While they're always pros and cons to any competition, the Open is one competition I'm always excited to see us be done with. I love the worldwide view of fitness but could not hate online competition anymore than I do the Open, especially by the fifth week. With that said Team Power and Grace did pretty well. We qualified seven athletes in three regions. While every one of them took a deep breath and a sigh of relief to have made it to the next level, when their work came in for this week it was back to the grind as they only have 6 to 9 weeks to get ready. The athletes that made it were:
– Kristi Eramo (1st) – Central East region
– Logan Collins (5th) – South Central region
– Melissa Doss (18th) – Central East region
– Jason Hoggan (18th) – South Central region
– Chris Shimley (18th) – Central East region
– Kara Paslay (19th) – North Central region
– Derek French (19th) – Central East region
Look for some more information coming out on their preparation and how you can support them.
For those of you following the blog, I'm sure you're wondering what in the world you're going to do now. The Power and Grace public blog has always always always been an Open preparation blog. Meaning the peak of our season will always be the five weeks of the Open. What that means for those of you following the blog is you have just entered the off-season, pending you did not make Regionals. Therefore, you're going to see a dramatic shift in the programming starting next week. This week was a slight rest week and meant to give you some freedom to do whatever you want. Furthermore, if you wanted to take the next three or four weeks and rest relax and have some fun that would be ideal. Your body needs the rest take it now rather than later.
Otherwise, here are some things you're going to see in the programming on the blog moving forward.
1- A massive emphasis on perfection of movement in the lifts and in your skill development. Essentially this means lots of position work both in gymnastics movements as well as the Olympic lifts. Expect to stay away from high intensity lifting, high repetition lifting while under an extreme time constraint, as well as big sets of full gymnastic movements. As we start the off-season program our long-term goal will be to fix many of your bad habits so that when intensity hits later in the season those habits don't show up under duress. This means lots of percentage work and calculated movement.
2- Aerobic threshold work. Contrary to many different philosophies and theories out there, you cannot build a sufficient aerobic base in a couple of weeks. It takes an extensive amount of training to build an aerobic threshold sufficient enough to carry you through the CrossFit season. It doesn't happen overnight, it's not always fancy and sexy, and it most often is the work you're going to want to skip. The next 5 to 6 months of training will have a ton of this style of work in it. Don't ignore the advised intensity levels and stick to the prescribed rest to work ratios. This work now will be foundational for the higher intensity and lactate work we do later in the season as we approach next year's Open.
I hope that bring some clarity to what you will see on our free blog coming up. Also, take a look at our Regional athlete's Instagrams and be sure to support and follow them as we get ready to take our stab at one of those ever-elusive Games spots.