1 Rep Max
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
I’m sure you all at some point have gotten tired of Nabil or I telling you to go down in weight. We don’t do it to make you feel bad, we don’t do it because we are holding you back, we truly want you to grasp the movement of the lift. Often times during strength days, many of you base your success on lifting the heaviest 1-rep possible. Although a 1-rep max is valid measure of strength at that moment, lifting something heavy one time does not necessarily mean you have completely grasped the movement or have attained the strength to repeat it on multiple occasions. This is why we like to incorporate days with reps of 3, 5, and sometimes 7-rep max attempts. Although we admire your eagerness to want to push big weight, we’d rather see you actually grasp and be comfortable with a lift. Here’s another awesome post from CrossFit South Brooklyn on why shooting for the heaviest 1 rep is a little over-hyped.
From the post.
Think of a 1RM not so much as a measure of strength capacity but as an act of strength performance. Veteran lifters will speak of owning a weight versus hitting a weight. Owning a weight means that you can get under a bar just about anytime you want and move that weight (assuming a proper warm-up and having not done back-to-back hero WOD’s that week). Hitting a weight is a much less reproducible feat. It means that on a day where you felt good, were well rested, timed your eating properly, had your weight belt sitting just right, heavenly bodies were aligned properly, and you managed not to mess anything up, you were able to squeeze out a higher weight than ever before. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a weight that you have only hit once isn’t something that you can just do on command. It’s an act of strength and will; repeating it doesn’t just happen. No sprinter expects to hit a PR every time they run a given distance, not in competition and especially not in training. There is no reason to just assume that every time you get under a barbell you’re going to PR.
We should also consider that not every one’s best event in lifting is the 1RM. Consider again, sprinting. All sprinters are fast, that’s why they are sprinters. However sprinters have different specialties, some are better in a 60m dash, others are better at the quarter mile. If we took a random group of sprinters and tested their best times at a series of distances, say 60m, 100m, 200m, and 400m, we would probably find that the rankings would look very similar across the events: the faster runners would tend to do well at all of them. However, you would also expect to see some shuffling of rankings based upon the individual strengths of the sprinters. Some are better at accelerating, some run the turns well, some finish well, etc. To bring this back to lifting, imagine a group of powerlifters from the same weight class. If you tested their 1RM, 3RM, and 5RM squat you would see something very similar: The strongest lifters would tend to be at the the top of each ranking, however you would also see some move up or down the leader board as the reps changed based upon their individual characteristics. This is relevant to us because the better you are at an event, the 3RM versus the 1RM for instance, the more likely you are able to reproduce your best effort. We should test our strength at 3RM’s and 5RM’s for precisely the same reason that Track and Field tests more than just the 100m dash as a measure of speed.
Read full post here.
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Wednesday’s WOD:
A.) Front Squat
5-4-3-2-1
*Score is sum of total weight for each set.
*Only allowed 1 attempt per set.
*Failed set results in a “0″.
B.) 7 Minute clock
50 Pullups
*Start with 5 burpees and perform 5 burpees every minute until finished with pullups.
