Bruce Peterson — Takes Charge!

One of the biggest impacts on my life is that I am more and more often finding myself looking for things to do, looking for additional activities. I recently drug my bicycle out of the garage and dusted it off and went for a ride. I started taking tae kwon do, something I thought about doing for about 20 years but never did. Mowing the lawn is no longer a day long process that leaves me exhausted; it’s now a 30 - 40 minute detour in the day.

Probably the number one change that has come about in recent months is that I am making a transition from patting myself on the back for milestones reached to instead work even harder to reach the next level. I’m not working out because I think I should, I’m working out because it makes every part of my life better.

Top 5 Tips For Kick-Starting Your Skill Practice

Here are my top 5 recommendations for kick-starting your skill practice:

1. Don’t avoid the Workout of the Days that have movements or skills you can’t do or can’t do well. On the same note, don’t skip the ones that you just don’t like doing. If you don’t like doing it or can’t do it well, then chances are great that this is the thing you need to work on the most! If you have to, scale it down, or just practice the movements.
2. Don’t skip designated Skill Practice days as they are vital to your skill development and give you a chance to recover so you can go harder on the next WoD.
3. Come in/stay late and practice skills with a focused, intentional mindset. Don’t just go through the motions! The best athletes at our gym (and throughout CrossFit) are the ones who do the most and best quality skill practice.
4. Learn and train joint mobility exercises to restore your capacity for functional movement and restore lost ranges of motion in joints so that you develop CrossFit skills and movements much more quickly.
5. Use our forum to log your workouts AND skill practice. Keep a log of your skill practice, including your weakest skills and log each time you practice them. The forum is also a great way to get other’s feedback on your training and find out what is working for them.

What Can I Have For A Snack and Still Stay in the Zone?

Question:
What can I have for an “easy” snack and still stay in the Zone?

Answer:
On the Zone, every meal and snack should provide 40% of calories from carbohydrate, 30% from protein and 30% from fat – 40:30:30 ratio. If you are on the Athlete’s Zone, your fat will constitute a higher percentage.
Try dividing your plate into three parts to make the Zone easier to follow: Read more

Make Every Workout A Success

As a coach, it never fails to amaze me how the longer you train a group of people you begin to see behavioral patterns emerge. You see the same people consistently skipping workouts – maybe because they perceive them as too challenging. You witness the same people skipping warm-ups because as they say unconvincingly, “I don’t need to warm up.”

You also see the same people skipping skill practice days because there is not a workout involved or they simply suck at the skill being practiced. They generally skip run workouts such as 800 meter repeats, 5k and 10k runs. Sometimes they say, “I can do that at home,” but usually don’t, and other times they just don’t understand that training all 3 energy pathways in the body, including the aerobic pathway, is part of CrossFit. These same people are also asking, “What can I do to get better at ‘X’?” or “Why am I not improving at ‘Y’?” Read more

Success Stories

I want to hear your story. How has CrossFit Plano changed your life? Submit your story to me. Include your name and if you would also include a few photographs. I look forward to hearing from you.

Troy Dodson

The Pound - CrossFit Plano, CrossFit Dallas

Bill Strahan — Taking Charge!

My wife and I started at Crossfit Plano on February 11th of this year. She’s lost about 5 pounds, I’ve lost almost 10. More importantly, we’re both in MUCH better shape and capable of things that neither of us dreamed we ever would be.

Hell, in some cases we’re now capable of doing exercises we didn’t even know existed prior to coming to Crossfit Plano!

I’ve learned how to poke new holes in my belts with an ice pick…had to do that on two of my belts since my waistline has shrunk about 1.5″ in the last 8 weeks.

The combination of competition and camaraderie with measured workouts turns a handful of exercises into a sport in which you’re trying to beat your own previous performances as well as be the top for any given workout of the day. In other words, you can’t help but be motivated.

I wouldn’t trade my experience so far for anything. It’s awesome.

Sometimes Life’s A Pain

I was recently a guest speaker at a corporation. The topic was how to use joint mobility to prevent injury, while improving key quality of life factors such energy levels, productivity, and the rehabilitation of various painful conditions. This can be achieved through moving the joints to re-train one’s system to move better, a.k.a. “Z Health.”

The key is in understanding that the Central Nervous System is the governing system of the entire body and all of its subsystems. It is truly all about the brain!

Bear with me for a moment while I take you through the basic jargon you’ll need to follow along:

1. Your proprioceptive system sends signals to the brain to let the brain know where the body is in space, time and movement. There are various signal types that are sent, but for now we will just discuss two of them: mechano-receptive, and nociceptive. Read more

Written by Troy Dodson · Filed Under Nutrition and Health 

Fish Oil

April 10, 2008

Inflammation is linked to a variety of diseases – Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Asthma, Bronchitis, and more. Inflammation is driven by a imbalance in hormones such as Insulin and a group of hormones called Eicosanoids. Eicosanoids reside at the cellular level so all of your bodies cells have the ability to “communicate” using eicosanoids. Barry Sears, in his book “The Omega Rx Zone”, explains that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ eicosanoids. As bad eicosanoids drive inflammation which is causal for many chronic disease patterns in the body the purpose of supplementing with Fish Oil is to improve the production of “good” eicosanoids while reducing the production of “bad” eicosanoids resulting in less inflammation and as a result better health and performance. The reason why you should get your Omega-3s from Fish Oil is that it is a much more concentrated source of Essential Fatty Acids (Vitamin F). Read more

Written by Troy Dodson · Filed Under Nutrition and Health 

Your Best Body — Discover the right way to succeed.

April 10, 2008

I started doing CrossFit for myself in late December 2004, and experienced tremendous results throughout 2005. In the first 8 months of 2005 I dropped my body fat from 20% plus to 8.5%, and took my pull ups from 1 to 30. The first time I did “Fran” was with a 35 lb barbell. I could not get the bar in the rack position and all of my pull ups more closely resembled flailing then pull ups – let alone jumping pull ups. Not a single pull up was an actual pull up! My overall time was 17 minutes and some change! I thought I was going to die – it was a very memorable experience. I have since done “Fran” in 3:33 with the full 95 lbs and all pull ups. Read more

Written by Troy Dodson · Filed Under Feature Article, Fitness