Met with my old/new coach this afternoon for a little heart to heart. Basically, my strength sucks, and my form in the olympic lifts (and likely the power lifts) sucks more. This was evident in my CrossFit Games WOD #3 video. I’m committed to being better every day, so, armed with humility and an assload of motivation, Chris Brown and I sat down to discuss my goals and a path to success.

I started my CrossFit journey with Chris at his gym, Emergent Fitness, in 2005/6, leaving to train solo sometime in 2007/8. He has since grown the facility beyond CrossFit to incorporate other programs and mechanisms that he and his trainers have tested on themselves and their athletes for specific purposes. With overall strength being my main weakness, despite my own experimentation with various flavors of strength-biased conditioning work, we agreed to focusing my efforts for the next 12 weeks on a strength/lifting program. It’s going to pull me away from frequent/long metcons, but I’m eager to get the foundations in place. The general idea is that it’s faster to earn strength through a focused cycle and re-habiliate conditioning afterwards than it is to try to reach the same strength goals through a pure CrossFit style conditioning program (aka main site WODs). It makes sense, and I’m committing to it, but I’ll admit some anxiety over potentially losing ground on the core conditioning front. I’ll post my own experiences/thoughts about programming in that manner as I progress.

So, these goals I mentioned, just what are they?

On the events side, I plan to:

1. Be ready to test for my next karate rank in mid-September;
2. Compete in the As Rx’d Tour Chicago competition at the end of September, 2011;
3. Various specialty courses (CrossFit affiliated and non-affiliated alike), focusing on strength, oly/power lifting, mobility, and kids.
4. Start looking towards the 2012 CrossFit Games Open with the intent of making it at least to Regionals, but shooting for the final games events in CA.

Chris and I will set some specific phase goals for this 12 week program, but I’ll post on those later this week, once I have my head wrapped around them.

I’ve been telling other people for years that they need to have a qualified coach to help the progress. Time to sip my own medicine.

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