Over the past few months, we’ve channelled our efforts toward building a solid foundation of basic barbell movements and strict bodyweight strength and endurance. During this time, we’ve seen many of you drastically improve your pull-ups, push-ups, leg strength, and core stability. Starting this cycle, we are building on that foundation by focusing on a CrossFit bodyweight benchmark: Angie.
Angie is a higher volume workout, consisting of 100 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, and 100 air squats. To tackle this workout, we are going to continue to work on raw strength and muscular endurance, but also begin to incorporate dynamic kipping movements for those who have the requisite shoulder health and stability. You can also expect our barbell exercises to move toward building explosive power with movements like the power clean and push press, rather than the strict pressing and pulling movements we’ve built up previously.
For some of you, the volume in Angie will be too much, so we have a few options to ensure you stay safe but can still see progress. If you are scaling the pull ups or push ups down to modified pulling and pushing progressions, we recommend you choose one modification and stick with it for the entire workout. For example, if you do your push ups to a 20” box incline, stay with that box height for the entire workout even if you start having to take longer rest breaks between sets.
If you are coming off a long break or if you are very new to the Grassroots community, we recommend you cut the number of reps down to 50 of each movement. Generally, we see that when people do more reps than they are actually capable of, they cheat the movement and fail to meet the correct range of motion standards in order to keep the workout going. In a benchmark like this, it is imperative that each rep is valid so you can see improvement when you retest. By focusing on 50 reps of each instead of 100, you can take the time to ensure that every part of the workout is to standard.
For those of you who can do the workout RX or who have been with us for a while, we encourage you to attempt the full workout, but we will be setting time caps for each segment of the benchmark. If you cannot complete that part of the workout in time, you will simply record your reps for that segment and move on. The goal is to improve upon your rep totals for each segment or to improve your overall time when we retest again.
After a long few months of building our base, we’re excited to start to put our newfound skills to the test. Our goal is a continuation of the solid efforts you have all put in over the last 12 weeks and a further progression of your bodyweight strength, power, and endurance.
