Olympic lifts, kettlebells, gymnastic rings….these are a few of our favourite things….

Ever wished that there was a single instruction manual containing all of this cool stuff? Well, now there is!

Andrew Stemler, creator of the popular i-Course – a full day of learning all the key Crossfit skills – has produced a manual to go along with it. You can support Gubernatrix.co.uk by getting your copy here.

This means, oh joy, that all you people who would love to go to the i-Course but can’t get to one can now do your own version at home. And you people who are lucky enough to have attended the i-Course now have a handy reference guide for all those skills that you only just managed to take in on the day.

What’s in the manual?

The 85-page Elite Fitness Manual is packed full of goodies including:

• Olympic lifts and all their progressions
• Kettlebell exercises
• Gymnastic ring training
• Bodyweight exercises
• Abdominal training
• Muscle-up

It covers practically every key exercise and lift in the functional fitness arsenal. All except the bench press. But you know how to bench, right?

Who is the manual for?

The manual is designed to be suitable both for beginners and intermediate trainees. There is plenty of progression in all the key exercises so if you are a beginner you start with the first progression and if you are an intermediate, jump in where you feel comfortable.

You don’t need any experience in the exercises themselves but a general familiarity with free weights and bodyweight exercises is helpful. If you’ve only ever worked out on machines, you’ll be in for a shock!

Many of the skills described in the manual are so complex and tricky to master that you will be kept busy for weeks, months, years. Stemler comments that “you never master the squat: its always work in progress: there is always something you can improve”, and I can personally attest to this as my squat has been a work in progress for about five years!

That’s why a manual like this is so useful and such good value for money. It will last many years, possibly a lifetime. As it is an ebook it is a good deal cheaper than the traditionally published equivalent would be.

Presentation

One aspect that has always impressed me about Stemler’s publications is the look and feel. Compared to many self-published ebooks in this genre, the presentation is slick, entertaining and easy to read. The photo sequences are very helpful. I always find it frustrating when a book presents only one photograph of a particular move; what you really want to know is what it looks like to get from A to B.

The Elite Fitness Manual breaks key moves down photographically, which is really helpful. Nevertheless Stemler acknowledges that this lends a certain falsity to what are fluid and dynamic movements.

The overall thrust of the manual is not: here’s an ideal way to do this difficult move that only super-flexible 12-year-olds can pull off, but more: here are some safe progressions that you can practise on your own.  Eventually you will be able to put them all together.

So the Elite Fitness Manual is your passport to a broad range of athletic, functional skills and can be yours for only £12.99. Worth every penny, I’d say.

Go shop!

More from gubernatrix

• Review: the Crossfit London i-Course
• The A-Z of training books
• Review: the complete guide to training with free weights
• Kettlebell training guide
• Muscle-up and ring training guide

This thought struck me as I was watching a climbing film, Alistair Lee’s Onsight where one interviewee comments that when you try to explain headpointing (practising a route on a top rope before leading it) to anyone who doesn’t climb, they don’t understand the point of it at all. It’s the same with functional fitness. I mean, since when has fitness not been functional?

Unfunctional fitness

“Veronica and I are trying this new fad called uh, jogging. I believe it’s jogging or yogging. It might be a soft j, I’m not sure, but apparently you just run for an extended period of time. It’s supposed to be wild.” – Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy

Somewhere down the line, the view was formed that a lot of so-called fitness activity was actually unfunctional. It may have looked like fitness and sounded like fitness and perhaps some fitness was gained as a by-product, but the overriding aim and ambition was to look good naked.

Shiny new contraptions were invented to assist in this goal, as well as accessories, pharmaceutical products and supplements. Perfection could only be attained with the right gear.

Now, I’d like to look good naked as much as the next person so I am not questioning the validity of this ambition. But could you argue that in the modern world, all you need fitness for is to look good and stay healthy, since work, rest and play can all be carried out with the minimum of physical effort? Is that the modern function of fitness?

Physical culture

This became the philosophy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the popularity of ‘physical culture’ was at its height.

Eugen Sandow, both poster boy and mastermind of physical culture, wanted to show that an attractive and healthy body was within reach for anybody who was prepared to follow a simple exercise regime.

Physical culture acknowledged that exercise could actually have good looks as an end. Lifting weights would not only make you strong, it would make you beautiful.

We got to the point where, like pop, fitness ate itself. It has certainly become an end in itself. So instead of needing to be fit for something, you can now just be fit. Fit for anything – and nothing.

Modern life is now so geared towards our own convenience, where we have so little need to lift, carry, walk, run or climb that we are obliged to make deliberate efforts to set time aside for fitness because we are just not getting this effect from normal life. So the culture has arisen where fitness is pursued in a gym environment for 30-45 minutes three times a week. It is no longer just part of daily life. For many people it has even superceded sports.

Functional fitness

Functional fitness is about linking fitness to real functions once more. It is designed to reflect movements and functions found in daily life – sled pulling, wood chopping, rope climbing and so on.

I have heard people say, “What’s the point of that? I’ll never have any need to chop wood or pull a sled!”

But the great thing about functional fitness is that you use ordinary objects found around the home or the garage. You don’t need expensive equipment or posh gyms to get fit. A sledgehammer is not only much cheaper than a cable machine, but you might actually be able to use it for other tasks as well. Smashing your old furniture up, for example.

Functional fitness is a simpler approach to fitness. The point is to get fit, not to spend lots of money on machines and supplements. Functional fitness practitioners appreciate simple and versatile equipment like the skipping rope, gymnastic rings or kettlebell. In fact many people get a lot of pleasure from making their own kit.

There is a feeling of self sufficiency that comes from making things or using objects imaginatively that improves your mental wellbeing as well as your physical health (and your financial health, come to that). We may not ever really expect to be dropped in the jungle and have to fight our way out, but it is comforting to think that we are capable enough to have a decent chance.

Functional fitness also takes a holistic view of fitness itself. Fitness encompasses strength, speed, endurance and agility. It includes short, sharp efforts as well as lengthy ones. Most people end up with a bias in one particular direction according to their own preference and build, but functional fitness aficionados make an effort to cover all areas and work on their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

You will often find functional fitness practitioners training outside or in a fairly basic indoor environment. Simple and functional environments are appreciated as much as simple and functional equipment.

Elitism

“Gym Jones is private and isolated from the modern fitness ideal precisely because we believe that attitude to be poison. We believe that a proper training facility is separated from the complacency of the general public, and has its own set of rules and values. We believe that nothing of value may be acquired by simply going through the motions; real fitness is earned.” – Gym Jones

There are people in the world whose jobs involve functions that could be classed under ‘fitness’ – soldiers or firefighters, for example. But many people are simply pursuing fitness for its own sake. And if we’re honest, to be better than other people. Underlying a lot of so-called functional fitness is simple elitism.

Personally I’m all for elitism. I like being fitter/cleverer/healthier than the majority of the population. But let’s call it what it is. In this spirit, I appreciate the honesty of Crossfit’s “forging elite fitness” tag or Testosterone Nation’s strap line of “unapologetic muscle building elitists”. Even the quasi-cultish mystique surrounding Gym Jones could be forgiven on the basis that it is more interested in being true to its values than in being loved.

Many of the functional fitness methods or schools are elitist in outlook. It is an acknowledgement that fitness is more than simply staving off obesity and incapacity for as long as possible. It is about being as good as you can be or as good as your motivation can make you.

There are times when functional fitness, like many interesting concepts, disappears up its own backside. There is an awful lot of gumph spoken about hunting and gathering and being ‘ready for anything’.

I used to be sceptical of this ‘ready for anything’ attitude. It seemed faintly ridiculous for middle-aged suburban men and women to be training as if for battle on the off chance that guerilla war is going to break out in Maidenhead. And if a meteorite does hit the earth wiping out all supermarkets, our survival is going to be more about bushcraft knowledge and a high degree of efficiency than supreme physical fitness (more Ray Mears than Bear Grylls, if you know what I mean).

“Like it or not, we are the product of a very long process of adaptation to a harsh physical existence, and the past couple centuries of comparative ease and plenty are not enough time to change our genome. We humans are at our best when our existence mirrors, or at least simulates, the one we are still genetically adapted to live. And that is the purpose of exercise.” – Mark Rippetoe

But like anything, it is a matter of degree. Some people train to be able to kick a football around with their kids, others want to complete a mountain marathon. Ultimately it is about finding out just how capable you are, and the harder you push the more you adapt.

So functional fitness is the practise of all-round training using basic equipment in an unfussy environment, preferably outdoors. If you are lucky enough to have some real wood to chop or a genuine reason for pulling a sled, lucky you. If not, you may have to make one up.

What are your thoughts on functional fitness? Is the ‘functional’ redundant? Would you call yourself a functional fitness practitioner?

More from gubernatrix

• What is functional strength anyway?
• Fitness on a budget
• Bodyweight or bust!
• “300″ workout

Further reading

• Budget training by Ross Enamait
• Ritual vs Routine – a leftfield take on the relationship between fitness and physical attractiveness from Bodytribe
• 30 days without weights – bodyweight training
• Why Gym Jones is a private facility
• Funckey – the functional fitness community in the UK

On Sunday I attended the Crossfit London i-course in east London, a full day event aiming to teach participants all the essential Crossfit skills, from olympic lifts to rings to kettlebells to bodyweight exercises. I was invited to attend and review the course by Andrew Stemler of Crossfit London, whom I have trained with before.

About the i-Course

The i-Course concept is, as far as I am aware, the only course of its kind in the UK and certainly the most comprehensive workshop programme I have seen that is open to all. This unique proposition has proved popular: the next session has already sold out and Crossfit London is booking well into next year.

Why are tickets selling like the proverbial hotcakes? Well, the agenda for the day runs something like this:

• How to squat
• How to perform the olympic lifts, including the nine fundamental moves: squat, front squat, overhead squat, press, push press, push jerk, clean, snatch, sumo deadlift high pull and deadlift
• How to swing and snatch a kettlebell
• How to practise handstands and the handstand push-up with all the assistance exercises currently recommended
• Core including L-sit
• Crossfit kipping pullup
• Parallel bar and rings looking at ring dips and muscle-up progression

For anyone interested in functional fitness or Crossfit, it ticks all the right boxes, but it is a lot of learning to pack into one day! The agenda makes it look like great value for money, but can you really learn all of these skills effectively in a single session?

Learning

What you get out of the day depends to some extent on your level of knowledge and experience coming into the session. Those who are totally new to the exercises and concepts may not remember much of the technical detail but will come away with an understanding of the most important principles and the range of skills that can be acquired: plenty to build upon and be inspired by.

People who are already familiar with some of the material (perhaps they have done squatting and deadlifting but have never attempted a clean and jerk) will learn a good deal and will come away with better form in the exercises that they thought they knew.

However it is essentially an introductory course so if you have been practising these skills for a few months or more, you may have gone beyond what the i-Course can offer – unless you want some reassurance that you are doing the right thing.

On the day, participants told me that they did learn a lot, even if they won’t remember absolutely everything. I was impressed by everyone’s concentration throughout an intensive day. It was a motivating atmosphere to be in and even though I was getting pretty tired towards the end of the session, I tried to hide it as everyone else appeared to be in fine fettle and as keen as at the start!

Teaching

This concentration and application is testament to the motivation of the group but also to Stemler’s organisation of the session. He starts right on time, which sets the tone for the day, and keeps things moving along nicely.

The team consists of Andrew, a Crossfit Level 2 certified instructor, aided by three Crossfit Level 1 instructors (Miles, Chet and Simon) and police PTI, Colin. The quality of the teaching is very good, especially from Andrew who is a natural communicator and has boundless energy.

The emphasis is on drills and cues that help you get into the correct position for the exercise, rather than a litany of instructions about the relative position of each body part. This will save people from hours of struggle or the misguided belief that they are unable to do particular exercises. ‘Teaching the teachers’ is also built into the course, for those people who are there to learn how to instruct others.

Supporting the instructor team are a number of ‘helpers’ who are themselves experienced Crossfitters. Having this many people helping to run the course ensures that everyone gets attention and things run smoothly. My thanks in particular go to one of the helpers, Steve, for taking these photos when he wasn’t actually helping people with their exercises!

What sort of people attend the i-Course?

I had assumed that most of the participants would be Crossfitters looking to improve their skills, but there was in fact a variety of people attending: personal trainers looking to expand their repertoire for their clients; people just starting out in Crossfit or just wanting to get fit; those interested in a particular element (such as the olympic lifts or the gymnastics) who thought this course was the nearest thing available; and military personnel looking to increase functional fitness.

The exercises and drills are pretty challenging, although different levels of strength are catered for (for example, you don’t have to be able to do a pullup). It probably could have been made clearer at the start that you are not expected to be able to do everything perfectly within this session: the idea is to equip you with the knowledge to practise on your own or coach others over a period of time.

However I know that some people were inspired and motivated by the difficulty and the fact that some exercises did not come easily! There were some pretty strong lads who were very confident on familiar exercises like pullups, but were humbled by a simple L-sit progression. I spoke to one chap who is an experienced runner and was used to thinking of himself as reasonably fit and yet had real trouble with one or two of the more unusual exercises. But he seemed delighted by this discovery and keen to improve.

It would be a rare person who could turn up to a session like this and be able to do everything easily. This goes to the heart of what Crossfit is about: improving every aspect of fitness rather than specialising in one area. Stemler takes it as far as to say that sports people are not “fit” because they specialise too much. As soon as you start to focus on one particular sport, you lose fitness in all the other areas. I find this a controversial idea as the same argument could be applied to Crossfit: that is, doing Crossfit really only makes you fit for Crossfit! However the point is that a wide variety of skills are being taught.

Do you have to be drinking the Crossfit kool-aid?

The short answer is ‘no’ and you can get an enormous amount from this session without being or becoming a Crossfitter. Stemler refrains from trumpeting the benefits of “Crossfit” (except in a jokey manner), allowing the workshop to speak for itself. And rightly so: Crossfit didn’t invent these exercises, it just puts them together in a particular way and has a particular approach to performing them.

The verdict

A very worthwhile course for the motivated functional fitness fanatic! If you like learning new skills, want to work hard and don’t mind a bit of constructive criticism, this is a good use of your hard-earned money. Whether you ‘do’ Crossfit or not, you will come away with a fine array of skills that you can put to whatever use you like.

To book an i-Course, click here.

Have you done the i-Course? Post your comments below.

Further information

Get the i-Course manual here – your 85-page guide to elite fitness from Andrew Stemler

Crossfit London sunday workouts

It is easy to forget that most people don’t know what powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting actually are. They know it involves lifting weights of course, but they don’t know how these sports differ from each other or from an activity like bodybuilding. I used to be one of those people (slap me if I sound unbearably smug now….)

The other side of that coin is that most people think anybody who regularly picks up a weight is a bodybuilder. The extent to which bodybuilding and lifting weights have become melded together in the public consciousness is amazing.

Nicole and Eva from Crossfit Santa Cruz

One of the great things about the Crossfit movement is the way it educates trainees about strength sports. You will get people coming from a heavily bodybuilding-influenced fitness club environment into a milieu where powerlifts, Olympic lifts and gymnastic exercises are regularly performed.

Not only that, trainees are encouraged to up the intensity and up the weight. In a Body Pump class, if you are not smiling, you aren’t doing the class properly. In a Crossfit session, if you are not gasping, sweating and grunting, you aren’t doing the workout properly.

Crossfit has also broken the mould by putting women front and centre – very fit, very strong women at that. They have managed to do what might have been considered impossible: make a system with girls’ names for workouts and women in the demo videos not look like a chick thing.

This isn’t a post about how wonderful Crossfit is. It’s an illustration of how Crossfit has been able to get women who would never see themselves as lifters to lift weights. The powerlifting world is all very well but most of the women in it were either introduced to lifting by their husbands/boyfriends or, like me, have some unusual inner motivation to pick up heavy stuff.

So there is still a lot of work to do to convince the majority of women that lifting weights will not make them bulk up. In fact, it is more likely to do the opposite and slim them down. That’s certainly what happened to me and I am not blessed with good genetics, special powers or anything like that! You don’t have to get as ripped as Nicole Carroll or Eva Twardokens in the picture above if you don’t want to (and to be frank, most people wouldn’t have the dedication to get like that anyway), but you can be leaner and more shapely.

However, this isn’t just a fear born of cultural conditioning, it is also indicative of a deeper problem: ignorance of the role of nutrition and hormones in the body’s development. Lifting weights – on its own – won’t make anyone, man or woman, bigger. How you eat governs whether you get bigger. But it’s up to you whether that extra weight is mostly fat or mostly muscle.

Read more:

• Types of weight training
• Types of strength
• Why do most women still avoid the free weights room?

You can set the timer to go off at regular intervals, such as every minute. This would allow you, for example, to do a circuit that involved changing exercises every minute without having to worry about looking at a clock or a watch. This is extremely useful if, like me, you do a lot of your circuit training on your own or outside where you are not in sight of a clock.

Moreover, the Gymboss allows you to set two interval lengths, so you can use it to do tabatas – where you need one interval of 20 seconds and one interval of 10 seconds.

I’ve been using a Gymboss interval timer for several months and I think the product is so useful that I have decided to host some links to the site. If you decide to get one too, you can give your much-needed support to this site by purchasing your Gymboss via the banners and links here.

Workouts using a Gymboss

Interval timers like Gymboss make a whole host of conditioning workouts much easier, especially if you work out on your own.

1. Tabata protocol

The Tabata protocol consists of 20 seconds of maximum intensity exercise, followed by 10 seconds of rest. This cycle is repeated 8 times, for a total of 4 minutes. Tabatas can be performed using any exercise. The key is to perform at maximum intensity, which has the effect of increasing aerobic capacity and raising the body’s metabolic rate for long after the exercise itself has finished.

If you have never tried tabatas, you are in for a surprise! 20 seconds doesn’t sound like a very long time, but the body fatigues more quickly than you expect, especially if you are not used to high intensity work. Whatever exercise you choose, whether squats, press-ups, burpees or something else, count the number of reps you do in the first 20-second interval and try to get the same number of reps in each of the subsequent intervals. It’s a lot harder than you think.

Read more:

Ross Enamait on the effectiveness of tabatas

2. Crossfit Workouts

Some Crossfit workouts involve timed intervals, such as the popular Fight Gone Bad. In this workout there are five stations:

1. Wall ball
2. Sumo deadlift high pull
3. Box Jump
4. Push press
5. Row

You perform each exercise for one minute before moving on to the next without a break. When all five exercises are complete, you rest for one minute, then start round two. Fight Gone Bad is usually performed in either three- or five-round versions.

Read more:

Gubernatrix does Fight Gone Bad with Crossfit London

3. Circuit training

You can use the Gymboss to put together your own circuits for high intensity workouts. A favourite circuit of mine is:

1 minute row
1 minute thrusters (front squat followed by push press)
x 3 rounds

Simple, tough but very rewarding!

Read more:

Ross Enamait has some more ideas for timed intervals that he has summarised in this guest post for Workout Routines.

Following on from Crossfit London’s excellent Ring Training guide, they have now published a Kettlebell Training guide, which I am stocking.

We’ve had some great feedback on the Ring Training guide, so I’m confident the Kettlebell Guide will be just as effective.

Kettlebell Training Guide content

So what’s in it? Mainly step-by-step instruction on all the major kettlebell exercises, including:

• Swing
• Clean
• Press – shoulder, waiter and bottom-up
• Snatch
• Turkish Get-up
• Windmill

In other words, everything you need to get started with your shiny new kettlebell. Short of actually going to a kettlebell seminar, this guide is probably your best bet to ensure that you are getting your technique right. Kettlebells are not the easiest things in the world to handle (that’s the whole point), so some clear instruction will take you a long way.

Here is what Andrew has to say about kettlebell training in his guide:

“A kettlebell, in spite of the hype, is neither a gym in the palm of your hand, an item that flenses fat from your body, nor builds indestructible bullet-proof abs: that’s done by hard work, skill, determination and diet.

However, if it can be swung and lifted with correct form, it confers on the user a variety of strength, power and CV-based improvements that, some insist, outstrip conventional training methods.”

I like Andrew’s honesty here; he’s not a kettlebell evangelist but recognises the contribution of kettlebells to the strength and conditioning arsenal.

I feel the same way: there are some kettlebell exercises that I love, like the swing and the Turkish get-up, and they are just not the same with a dumbbell. But like any training method, you get out of it what you put in. So, get stuck in and let me know what you think!

Photo credit: Karimian

I have recently started the Zone Diet and I thought it would be useful to post my experiences up here every so often.

I found out about the Zone Diet through Crossfit; it is their prescribed diet as it is consistent with the Crossfit recommendation to “eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar” for optimum health, body composition and physical performance.

What is the Zone Diet?

Originally devised by Dr Barry Sears, Crossfit has adopted the Zone Diet for its athletes. The Zone Diet is designed to control levels of insulin and thereby reduce fat storage in the body. It cuts out foods with a high glycaemic index and encourages consumption of protein and mono-saturated fats, aiming for a macronutrient split of 40% carbohydrate, 30% protein and 30% fat.

This is not in line with conventional diet wisdom which tends to recommend a higher proportion of carbohydrates (50-60%) and a lower proportion of fat and protein (15-25%).

Although no particular food is prohibited or required, Crossfit has produced lists of ‘favourable’ and ‘unfavourable’ carbohydrates, and recommended proteins and fats. Starchy carbs and refined sugars, for example, are ‘unfavourable’, in line with the Crossfit recommendation to eat “little starch and no sugar”.

Everything you would need to know to get started with the Zone Diet can be found in this Crossfit journal article.

Why did I choose the Zone Diet?

I have tried conventional calorie-counting diets in the past and have had some success with them. However, recently I have found it much more difficult to stick to them. I have felt like I just wasn’t eating enough.

I know a number of Crossfitters who are following the Zone Diet. They seem to have similar activity levels to myself and similar performance and body composition aims, and all were reporting success with this diet. So I thought I would give it a try.

The First Week

I have been following the Zone Diet for a week now and my experience has overall been very positive, although I have also had one or two issues.

The good points

Firstly, the positive points:

I haven’t felt hungry at all. When I totted up the number of calories I was eating per day, I was amazed that it could be so low and yet not result in hunger. Previously I found it difficult to keep to less than 1800 kcals per day (I’m a 60kg female). On the zone, I have been eating 1350-1400 kcals per day and not feeling hungry.

I haven’t had energy peaks and troughs throughout the day. Energy levels have stayed constant. I am able to go from breakfast to lunchtime without needing to snack, which is very unusual for me.

I have eaten no sugar except that which occurs naturally in the foods I am eating and I haven’t missed it at all. This was another shock as I have always had a sweet tooth and I was a complete monster for chocolate, biscuits, cake etc. I would never have believed that I could be perfectly happy not eating sugar. I haven’t even felt the need for sweetener.

I’ve lost weight, around a kilo in the first week.

It’s easy to use. I had thought at first that it might be a bit complicated but I am actually finding it easier than previous dieting experiences. I am used to weighing and measuring food, which probably makes a difference.

The less good points

However, I have had a couple of issues in these early stages. Firstly, the sheer bulk of food that I am eating at one sitting has increased significantly and there are times when I feel a bit too full. Getting your carbs from vegetables and a bit of fruit means eating a lot of vegetables! Also, eating protein at every sitting makes a difference. I am not used to having porridge for breakfast and then gobbling down several slices of ham and a few nuts.

The solution to this is either to tweak your food choices until you get a volume of food that you can handle or eat more frequently. However I imagine the body does get used to eating this way after a while. I found it a bit awkward in the first few days but I think I am already getting used to it.

The other problem I am encountering is tiredness. This kicked in around day five and I’m still suffering from it now, on day eight. I have been told by others on the diet that it does go away eventually once your body has adapted to the new diet and caloric intake. But right now it is frustrating because I am finding it harder to train and I want to sleep all the time!

I also found myself getting a bit emotional today – a classic symptom of the reduction in carbs. Again, I understand that this goes away eventually.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post a couple of days ago, my energy seems to have returned. So the tiredness only lasted a few days, or so it seems at the moment

Into the second week

Despite these issues, I am looking forward to what the second week might bring. As a result of my first week experience I am looking to:

1. Scale back my training slightly until my body has adapted better to the new eating pattern.
2. Try a protein supplement to get around some of the bulky food issue (and hopefully save money!).

Watch this space!

Zone Diet links

Crossfit Journal article on the Zone Diet

Crossfit dietary prescription

Enter the Zone Diet – the unofficial zone diet online

Zone Diet – Barry Sears’ official zone diet site

Get Zoned – Australian zone diet information

The muscle-up is one of the most challenging tests of strength for the amateur trainee. If you’ve mastered dips and pull-ups and you are looking for your next challenge, add the muscle-up to your arsenal.

If you want to learn this difficult move you will need some excellent guidance and Crossfit London’s Ring Training guide by Andrew Stemler is just what you need. I have been using this myself and it is brilliant – lots of drills, great pictures, easy to use. The introductory sections include items freely available elsewhere but the real meat of the guide is all the muscle-up stuff, which isn’t available anywhere else.

The guide also covers more basic ring training so even if you are not ready for the muscle-up yet, you will benefit from the instruction. The guide’s content includes:

• Full body ring training guide, including how to perform squats, dips, chest flys etc on the rings
• A-Z of pull-up training
• Muscle-up progressions and drills
• Muscle-up instruction

So if you want to take full advantage of your rings and get a muscle-up this year, considering investing the price of a pint in a decent guide to help you on your way.

What makes this ranking different from the rankings you often find in fitness magazines is that the upper levels are genuinely challenging and all-encompassing. For example, the Level 1 benchmark for ‘push’ is 10 push-ups, whereas the elite level is 60 push-ups on rings and/or 1.5 x bodyweight bench press.

By way of comparison, check out this fitness test from Men’s Health. The top level is actually quite achievable for anyone training regularly for a couple of years. Also, the chosen tests don’t cover all aspects of strength and fitness (e.g. maximal strength).

It’s easy to sound elitist when talking about this stuff and I am aware that not everyone wants to or has the time to achieve super fitness. However, the opposite is also true: people find it difficult to think beyond the next training cycle or the next competition. I’m guilty of this myself; I am very good at setting short term goals but I rarely think about where I might be in three, five or ten years time.

A decent benchmark is also useful for anyone who trains on their own or who doesn’t have a peer group pushing them harder. I myself have really felt the lack of a peer group since I moved away from London. It is all too easy to get complacent and think you are the bees’ knees just because you are a bit fitter than the handful of people who go to your local health club.

And for those who feel that they are not particularly fit and strong, why not set your sights higher? It’s amazing the number of people every year who decide to train for a marathon or an Ironman. That kind of ambition is fantastic, I’d love to see more of that in strength training. This is something that Crossfit does quite well, by encouraging everyone to aim for the muscle-up, a genuinely impressive exercise that is nonetheless achievable with a lot of hard work and dedication. Ross Enamait‘s challenges, such as the 100 burpee challenge, are also good ways to benchmark yourself against others.

Got any more good benchmarks to suggest?

I’m in London for the festive season so I have grabbed the opportunity to get some quality Crossfit sessions in. I’ve been going to the weekly Workout On Sunday sessions down in Stratford, east London. As you can see from the picture above, there’s no poncing about in gyms, we utilise nearby parks and back streets to the – well, disinterest of the locals, to be honest. Eastenders are not easily impressed!

We usually start with a session on technique – last week it was kettlebell swings, this week it was the concept2 rower. Then we move on to the main workout, up to 20 minutes of highly intensive exercise.

I’m not sure if last week’s workout had a name but it consisted of:

• 20 kettlebell swings (weight of your choice)
• 5 pull-ups
• 5 ring dips

Maximum rounds in 15 minutes

My word, ring dips are humbling! It was my first time on gymnastic rings and I was a bit rubbish. Normally I can knock out 10-15 bodyweight dips on parallel bars with no problems but on the rings I barely managed 2 full range of motion efforts. The instability of the rings is a big factor, and the range of motion expected by Crossfit is greater than I am used to. The rings have to go right into the armpits. Since I couldn’t manage that many ring dips, I did 5 negatives instead. This entails just doing the lowering part of the dip, and putting my feet on the ground to get back up to the top position.

Kettlebell swings are an absolute beast but a fantastic leg exercise. They leave your legs like jelly. I have been doing dumbbell swings for a while so I was keen to try the kettlebell version. I actually now prefer the kettlebell swing because it’s more, well, swingy.

This week we did Fight Gone Bad, a Crossfit classic. This consists of:

• Sumo deadlift high pulls
• Concept2 row
• Tree ball (our outdoor version of wall ball)
• Push press
• Box jumps (24 inches)

1 minute each exercise, 3 rounds
1 minute rest between rounds

Andrew demonstrates the sumo deadlift high pull

I used a 20kg olympic bar for the sumo deadlift high pull and the push press. I found the push press the most challenging exercise because it has the least leg involvement and my legs are comparatively much stronger than my upper body.

I also found tree ball surprisingly challenging. I thought it was going to be one of the easier exercises – how hard can it be to throw a med ball at a tree?? But the effort of throwing and catching a 5kg ball when you are already fatigued, plus doing a full squat is deceptively hard. Added to that the fact that you are trying to hit the tree and not passers-by so your aim has to stay true, you can’t just chuck the thing in the right general direction.

Steve performs tree ball

What I love about Crossfit and similar systems is how seemingly innocuous exercises can turn out to be quite difficult. It keeps you on your toes, constantly challenged. If you’ve got used to doing a familiar exercise one way and you are suddenly expected to do it another, it can be like doing the exercise for the first time. You can’t be too cocky in this situation!

Crossfit is growing in the UK, although it is confined to a few big cities at the moment. For a list of current Crossfit affiliates, click here.