http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/index/ CrossFit Norcal Strength & Conditioning en nicki@norcalsc.com Copyright 2008 2008-11-21T04:58:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/deadlift_prs/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/deadlift_prs/#When:04:58:00Z We’ve had some great new personal records in the deadlift over the last couple of weeks! A few notables: Don 385 Vaughn 365 Chris 340 Rocky 315 Natalie 225 Margaret 210 Blaire 200 Sarah 200 Great work everyone! More deadlift pics in the gallery… News 2008-11-21T04:58:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/endurance_also_called_sufferance/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/endurance_also_called_sufferance/#When:04:48:00Z Listen up endurance athletes: We’ve all heard Nicki and Robb repeatedly tell us (endurance athletes) that we need to increase our INTENSITY, (the amount of energy used during an activity or exercise) and not endurance in order to get faster and win more races.  Endurance (also called sufferance) is the ability for humans to exert themselves through aerobic or anaerobic exercise for relatively long periods of time. Training for endurance can have a negative impact on the ability to exert strength unless an individual also undertakes resistance training to counteract this effect.[1] Since you are CrossFit you are on the right path, well sort of.  We Endurance athletes get A+’s on endurance.  We can suffer in the pool, on the bike and run for hours and even days; however we can’t do it with intensity.  We need to work on the intensity of our sports and during WOD’s otherwise we will continue to work at what we do best.  Sufferance.  Studies show that running economy will be improved more through anaerobic training than endurance training.[2] So the question is do you want to swim, bike, run faster?  Then run faster, jump rope, box jump, push-up faster.  If you haven’t read Robb’s blog on The Coaches Get Coaching (October 20, 2008) then go read it.  “ . .  if you have a coach who is not looking for new material, not trying to improve his or her game, I think the likelihood of burnout and antipathy is high. For you folks, our clients, this SHOULD mean better programming and new material.” I couldn’t agree more!!!  I’ve been working with a running coach Adarian Barr of Next Level Athletics and Fitness in Sacramento.  Adarian has a MA degree in Physical Education, USATF Level II Certified Coach Sprints, Jumps, Hurdles and Relays, USATF Level I Lead Instructor, NESTA Speed Agility Quickness Trainer and Three Time NCAA Track and Field All- America.  Most importantly he has been training me to run correctly utilizing the ball of the foot and proper technique which has translated to better race times.  I’ve been working with him since the beginning of November and this past Saturday I attended one of his speed clinics.  What did he say I needed to work on?  INTENSITY.  Now where have I heard that before? Sign up for the Sprinting workshop on December 6th at 10 am.  You will also meet Adarian who will be assisting me. References 1. Hickson, R.C. (1980). “Interference of strength development by simultaneously training for strength and endurance”. European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology (Springer Verlag) 45 (2-3): 255–263. 2. (Explosive-strength training improves 5-km running time by improving running economy and muscle power. J Appl Physiol. 1999 May;86(5):1527-33.).  News 2008-11-18T04:48:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/paleo_kits/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/paleo_kits/#When:20:13:01Z Hey Y’all! Just wanted to let you know about a kick-ass product Steve Liberati has developed called Paleo Kits. The kits consist of grassfed jerky, dried fruit and nuts.  Paleo-fracking-tastic! Proceeds from the sales of paleo kits go to fund Steve’s Club, a non-profit organization that provides CrossFit training and mentorship to the youth of Camden NJ. Not only is this a kick-ass cause, but you no longer have an excuse about how you can’t find paleo food to eat on the run. Pony-up and buy some Paleo-Kits! News 2008-11-13T20:13:01-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_more_than_fitness_operation_phoenix/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_more_than_fitness_operation_phoenix/#When:05:20:00Z I wanted to let everyone know about a program sponsored by CrossFit HQ called Operation Phoenix. From the Operation Phoenix site: Operation Phoenix is a CrossFit initiative that will raise the necessary funds to equip the entire United States Marine Corps with functional fitness equipment to increase combat preparedness, reduce injury, and strengthen unit cohesion. This will be accomplished through non-profit sales, corporate sponsorships, and individual donations. Every penny raised will go directly to “America’s Fighting Force,” the USMC. This bold plan was conceived when the old CrossFit HQ in Santa Cruz, CA closed earlier this year. Greg and Lauren Glassman, unsure what to do with the gear from the original Box decided to donate the entire contents of HQ to the Marines of Camp Pendleton. This process was documented and can be viewed here in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. I’ve had the honor and good fortune of helping to certify 2 groups of Marines at Camp Pendleton and to get my fanny waxed at The Warehouse. I can not wait to see our Marines equipped with gear as good as we have at CrossFit NorCal...please help to make that a reality and buy a T-shirt or make a donation. News 2008-11-11T05:20:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_nutrition_cert_flagstaff_az/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_nutrition_cert_flagstaff_az/#When:17:17:00Z Woooho! Great times in thin air! I swear I was winded just walking up and down stairs this weekend. A huge thank you for all the folks who came out. We had folks from all over the states including, Texas, California, Nevada, and N. Carolina. We even had an attendee from Calgary, Alberta, Ca. Good times, Ehh?! You folks had GREAT questions and it was super fun for me. Thank you to Mike & Lisa Ray and the whole crew at CF Flagstaff. Y’all have a great facility and awesome community. If only there had been a little more air in the room when you put us through the 21,15, 9 DL/OHS WOD we did (after Olifting). That was a spicy little meat-ball! News 2008-11-09T17:17:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_norcal_at_the_almond_bowl/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_norcal_at_the_almond_bowl/#When:05:02:00Z The sky opened up and dumped on Chico last Saturday--and we were sure that Sunday would bring the same.  Luckily, the showers stopped and a damp fall morning welcomed over 900 runners to Bidwell Park for the 2008 Almond Ball....Perfect running weather! Our own trainer, ‘runner-girl’ Angela Horswill jumped in on this local run and cruised in the 5K with a time of 21:25.  For those that don’t know, this race is just a warm-up for Angela--she has raced in distances as great as 50K. Here is Angela and her favorite running partner! Congrats to our other Crossfitters, Chris and Melissa Friedland, and Alison MCcoey who all joined Angela in the 5 K race. Chris cut over 40 seconds from his last 5K, and ran a 6:44 minute/mile average.  SMOKIN’!! Check out Chris’s post race hydration technique...catching rain drops! Check out Kat Berry on the right. She has been training at CrossFit with Angela for just over 6 months--and in the 10K event she placed 4th in her age group with a new PR of 51:12 (8:15/mile pace)! Adding a crossfit work-out to your endurance sport training is going to improve your performance by increasing your capacity to work at intensity, and more importantly, keep you healthy.  When you’re training multiple days per week in a repetitive motion sport--like running and cycling--after time you will have muscle breakdown.  Through CrossFit you can improve muscle strength thereby increasing endurance and reducing fatigue.  Fatigue=inconsistent form=injury.  Strength training to improve core stability translates to injury prevention--and ultimately, better performance.  CrossFit also had a booth at the Almond Bowl...right next door to our favorite Doc!  Check out Cindy and Dr. Fragoso keeping people healthy post-race! News 2008-11-07T05:02:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/stretching_for_smarty_pants/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/stretching_for_smarty_pants/#When:04:47:00Z Continuing with our contrarian theme from yesterday let’s look at something physical instead of nutritional. Lets look at stretching. Now, you might have noticed that classes at CrossFit NorCal include a thorough warm-up, usually starting with a run, a row or some jump-rope, then we transition folks into this mystical movement sequence called DROM. DROM (pronounced “dee rawm") is short for the schmantzy pants term “dynamic range of movement”. This is in stark contrast to static stretching such as that seen in a yoga class or the good old knee-wrecker, the Hurdler’s Stretch. So, why do we do DROM instead of traditional static stretching before training? Well, the old static stretch before exercise decreases the ability of those muscles stretched to generate strength and power PLUS static stretching appears to increase rates of injury. Strength coaches worth their salt have known this for some 20 years, but it takes significantly longer for the exercise scientists to “prove” what is already in common practice. Prof. Duane Hudson of our very own CSU Chico Kinesiology department was featured in the New York Times a few days ago. This just proves two things: 1-Occasionally the NY Times prints something that is correct. Much like monkeys at typewriters, given enough time, could reproduce to works of Shakespeare. 2-Eventually Academics “prove” what coaches, producing elite performance, have known for decades. Someday, perhaps 20 years from now, someone may prove that Crossfit “works”. Until then I guess we are just flying blind! News 2008-11-06T04:47:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/norcal_nutrition_are_we_crazy/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/norcal_nutrition_are_we_crazy/#When:03:37:00Z You might have noticed that the nutrition approach we recommend at CrossFit NorCal is a bit...oh, shall I say, contrarian? Where the USDA, AMA and the rest of the Government sponsored entities recommend grains and legumes as the base of the diet, we recommend lean meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. That’s crazy, right? aren’t we going to die from heart disease and cancer if we eat meat? How will we ever get fiber if we don’t eat grains!? I mean, fruit and veggies...what have they got to offer?! I’m being fecetious here, I hope you get that. I do understand our recommendations fly in the face of what we are told to eat from nearly every source you can find...what’s the deal? Well...the deal is, our nutritional approach, a diet the attempts to emulate that of our paleolithic ancestors, is without a doubt the best route to optimized performance and health. Big claim? Yep, but easy to back up. Folks start with us, tweak their food, then look, feel and perform better. Every measurable bio-marker such as cholesterol, triglycerides or blood pressure improve...depression resolves. It just works, because this is the way we are wired to eat. But hey, what the hell do I know? I’m just the crazy guy in the shed telling people to do weird stuff like sleep more, take fish oil and increase their protein intake. How could I possibly be right about this? Well...here are a few interesting things for y’all to consider: 1-A Paleo diet, calorie per calorie, beats any other diet you can compare it to. Here is a nice look at this in a paper from Loren Cordain. If you notice, the basic diet presented here looks like taking a nutritional supplement. Now, if you are ambitious, you can take ANY of those listed Paleo foods, Lean meats, nuts, seeds, fruits and veggeis and compare them to the same calorie content of grains, legumes or dairy (non- fortified...just the way nature made them!) and you will decrease the relative nutritional content of the diet. Don’t believe me? You can actually do this experiment with the USDA Nutrient Database. So before you start waxing eloquent about how “nutritious whole grains are” give this a shot...build a diet the way our government recommends you do it via the food pyramid, then compare that to Paleo foods. 2-Many of the best coaches in the world recommend a Paleo diet. Granted, many also do not, but there are an ever growing number of coaches who recognize that optimized performance will not be found at the bottom of a box of cereal or served on a bagel. Want a concrete example? How about Joel Friel, US Olympic Triathlon coach and author of The Triathletes Training Bible and Co-Author of The Paleo Diet for Athletes. I could use different examples but the endurance crowd is absolutely the most entrenched in this notion that optimized performance comes from a tube of GU or from some kind of Franken-Food like a Cliff-Bar. Here is an excerpt from The Paleo Diet for Athletes in which Joel talks about the Challenge Loren Cordain placed on him to try the Paleo diet for one month. check it out: “I have known Dr. Cordain for many years, but I didn’t become aware of his work until 1995. That year we began to discuss nutrition for sports. As a longtime adherent to a very high-carbohydrate diet for athletes, I was skeptical of his claims that eating less starch would benefit performance. Nearly every successful endurance athlete I had known ate as I did, with a heavy emphasis on cereals, bread, rice, pasta, pancakes, and potatoes. In fact, I had done quite well on this diet, having been an All-American age-group duathlete (bike and run), and finishing in the top 10 at World Championships. I had also coached many successful athletes, both professional and amateur, who ate the same way I did.” “Our discussions eventually led to a challenge. Dr. Cordain suggested I try eating a diet more in line with what he recommended for one month. I took the challenge, determined to show him that eating as I had for years was the way to go. I started by simply cutting back significantly on starches, and replacing those lost calories with fruits, vegetables, and very lean meats.” “For the first two weeks I felt miserable. My recovery following workouts was slow and my workouts were sluggish. I knew that I was well on my way to proving that he was wrong. But in week three, a curious thing happened. I began to notice that I was not only feeling better, but that my recovery was speeding up significantly. In the fourth week I experimented to see how many hours I could train. “Since my early 40s (I was 51 at the time), I had not been able to train more than about 12 hours per week. Whenever I exceeded this weekly volume, upper respiratory infections would soon set me back. In Week Four of the “experiment,” I trained 16 hours without a sign of a cold, sore throat, or ear infection. I was amazed. I hadn’t done that many hours in nearly 10 years. I decided to keep the experiment going.” “That year I finished third at the U.S. national championship with an excellent race, and qualified for the U.S. team for the World Championships. I had a stellar season, one of my best in years. This, of course, led to more questions of Dr. Cordain and my continued refining of the diet he recommended.” “I was soon recommending it to the athletes I coached, including Ryan Bolton, who was on the U.S. Olympic Triathlon team. Since 1995. I have written four books on training for endurance athletes and have described and recommended the Stone Age diet in each of them. Many athletes have told me a story similar to mine: They have tried eating this way, somewhat skeptically at first, and then discovered that they also recovered faster and trained better.” So, if you missed the gist of that, Joel was able to train harder, longer and recover faster using a Paleo diet. He recommends the diet to ALL his athletes and includes this information in all his books. Oddly enough, we even have one of his staff dieticians, Kelly Cawthorn, available at CrosFit NorCal. 3-The Paleo diet describes our past, shines a light on our current situation, and provides predictive value for our future. The Nutritional “Sciences” are anything but. In theory they are a subset of Biology. The basic tenant of biology is evolution via natural selection...yet this fact absolutely buggars those in the nutritional sciences. The folks at CSU Chico Nutritional Sciences absolutely HATE the concept of the Paleo diet, yet offer no counter point or model that better describes the data at hand, nor offers the least bit of predictive value. They are awash in “paradoxes”. French Paradox, Spanish Paradox...things are only paradoxical in the nutritional sciences because they made bad assumptions and abandoned the scientific method. I get fired up about this because peoples lives are at stake here and the information we are fed is WRONG. It starts from faulty premise and worsens with every step. Here is an excerpt from The Protein Debate, a work we sponsored between Dr. T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study and Prof. Loren Cordain. Here is that excerpt which is the introduction for Prof. Cordain’s piece. The over-arching topic was the role of protein in health and disease in humans. As a side note: I’m a graduate of CSU Chico in biochemistry. When we sponsored this debate, between two of the most highly regarded researchers in the world, I thought the CSU Chico Nutritional Science department might be interested that a former student had sponsored and spear-headed this original work. I forwarded the Protein Debate to the members of the Nutritional Science department. Response? NONE. Sorry, I’m just bitter I guess, here is that introduction from Prof. Cordain: Introduction Although humanity has been interested in diet and health for thousands of years, the organized, scientific study of nutrition has a relatively recent past. For instance, the world’s first scientific journal devoted entirely to diet and nutrition, The Journal of Nutrition only began publication in 1928. Other well known nutrition journals have a more recent history still: The British Journal of Nutrition (1947), The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1954), and The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1988). The first vitamin was “discovered” in 1912 and the last vitamin (B12) was identified in 1948 (1). The scientific notion that omega 3 fatty acids have beneficial health effects dates back only to the late 1970’s (2), and the characterization of the glycemic index of foods only began in 1981 (3). Nutritional science is not only a newly established discipline, but it is also a highly fractionated, contentious field with constantly changing viewpoints on both major and minor issues that impact public health. For example, in 1996 a task force of experts from the American Society for Clinical Nutrition (ASCN) and the American Institute of Nutrition (AIN) came out with an official position paper on trans fatty acids stating, “We cannot conclude that the intake of trans fatty acids is a risk factor for coronary heart disease” (4). Fast forward 6 short years to 2002 and the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine’s report on trans fatty acids (5) stating, “Because there is a positive linear trend between trans fatty acid intake and total and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol concentration, and therefore increased risk of cardiovascular heart disease, the Food and Nutrition Board recommends that trans fatty acid consumption be as low as possible while consuming a nutritionally adequate diet”. These kinds of complete turnabouts and divergence of opinion regarding diet and health are commonplace in the scientific, governmental and medical communities. The official U.S. governmental recommendations for healthy eating are outlined in the “My Pyramid” program (6) which recently replaced the “Food Pyramid”, both of which have been loudly condemned for nutritional shortcomings by scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health (7). Dietary advice by the American Heart Association (AHA) to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) is to limit total fat intake to 30% of total energy, to limit saturated fat to News 2008-11-05T03:37:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfitters_in_costume/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfitters_in_costume/#When:04:55:00Z More than of few of you were fairly creative with your Halloween costumes!  Strazz grew out his beard for over 2 months in pursuit of the perfect Abraham Lincoln...and Rocky chose to dress up as the lead singer in the following Saturday Night Live parody! (Uncensored version!) Great pics! News 2008-11-04T04:55:00-08:00 http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_south_brooklyn/ http://www.norcalsc.com/index.php/site/crossfit_south_brooklyn/#When:04:55:00Z Thanks to David Osorio and the fabulous folks of CrossFit South Brooklyn for hosting us and the CrossFit Nutrition certification this weekend!  Robb and I got to get in a little training on Friday as well as stomp around the Park Slope area of Brooklyn...it was great!  David and Margie took us to some great restaurants and we ate grassfed beef like maniacs!  Check out some pics of their great space. News 2008-11-03T04:55:00-08:00