Rope Climbs and Clean & Jerks

You know, they say you can't prepare for Crossfit, but I think the thing I was least prepared for was how ripped up my hands would get. Thanks to a gajillion rope climbs (yes, a gajillion, technical Crossfit terminology right there) I have some really sore fingers, including one giant blister on my thumb as illustrated here:

Today's Crossfit workout meant tackling 2 things I had never done before, the rope climb and the clean & jerk. We had a warm-up that was basically a WOD in and of itself for me, followed by our strength portion, which was practicing our clean & jerks, then our actual WOD:


5 rope climbs/5 clean & jerks
4 rope climbs/4 clean & jerks
3 rope climbs/3 clean & jerks
2 rope climbs/2 clean & jerks
1 rope climbs/1 clean & jerks
with increasing weight with each set of clean & jerks of course


Since I won't be tackling an actual rope climb any time soon, I get to do the scaled down version, which is lowering yourself back while holding onto the rope until your close to parallel to the floor and then lowering yourself completely until your back is on the floor, then pulling yourself back up. Since it's scaled down, you get to do extra (yay!), 3 scaled down rope climbs for every regular one. There's that tricky math again. For those of you who are rusty, that means I did 15-12-9-6-3. I surprised myself by, well, doing it. And I've got the f'ed up hands to prove it. :P

The clean & jerk however moves up into the "one of my favorite moves in Crossfit" category. It's nearly identical to the clean & presses I've been doing in Body Pump, which I've always loved. The only issue is that I've apparently been doing them slightly wrong so I had to work a bit today to undo that bad habit.

All in all, this workout was a lot more about strength than stamina for me and I assure you that the result is going to be immovable arms tomorrow. Keeping my fingers crossed that tomorrows WOD is all about the air squats! :P