The Girls Are Back In Town
LR and Ali just got back from an amazing week of volunteering at the CrossFit games. Unfortunately all that time focused on helping the fittest people on earth compete put a dent in their own workout schedule. I'm guessing that multiple trips to In and Out Burger didn't help improve their Fran time much either. That's why we're making August the month of the pull up!
We're Going To Be Strict With This...
Having The CrossFit Games on ESPN over the last week has rekindled the old kipping vs. non-kipping pull up debate. Rather than argue, we're just going to make this a strict pull up challenge. If we make big gains in our strict pull ups, we should also see improvements in kipping and butterfly as well. Also, it's been far too long since LR was last able to do a muscle up - a month of strict pull ups should give her the edge to get herself back over the rings!
Double Your Pull Ups, Double Your Fun
Now that we've decided that we're going to be doing strict pull ups, what's the actual challenge? Simple - the three of us want to double our max unbroken strict pull ups by the end of August.
Impossible? Probably, but we're not that bright and we don't fear failure. Here are our current numbers and our goal numbers for the end of August:
DBJ: 10/20
LR: 8/16
Ali: 3/6
The Method
We're going to use a pyramid scheme (not the Bernie Madoff kind) to build ourselves up over the course of the month. For those of you that haven't heard of this, here is what we will be doing every day we are in the gym for the first week:
DBJ: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1
LR: 1-2-3-2-1
Ali: 1-2-2-1 (hard to do a true pyramid when your max is three)
Each week we will add a step or two to the pyramid for our training sets. We'll test our max on the weekends and keep everyone updated on our progress. We're pretty excited to see how this goes. For a more in depth explanation of pyramid sets, scroll down to the bottom of this page.