12/6 Wednesday - #podiumweek Day 3

Today we are testing our endurance and recoverability. We have done this workout, the OPT Recoverability Test, several times. It is a brilliant workout. Some CrossFit workouts are notable for their excellence and some for their stupidity. We first discovered the OPT Repeatability Test from this article in Breaking Muscle: The 3 Best and 3 Worst CrossFit Workouts. 
The author describes today's workout as, 

"Simply the hardest workout I have ever done, and brilliant in its design and purpose. The goal is to test your fitness level by testing your ability to recover. After going all out on round one, you rest twelve minutes, do it again, and then again in another twelve. How much fall off in your second and third round time is suggestive of your body’s ability to recover, regenerate ATP, disburse lactic acid, and return your body’s systems to a near normal state.

And in the meantime, every single rep, without fail, sucks beyond all reasonable description. When you hop on the rower for the final 250m at the end of round three, you are quite sure you’re riding a sled directly into Satan’s maw.
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VERDICT: YOU WILL BE A BETTER ATHLETE FOR HAVING PERFORMED THIS TEST AND YOU WILL GET NOTHING SHORT OF A FANTASTIC WORKOUT."

With a description like that, you can instantly see the appeal. Workouts shouldn't be hard just for hard sake. I am always thinking about the stimulus of each workout I program. Why are we doing it? What adaptation do I want it to stimulate?
These are the questions a good programmer asks, not just "How long is it?" or "How hard is it?" I make sure we are working all three metabolic pathways (phosphagen, glycolytic, and aerobic) and that we are adapting to our training over time without burning-out, over-training, and over-use. 
Get ready to work VERY HARD in class today. If you have a phone, have it with you and use it to time each round. It will make the time math at the end so much easier! 
Good luck! Compare to March 8, 2017. 

Holiday Party Friday December 8

Join us for our first ever Winter Holiday Party. We will do the 12 Days of Christmas Workout at 5:30pm, then enjoy a Paleo Potluck and White Elephant gift exchange starting at 6:30 PM. If you don't want to workout, then join us for the potluck and gift exchange. Friends and family are welcome! 
Please bring a Paleo dish to share (meat, vegetables, nuts/seeds, no dairy, no grains, no dried legumes). We'd like to include a recipe exchange, so please bring small cards or printouts of your Paleo recipe to share with everyone. ​​​