Morning, friends! Glad you all enjoyed the Mexican Lasagna recipe! If you loved the sound of it, you’ll probably also like my Healthy Chicken Enchiladas (gluten free) and Sweet Potato Black Bean Veggie Enchiladas (just leave out the cheese to make it vegan).
In other news, Matt and I graduated from the Crossfit Foundations course last night at Crossfit Dupont!
Exciting! This means that we’re now free to attend any of the regular CrossFit classes. I’ll be sure to let you know how they go!
Chris (our instructor) gave us these little notebooks as a graduation gift. We’ll bring them to class and use them to track our workouts, so we can see how we progress in terms of reps, weight, etc.! I love this idea — so motivating to really be able to see your progress. I also didn’t know these old school composition notebooks still existed! Reminds me of elementary school. 🙂
We spent Monday and Wednesday nights learning some more of the strength moves that the Crossfit classes will usually feature. (I found a little dictionary of all the Crossfit moves, btw, in case you’re interested.) On Monday, we learned how to do a “snatch” — we started with hollow pipes to learn the form and then moved on to some light bars.
And last night, we learned a “Clean” — similar squatting movement to the other moves, but the bar comes to just below your chin instead of over your head.
Fun! I felt so hardcore. 😉 Here’s an action shot:
So far I’ve found the moves to be really intuitive once you learn the proper form. My main problem has just been that I have EXTREMELY tight shoulders/back/hips/everything (both naturally and also made worse by all the running), so sometimes getting all the way into the proper form was a little uncomfortable for me. We’re going to work on it. 🙂 Chris told me to check out this site for some moves that would help loosen me up and increase my flexibility:
When we were finished with our form lessons last night, we did a quick workout to seal the class.
I made a fun animated picture on Gickr.com by putting three of my kettle bell swing photos together (if you can’t see this, you might need to click through from a Reader or my email subscription):
![[gickr.com]_dbaa8730-af5c-59f4-01e8-32ea1b04ebe3](https://www.fannetasticfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/gickr.com_dbaa8730-af5c-59f4-01e8-32ea1b04ebe3.gif "[gickr.com]_dbaa8730-af5c-59f4-01e8-32ea1b04ebe3")
Success!! I finished in 8 minutes exactly. 🙂 That might not seem like much time, but boy were we all dripping with sweat! High intensity workouts are so effective.
And we actually were a bit tired already because on Monday night and last night, before the Crossfit Foundations course, Matt and I attended the 1 hour 7 p.m. boot camp that the gym offers! Chris (our Foundations instructor) let us know that Monday and Wednesday would be mostly standing around listening and practicing form using hollow bars during the foundations course, and that if we wanted to get in a good workout first, it might be a good idea to hit the boot camp.
Matt and I both LOVED the boot camp — it’s been really fun to work out together, since we’ve never gone to workout classes together before! It was like boot camps I’ve done in the past, but incorporated more strength in the form of some of the more low key Crossfit moves (e.g. moves with dumbbells and heavy balls, but not massive bars). Wall balls are HARD — you basically stand facing the wall, throw a heavy (but cushiony) ball up as high as you can, then catch it landing in a squat position… and repeat! At one point I used Matt’s heavier ball by accident and was wondering why it was so insanely hard all of a sudden!
I ended up finishing second, right after Matt. I beat out the two guys who were ahead of me at the end during the block run. 😉
And speaking of running, I had another great run with Lululemon Georgetown on Tuesday night! Well, by great, I mean slightly torturous because it was REALLY hot and humid out. Blech! I was also sore from Monday’s boot camp, which didn’t help. The pretty views and good conversation did help, though! We did an out and back run down along the waterfront and through the monuments.
This was one of those nights where I was really glad I was with people, because otherwise, I would have been walking. 🙂 Groups are so motivating — we were all cheering each other on (and occasionally saying how much the heat sucked, ha). We did 4.3 miles in 39:19.
After three days of such awesome workouts, today is definitely a rest day. I earned it!
How have you been fitting in workouts this week? And any tips from you CrossFitters for me and Matt now that we’ll be attending our first real CrossFit classes?
