Friday, February 20, 2009 by Daniel

I am a beautiful butterfly

...or at least I will be.

I'll get to today's workout in a bit. First, I want to relay something that I find very exciting: I think I'm starting to understand the butterfly kip.



Aaron apparently went to CF Oakland, where they gave him a lesson in the butterfly, which he passed on to the rest of us after class. It took a few tries (it's difficult not to relapse into a regular kip), but eventually I started to get a feel for it. I can't yet get high enough on the bar - I get freaked out by the metal bar speed directly towards my face - but I was able to string a few together on the rings.

This is exciting to me for a couple reasons. 1) If you can do it, it's MUCH faster, but more importantly, 2) your legs stay bent the whole time. This means that the Ironworks bar, where I do the majority of my pullups and which is a bit too low for me, could stop being the frustrating kip-killer it currently is. My plan is to practice these until I can get my chin over my bar, then switch to doing them for the WODs. It will mean losing a few as-RX workouts, but it's my hope that with time and practice, I'll be able to do these C2B as well. I know it's possible, and those that can do it swear it's easier. I suspect this is because, done properly, the butterfly kip enables the vast majority of the power to come from the hip, and lets the arms do less work.

Anyway, on to today's workout. Max took pity on us for two difficult workouts (I've been pretty wrecked today), and gave us something quite low-key:

Floor press 5-5-5-5-5

135-145x4-145-150-155x4

An entire workout spent lying on the floor. Perfect. It's a weird lift - the ROM feels all wrong, but having the floor stop your arms prevents any bounce from the reflex action of the muscles, so you have to start the lift in midair. I didn't hate it, but it didn't feel super-useful to me.

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