I found this link on Petranek Fitness about a new show on the Discovery Health called "Fit to Live". It exposes people to situations that would ordinarily cause flight, fight, or freeze, such as life threatening events, to see whether they can keep their calm and have the strength and confidence to save those in danger. Check out the article, When Fitness Means Life or Death which explains this new show. I have talked about this many times before in terms of CrossFit. A lot of the movements you do during workouts require a certain amount of skill (Olympic Lifts, kipping pullups, etc.) and when there is no duress, many of you can perform them well but as soon as you are put on a clock everything can sometimes go out the window. When you could do 10 pullups in the warm-up you can only do 2 or 3 when the workout begins. The same goes for the Snatch. This is on a much smaller scale but can see the resemblance to real life situations. Being able to use your acquired skills demands that you keep your emotional state at bay. The second you allow the movements to take over or you get in a hurry that skill gets shut off by fight or flight. The closer and the faster your heart rate gets to heart rate max (220-age) the more likely these unwanted instincts take over. They prevent you from using your skill. Think about it. When you start a workout with box jumps, if you get in a hurry because you just heard 3-2-1 Go! the first jump is usually your worst. When doing wall balls, because you don't like them very much, your heart rate goes up just a little more than what is caused by the workout and the squat to throw becomes just a little bit harder to handle and you can only do so many at a time. You repeatedly miss the target because you can't get it high enough when only a few minutes earlier you had no problem reaching it during the warm-up. This goes for a lot of other movements as well. Now think about this, what if the situation suddenly arose where you or someone with you needed to save others around you in the case of an emergency? Would you have the where-with-all to remain calm, assess the situation at hand, think about the skills you possess that would be useful in this particular situation, and save people's lives?

Now, the next time you are doing a complex movement in a workout remain calm, assess what you have to do, and follow through. This alone will allow you to do more consecutive reps thus shaving seconds off your time because you are now more efficient.

Now on to the workout:


WOD
Rounds in 12 minutes of:
5 DB Push Press (35#/25#)
DB Walking Lunges, 10 steps (same db's)
15 Atlas DB (85-90#/60-65#)

Post rounds to comments.

Scale where necessary. Atlas DB's are the same as what you see in the picture but with db's. You will pick up a single db up from off the floor and place it on a box, 54" for gents/42" for gals, take if off the box and place it back on the floor and repeat for the required number of reps. The kicker is that 1. you can't place the db end over end, 2. when picking it up and placing it on the box you may not touch the handle, and 3. when placing it on the floor you must remove your hands from the db altogether before re-attempting to move it again (deadlift). What you can do is utilize the handle when taking it off the box and putting it back on the floor. Have fun and we'll see you on Tuesday.