Tacoma Strength and Conditioning

Cardio Hell

3 rounds

500m row

21 burpees

400m run

This is another workout that we’ve done before.  I don’t know what makes it so rough.  There’s nothing heavy, nothing absurdly high rep or long (although one might argue that any number of burpees is absurd), nothing particularly complex.  Still, I remember it being such a challenge that I’ve always kept it in the back of my mind, waiting to spring it on you again.

Beforehand we did Power Cleans.  As has been mentioned before, there is a difference between power and strength.  Strength is the absolute ability to produce force on an object.  Think of a heavy deadlift slowly inching upward towards lock out.  Power is a relationship between force and time, it’s a ratio.  Overall force produced may be lower in a power movement, but the ratio of force to time is greater.  Think of a Snatch or box jump.

Another analogy is that while Strength is your top speed,  Power is your acceleration.

Generally in the course of a week, we work on one power-building movement and two strength-building movements.  In the pantheon of weight-bearing exercises, there is no single movement more powerful than the Snatch.  You take a weight from ground to overhead in a single explosive movement, carrying it through the greatest range of motion the body is capable of.  The problem with the Snatch, however, is that it is an incredibly complex exercise that takes thousands of hours of practice and refinement.  It also requires (and develops) a high degree of flexibility, coordination, and balance.  This in turn requires that we progress slowly and appropriately.

All fine and well if O-lifting is a goal, but for the average person this isn’t the case, and light technical work once a week feels more like a workout wasted.  So in light of this, we’ve started including the Power Clean as an alternative to the Snatch.  The same basic stimulus is there- an explosive weighted jump to lift a bar from the floor to shoulders, but the movement is much much simpler allowing us to get greater benefit from it sooner.  You can still opt for the Snatch if you want to develop that particular skill.

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