Friday 7.9: Front squat + Grace (video)

Friday. Front squat 5x3 (PR max 95kg). Wod. Grace, time 5.40.

Awesome workout! Grace have been tickling me for a while and finally I got a good chance to measure where I’m at. My bro and Toni were also at the gym so there was also some training partner pressure involved ;) We took off by warming up with rowing, pull-ups, double unders, front squats and clean technique. The schedule was to do front squats and workout called Grace, i.e. 30 reps of clean & jerk, we modified the weight slightly lighter.

Strength. Front squat 5x3 (80+80+85+90+ PR 95kg). Sami took 100kg, Toni 80kg.

Toni had never front squatted so this was a huge day of progress. There was some technique learnt in the beginning and finally he lifted 80kg as his new PR. We took sets of three reps each, my sets started from 80 and ended up in new personal record on 95kg! There was still energy left to lift more, I’ll save that for later. I love to squat, these strength movements have taken a piece of my heart, I’m really into them, it makes good to confidence level as you can witness some quick development.

Grace. Time 5.40, scaled to 50kg. Toni scaled to 40kg, time 4.09.

This day was all about Grace. I had some positive nervousness in the morning as I woke up ‘cause I knew this workout was awaiting. And it was perfect that these two fellows were along as you can’t be too merciful to yourself as there are people shouting you forward in your workout. My PR in clean is currently 65kg, and 60 in push press so it would have been absurd to try Grace with 60kg, which is how it's originally meant to be done. Grace means you’ll have to clean & jerk the bar with 60kg from the ground to overhead position, 30 reps. Each time the bar has to come back down to the ground. In the overhead position ears can’t be seen if you look from the side. I used 50kg as my bar weight, which is about 80% of my max. Taking this into consideration, it was a tough weight to start with.

I really enjoyed doing the workout! It isn’t easy but it really gives you the opportunity to input the best you have to offer from your upper body strength. I had no strategy entering Grace so I just started lifting it as fast as possible because I figured fatigue will hit me anyway at some point. So why waste any time waiting for it? The first 7-8 reps went smooth, then the weight started to feel tougher. I had some problems that occurred at the latter half of the workout. The last 5 reps were disastrous as you can see, the bar felt so heavy that it was difficult to get it even to  my chest. My back arched and it was hard to get any assistance from my legs. So the technique is horrible to watch afterwards =) The last rep was inches away from a full extension but legitimately my training partners didn’t let it through, I lost another half a minute in the end because of this. I’m happy that all those counted jerks were good and acceptable ones so this is comparable the next time I’ll do it. Hopefully with the original 60kg that time!

Toni did his workout with 40kg bar and was able to perform Grace quicker, time 4.09. He said he'll do 6 reps in a minute and rest the remaining minute. That would have been precisely 5 minutes. However, he did the reps quicker. Especially Sami's encouragement made him go fast with the last reps. I think he could have taken the same 50kg bar and soon go with the 60kg. He has strength in there but he just haven't done these moves before. He will be a serious competitor once he gets the movements familiar. Well done big fella =)

Sami didn't take Grace this time, he just finished Diane the day before yesterday, 21-15-9 deadlift (100kg) + HSPU in 7 minutes. Today he went with 10 rounds of rowing, 30 rowing, 30 seconds rest, total of 1.700m in distance, average speed of about 1.38 / 500m. The original wod at crossfit.com was a total of 30 rounds. I'm going after that workout some day.