Blog Archive

Have you seen this woman?

If you do wish her HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

Kelly “The Dashound” Hansen turns the ripe old age of 29 today. Always quick with a smile and her heart on her sleeve Dashie breaths electric life into CrossFit Vancouver. We couldn’t do what we do without all her hard work around here.

Things I love about Kelly:

1) The cubby
2) How appreciative she is
3) The way she twirls her hair when she’s thinking.  Even chews it sometimes.
4) Her dirty dirty dirty (seriously) dirty sense of humour
5) You can fart on her
6) Love of wine
7) Love of TBear
8 ) She honest to goodness gives a &%$#
9) Can’t speak english

You rock Kell. We love you.

Friday’s Workout:

Oly Total

1 Rep Max Snatch
1 Rep Max Clean and Jerk

Shep

Our very own Rebecca Arraya is putting on a charity event next month.

Proceeds will benefit The New Stride Thoroughbred Adoption Society. They find homes for these majestic beasts when their racing career is finished.

Purchase your tickets at Winner’s Circle. Totally fun to get all decked out. Apparently its all about the head gear.

There will be dashound races that day as well. Seriously! My bets are on Kelly to win it.

Darth Erkel and I attended a similar event last year. It was a blast.

Have you ever seen two bigger mooks?

Thursday’s Workout:

Speaking of charity, CrossFit for Hope was created to create awareness and raise money for children with leukemia.

CrossFit HQ created a workout for the charity. It looks absolutely bad ass and, I’m betting, was done so to signify the battle these children are going through.

Hope

Three rounds of:

Burpees
Power snatch (75/55 lbs)
Box jump, 24″ /20″
Thruster (75/55 lbs)
Chest to bar Pull-ups

“Hope” has the same format as Fight Gone Bad. In this workout you move from each of five stations after a minute. This is a five-minute round from which a one-minute break is allowed before repeating. The clock does not reset or stop between exercises. One point is given for each rep.

If your calves et al are mangled from the numerous excellent double unders you did then Andy wants you to just do steps ups and downs for the jumping portion. DO WHAT ANDY SAYS!

Get in here and throw down.

One Love,

Sheppy

Sent from my iPhone

Tony Leyland, on sabbatical this summer (currently living it up in merry old England – going to Wimbeldon), sent me this great article by Gretchen Reynolds discussing the brain benefits of exercise.

Turns out we can create new brain cells from just exercising. What is even more exciting is that these new brain cells are especially adept at melding into the your brain’s neural network.

Research still has to be done as to what types of exercise best cause neurogenesis but intially it looks as though anything helps.  Even walking.

No wonder I feel so dumb after lying on the couch all day.

Read the whole article in the Exercise Science section of our website here.

Wednesday’s Workout:

Warm Up: Test your max 1) L Sit 2) Handstand

Three attempts at each

Tech: Muscle Ups. Do 5 sets of 5 muscle ups consecutive if you can. Do partner or solo assisted if you can’t. If kips are too easy then do static.

Workout: 20 sets of unbroken double unders.

If you are new to them just do 20 sets of 10. Or pick a target number for yourself.

Roll out and stretch your calves and soleuses afterwards. Trust me.

Originally today was going to be your first day revisited but TBear whined about it so I switched it up.

Tomorrow is a doozy.

The Shepherd

How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Published: April 18, 2012

 
The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does.

The most persuasive evidence comes from several new studies of lab animals living in busy, exciting cages. It has long been known that so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — lead to improvements in the brainpower of lab animals. In most instances, such environmental enrichment also includes a running wheel, because mice and rats generally enjoy running. Until recently, there was little research done to tease out the particular effects of running versus those of playing with new toys or engaging the mind in other ways that don’t increase the heart rate.

So, last year a team of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, gathered four groups of mice and set them into four distinct living arrangements. One group lived in a world of sensual and gustatory plenty, dining on nuts, fruits and cheeses, their food occasionally dusted with cinnamon, all of it washed down with variously flavored waters. Their “beds” were colorful plastic igloos occupying one corner of the cage. Neon-hued balls, plastic tunnels, nibble-able blocks, mirrors and seesaws filled other parts of the cage. Group 2 had access to all of these pleasures, plus they had small disc-shaped running wheels in their cages. A third group’s cages held no embellishments, and they received standard, dull kibble. And the fourth group’s homes contained the running wheels but no other toys or treats.

All the animals completed a series of cognitive tests at the start of the study and were injected with a substance that allows scientists to track changes in their brain structures. Then they ran, played or, if their environment was unenriched, lolled about in their cages for several months.

Afterward, Rhodes’s team put the mice through the same cognitive tests and examined brain tissues. It turned out that the toys and tastes, no matter how stimulating, had not improved the animals’ brains.

“Only one thing had mattered,” Rhodes says, “and that’s whether they had a running wheel.” Animals that exercised, whether or not they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice. Animals that didn’t run, no matter how enriched their world was otherwise, did not improve their brainpower in the complex, lasting ways that Rhodes’s team was studying. “They loved the toys,” Rhodes says, and the mice rarely ventured into the empty, quieter portions of their cages. But unless they also exercised, they did not become smarter.

Why would exercise build brainpower in ways that thinking might not? The brain, like all muscles and organs, is a tissue, and its function declines with underuse and age. Beginning in our late 20s, most of us will lose about 1 percent annually of the volume of the hippocampus, a key portion of the brain related to memory and certain types of learning.

Exercise though seems to slow or reverse the brain’s physical decay, much as it does with muscles. Although scientists thought until recently that humans were born with a certain number of brain cells and would never generate more, they now know better. In the 1990s, using a technique that marks newborn cells, researchers determined during autopsies that adult human brains contained quite a few new neurons. Fresh cells were especially prevalent in the hippocampus, indicating that neurogenesis — or the creation of new brain cells — was primarily occurring there. Even more heartening, scientists found that exercise jump-starts neurogenesis. Mice and rats that ran for a few weeks generally had about twice as many new neurons in their hippocampi as sedentary animals. Their brains, like other muscles, were bulking up.

But it was the ineffable effect that exercise had on the functioning of the newly formed neurons that was most startling. Brain cells can improve intellect only if they join the existing neural network, and many do not, instead rattling aimlessly around in the brain for a while before dying.

One way to pull neurons into the network, however, is to learn something. In a 2007 study, new brain cells in mice became looped into the animals’ neural networks if the mice learned to navigate a water maze, a task that is cognitively but not physically taxing. But these brain cells were very limited in what they could do. When the researchers studied brain activity afterward, they found that the newly wired cells fired only when the animals navigated the maze again, not when they practiced other cognitive tasks. The learning encoded in those cells did not transfer to other types of rodent thinking.

Exercise, on the other hand, seems to make neurons nimble. When researchers in a separate study had mice run, the animals’ brains readily wired many new neurons into the neural network. But those neurons didn’t fire later only during running. They also lighted up when the animals practiced cognitive skills, like exploring unfamiliar environments. In the mice, running, unlike learning, had created brain cells that could multitask.

Just how exercise remakes minds on a molecular level is not yet fully understood, but research suggests that exercise prompts increases in something called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or B.D.N.F., a substance that strengthens cells and axons, fortifies the connections among neurons and sparks neurogenesis. Scientists can’t directly study similar effects in human brains, but they have found that after workouts, most people display higher B.D.N.F. levels in their bloodstreams.

Few if any researchers think that more B.D.N.F. explains all of the brain changes associated with exercise. The full process almost certainly involves multiple complex biochemical and genetic cascades. A recent study of the brains of elderly mice, for instance, found 117 genes that were expressed differently in the brains of animals that began a program of running, compared with those that remained sedentary, and the scientists were looking at only a small portion of the many genes that might be expressed differently in the brain by exercise.

Whether any type of exercise will produce these desirable effects is another unanswered and intriguing issue. “It’s not clear if the activity has to be endurance exercise,” says the psychologist and neuroscientist Arthur F. Kramer, director of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois and a pre-eminent expert on exercise and the brain. A limited number of studies in the past several years have found cognitive benefits among older people who lifted weights for a year and did not otherwise exercise. But most studies to date, and all animal experiments, have involved running or other aerobic activities.

Whatever the activity, though, an emerging message from the most recent science is that exercise needn’t be exhausting to be effective for the brain. When a group of 120 older men and women were assigned to walking or stretching programs for a major 2011 study, the walkers wound up with larger hippocampi after a year. Meanwhile, the stretchers lost volume to normal atrophy. The walkers also displayed higher levels of B.D.N.F. in their bloodstreams than the stretching group and performed better on cognitive tests.

In effect, the researchers concluded, the walkers had regained two years or more of hippocampal youth. Sixty-five-year-olds had achieved the brains of 63-year-olds simply by walking, which is encouraging news for anyone worried that what we’re all facing as we move into our later years is a life of slow (or not so slow) mental decline.

writes the Phys Ed column for The Times’s Well blog. Her book, ‘‘The First 20 Minutes,’’ about the science of exercise, will be published this month.

Ever wonder why I am always getting people to run backwards as a warm up?

An old cross country running coach of mine did it to us all the time. I always thought he was a bit of jerk. Now that I am on this side of the athlete/coach tandem I think its ok to be hated just a little. Patty says its required in order to be a good coach. Don’t take this a license to be mean to Sheppy though.  I always appreciate the love.

If I had a nickel for every time a client or athlete has told me off under their breath or shot me a dirty look I’d be rich. You don’t even know when you are doing it. Haha. Sometimes I’ll see it and say “Don’t say that”. The athlete will respond with a giant “What?!” and I will tell them I know they just told me to go $&*# myself in their head. Along comes a big smile and we both burst out in laughter. One of my favourite coaching moments because it usually creates a stronger bond between us.

My old coach Mr. Brown got us to run backwards because it made your feet strong and worked your posterior chain damn well. Thanks Mr Brown.

Tuesday’s Workout:

Tech: Deadlift 3,3,3,3,3
Make them a challenging weight but execute perfect form.

Griff

Run for Time

800 m Forward
400 m Backwards
800 m Forward
400 m Backwards

This could be Jaws’ first leaderboard. She excels at running backwards.

Shep

I’m not sure where HQ got the name for “The Chief” workout but I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about Tecumseh (1768-1813).

He is named for the comet that was seen in the sky the night he was born. Tecumseh literally means “Shooting Star” or “Panther in the Sky”.

He believed in standing up for the Shawnee’s beliefs and their way of life. He was a bad ass warrior and highly skilled orator that valued family and tradition. Tecumseh refused to sign treatises with the encroaching Americans. He united tribes from all around the south west Great Lakes into a Confederacy to fight for their way of life and their land.

Although he died at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, the legacy of his life remains as a catalyst to stand up for what you believe in and that there is great power in unity.

If you like Historical fiction then I’d suggest James Alexander Thome’s “Panther in the Sky”. Lauded for its historical accuracy the book is a magical tale about Tecumseh’s life.

Monday’s Workout:

The Chief:

Amrap in 3 minutes of

3 Power Cleans (135/95 lbs)
6 Push Ups
9 Squats

Rest 1 minute. Do 5 rounds of this.

You start the next 3 minute round where you left off in the last round.

Mucho Amore,

Shep