that the arms will hang parallel to each other when you    grip the bar. This is accomplished by taking the narrowest grip you can without your  hands rubbing your legs on the way up. So your grip will be where your hands line up  with the widest point of your stance.

Most novices take too wide a stance, and therefore too wide a grip. Most elite    lifters take a close grip. Verify this for yourself. If your stance is correct, your    arms will hang straight down when seen from the front and you’ll have pulled the  bar the shortest distance it can travel to lockout.

During the process of taking the grip you do not move the bar, because you  just intentionally put it exactly where it needs to be, over the mid-foot.

Setting Up the Pull

You haven’t bent your legs yet, but now you need to drop your knees forward until your shins touch the bar. This motion places the shins at a slight forward angle that  leaves the bar over the mid-foot while in contact with the shins.

If you drop your hips, your knees will travel forward and shove the bar forward of the mid-foot. So don’t drop your hips.

Remember, don’t move the bar. That would be stupid.

Just after you touch the bar with your shins, push your knees out very slightly.  This keeps your thighs lined up with your slightly pointed-out toes and allows your  groin muscles and lateral hip muscles to engage during the pull.

If you’re a bigger guy, you’ll immediately notice that it’s easier    to get in position over the bar if your thighs are out of the way of your gut, as    mentioned earlier. The knees-out motion takes full advantage of the toes-out stance,  the smartest thing to do as you prepare to pull.

Chest Up, Back Set

Now comes the most important part of the procedure. Squeeze your chest up to set  your back. Don’t drop your hips like everybody else does, and like you’ve been doing, too. Just leave your ass where it is after your shins touch the bar and    set your back from the top down by squeezing your chest up into thoracic extension  and letting that wave of extension carry itself down to your low back.

Watch Brad Gillingham do his 881-pound deadlift and you’ll see that it can be    done quite effectively without a drop of the hips. It’s hard, because your back  is fighting with your hamstrings for control of your pelvis and your back has to win. It may feel odd the first couple of reps, but as you warm up it will get easier.  Regardless, the chest-up motion will always be the hardest part of the setup.

The fact is, if it’s easy, you did it wrong.

The Deadlift is Not a Squat

You must understand this: you’re not trying to squat the weight off the floor with the bar in your hands. This doesn’t work, as you may have noticed if  you’ve watched enough deadlifting to be informed about what really occurs when  heavy weights are pulled off the floor.

When the weight gets heavy, you can drop your hips as low as you want to and push    the bar as far forward as it takes to make you happy, but what actually happens before the bar leaves the floor is always the same: the bar comes back toward  the mid-foot, the hips come up until the shoulders settle into position just in front of the bar, and the bar comes up in a straight line, if you haven’t fucked up  the pull too badly.

The shoulders-just-in-front-of-the-bar position is a feature of all pulls that are  heavy enough, whether deadlift, clean, or snatch. I take a shot at explaining why in the new 3rd edition of Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training (hint: it has    to do with the lats).

By now you’ve looked again at all the deadlift videos and seen this position    establish itself every time, regardless of whether the lifter initiated the lift correctly or incorrectly (if the lifter initiated the lift incorrectly, the hips rise  and the back angle changes until the shoulders are just in front of the bar anyhow).

You can identify this position because the arms don’t hang straight down plumb,    but rather hang at a slight angle when viewed from the side. While you were looking  at them again, you also noticed the bar travels a vertical path. In fact, if you fuck    the pull up too badly (i.e. let it get forward of the mid-foot anywhere in the pull  so that the bar path isn’t vertical) it won’t go up – unless it’s a  sub-maximal attempt.

So squeezing the chest up as the best way to set your back merely incorporates the    facts that you’ve gathered by watching the videos and informing yourself. If you set your back in the position it likes to pull from anyway, you minimize wasted motion before the pull and you create a simple procedure for doing it the same way  every time.

The Lockout

All that remains is dragging the bar up your legs to lockout. “Dragging”  implies contact, and contact all the way up ensures the vertical bar path; if you let  it go forward as it passes your knees on the way up, you’ll have let it drift  forward of the mid-foot, and thus gotten out-of-balance.

But if you’ve set your back correctly and started the pull with the bar over mid-foot, it will come up your shins and your thighs in a straight vertical line, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a mechanically pleasing configuration.

Less Bounce to the Ounce

Of course, you have to keep your back flat, and that takes strength in the lumbar  erectors that can only be built with heavy deadlifts done correctly. It has become  fashionable in random exercise/”functional movement” gyms to permit the use  of bumper plates and a bounce off the floor for all the reps of a set of deadlifts  after the first one.

This isn’t “functional” – no sane, responsible person picks up a  heavy object by bouncing it off the floor because that might break something. An informed person knows that if you don’t use a muscle, you won’t train that muscle. Common sense dictates this fact, and no particular  intelligence is required to arrive at this conclusion.

Simple observation tells us that people who bounce their deadlifts aren’t  very strong off the floor. Experience informs me that if a 185-pound man with three  years of barbell “training” comes to my seminar lacking the ability to  deadlift 300 pounds with a flat back, he’s probably been bouncing his deadlifts.

The lumbar erectors are the muscles that hold the lumbar spine in extension. If  you fail to use them for that purpose during a deadlift, they won’t adapt to  this isometric task, and you’ll have turned the most basic back exercise in the  gym into a ridiculous circus trick.

Let’s be honest: you bounce your deadlifts because it’s easier to do  more reps that way. But you know this already, because you were never that ignorant.

Reset all your reps and make your low back get strong enough to hold itself flat  during a maximum deadlift attempt. Even if more reps are the goal, a stronger back is    the only way to achieve it.

There may be a slight tendency for the bar to drift forward as it comes off the  floor. When this happens, it’s usually because you’ve rocked forward during    the setup so that your weight is forward of the mid-foot. Shoes with heels can do  this, as can a misperception of your start position.

If this happens, you’re probably too far forward, with your shoulders too far  in front of the bar and your back too horizontal. To correct this, rock back off of  your toes, reset your chest up, and think about actually pushing your mid-foot  into the floor, instead of pulling on the bar.

That Wasn’t So Hard, Was It?

Deadlifts are one of the easiest lifts to learn and do correctly. It usually takes  me about five minutes to fix an incorrect deadlift, and everyone I fix tells me that  the movement feels “shorter.” We know that the trip from floor to lockout  is pretty much the same distance, wrong or right, unless your grip is very wide, so  what is responsible for this change in perception?

There are two components of the system – the lifter and the barbell. If the    bar travels the same distance from floor to lockout, it can’t be the source of  the difference in perception. It’s the lifter, whose ass is no longer waving  around in the air before the lift starts. This decrease in body movement and increase    in efficiency results in the perception of a shorter pull, even though the bar  travels the same distance.

So, now that you’re not ignorant, stop acting like you are. Do your deadlifts correctly, efficiently, and with impressive weights. Usually, the simplest method is  the smartest method to use.