Double Unders, Toes to Bar, Pull-Ups, Wall Walks

Today, being a Saturday at HyperFit USA,  we did a benchmark WOD.  Annie.

Annie is:
50-40-30-20 and 10 rep rounds of:
Double-unders,
Sit-ups.
(we did this with a 10 minute time cap)

In case the whole term is new, a double-under is a jump rope where you swing that bad boy under your feet two times for every jump you do.  Way, way harder than it sounds.

This was the first time I ever attempted to do a “double-under”.  Not at all ideal.  I learned the hard way today the value of spending time working on skills outside of the WOD.  For my “MOD”, a.k.a. modification, was to do single unders.  Seems to make sense.  Except it’s 3 for 1.  So that’s 150 single under jump ropes in round one.  This made for a lot of misery, and the evental time cap / DNF.

To avoid this, it’s really important to spend an extra 5 minutes before or after your WOD and work on a skill.  After my trip to CrossFit NYC.com, where toes-bar was part of the warm up, I started doing 5 before every WOD.  Then I mixed in 5 pull ups.  Mind you, I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now, and just a few weeks longer than that I could not do 1 un-aided pull up or 1 toes to bar.  It takes 5 minutes, but I actually have a kip going for both, and they are really coming along.  I banged out 6 toes to bar then 6 pull ups before Annie today, and went back for 6 more pull ups after Annie for good measure.  I also tried a few more double-unders after, but it was just getting ugly.

Starting Monday, I’ll be mixing in double-unders to the pre WOD routine.  As for wall walks, those are just fun as hell to do, and should be done when ever you can :)

If you want to track your pre WOD toes to bar and pull ups with me, I’ve got a simple workout tracker going here: http://beyondthewhiteboard.com/workouts/441711-toes-to-bars-pull-ups