May's Rambling

Make The Most of Out Your Squat

One of the best exercise you can do is squat; any trainers, coaches and athletes would agree. Squat is not just any compounded movements. It incorporates so many muscles there aren’t many other movements quite like it.

Squats are not just for your quads. Properly executed squats should also recruit your glutes, core and many other muscles. One of a way to tell if someone is focusing only on their quads is the ”collapsing in”, or internal rotation, of the knees. 

Image from M Factor Personal Training.

A few things I do to help teach glutes action are by wrapping a low resistance band around the knee, or to get them to visualize “unscrewing” the floor with their feet. The low-resistance band helps provide a physical queue to remind you to activate your glutes. The unscrewing of the floor also requires your glutes to generate the action.

By recruiting your glutes, it forces the knees into external rotation which help keeps them apart, and adds a hip thrust motion to your squat (which also ensures a full hip extension).This will lessen the load on your quads and give a bit of explosiveness to the movement. Overall, it will allow you to lift heavier weights as a result.

From the perspective of technique and integrity, you are also much more structurally sound and stable side-to-side with your IT band and your glutes engaged. The hip thrust motion from your glutes also help ensures that your lower back isn’t recruited for the lifting. It also looks more elegant and that’s very important. Taking pride in your movement does help motivate you to do well and to improve.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that squat isn’t all about burning your quads, and you would be missing out on a lot to not recruit and train all the muscles.

WOD Often?

I haven’t written any cool posts in a long time, just random knickknacks. It’s time to kick things into gears.

A lot of CrossFitters in my box, who didn’t make it to the Games, are starting to think about preparing for the next year Games.

Against their desire to WOD hard and crush their feelings out of their systems, I don’t believe it would be very productive. The problem with WODing, whether following the .com or your box’s programming, is that there is too much variety in the exercises. I know, the point of CrossFit is to be varied, and that’s supposed to be good. Well, it is good for conditioning. However, if you intend to work on something specific, something that you wish to improve, then it’s not so great.

The key to improvement is consistency. These competitors know what they want to work on, what they want to improve, as it might have been evident by their performances — or their perception of. They need to narrow their training down to just a few things for at least 6 weeks to see results. Improvements in strength and skills also take a longer time than conditioning. It would be better to start now and then work on the conditioning closer to the competition as well.

For me personally, WODing twice a week is a good number since I’m trying to build up strength. That’s often enough to maintain my level for endurance. I might supplement it with a second running or rowing session on my lifting days. This should be a good training program for now until closer to the next Games.

How often do you WOD or are planning to WOD? 

Please Don’t Be Math Illiterate

1. You can’t give 110%. If your effort were measurable and it comes out to be 110%, then you measured your 100% wrong.
2. You can’t always give it 100% everyday. You only have so much to give physically and mentally.

Just watched 2 documentaries, Waiting for Superman and Food Inc., in the same evening. I feel so smart.