June 2010 Newsletter
June News
Summer is officially here. The
weather is warming up. Remember to
stay hydrated and drink enough water
even before your workout. Dont wait
until you are thirsty to take a sip. Dont
hit the wall.
Crossfit Games is next month
July 16-18 at The Home Depot Sports
Complex in Carson, CA. We want to get
a group together to go down and
experience the games atmosphere. Let
Rick know if you are interested in going.
BE ON TIME We would
like to remind everyone to come on
time. This means on top of the hour
every hour. The reason why we need
to start at the top of the hour is so that
we can warm up and review the skills
of the WOD together and work as a
team. Again CrossFit is successful
because we typically workout as a
group, therefore producing
camaraderie, encouragement, and
friendly competition.
In case you have been having
trouble finding parking near the front of
the gym, we would like to remind you
that there is parking on the rear side of
the gym when you enter off of Miller Dr.
In this issue we will feature Mark
Rippetoe and his expert advise on bench
press, active hips, and bad form. And a
little section about Nuts.
The Slow Lifts by Mark
Rippetoe
The bench press is the best
exercise for absolute strength in the
upper body. So says Mark Rippetoe of
The Wichita Falls Athletic
Club/CrossFIt Wichita in part 4 of his
series on the Slow Lifts.
The bench press allows the lifter to
move heavier weights with the arms than
any other exercise. It should be included
in every barbell-training program. But it
is not the only lift we should do, as is too
often the case in typical gyms.
Benching provides hard active work for
the chest, shoulders, and arms and
isometric work for the forearms. It trains
novice lifters the fundamental skill of
pushing on a very heavy load, perhaps
its most useful function. When people
first start training, they have no
experience with maximal effort. The
bench press is a very good place to learn
how to bear down and push hard, and
this invaluable lesson translates to all the
other slow lifts quite well.
There is a little trick I use to make the
bar go to the right place, through the
right path, every time. Find a place on
the ceiling to stare at and nail your eyes
to that place. This point will be your
positional reference for the bar path and
its lockout position over the chest. If you
return the bar to the same position at the
top of every rep, having touched the
same place on your chest every time,
you will find that your bar path is
uniform as well.
Active Hips and Butt Winks
Drawing on more than 30 years
in the fitness industry, Mark Rippetoe
writes that an active hip can help clean
up problems associated with the squat.
Dr. Stef Bradford and Dr. Lon Kilgore,
Rippetoes long-time collaborators, also
contributed to this article.
deep if they allow the lumbar spine to
relax into flexion, a phenomenon known
in some circles as the butt wink.
Shoving the knees out of the way on
descent and keeping them there so that
the adductors can do their job is
accomplished by an external rotation of
the hip.
The concept of the active hip is best
understood as the use of an actively
locked lumbar extension and actively
shoved-out knees, which results in a
below-parallel squat that incorporates a
stretch reflex using all the muscles of the
posterior chain in the most optimal way
possible. The active hip gets the thighs
out of the way of the pelvis so that good
depth can be more easily obtained. At
the same time, it makes the squat
stronger and more powerful because of
the more effective use of more muscles
over a wider range of motion.

When we squat, the standard range of

motion criterion for the exercise is
below parallel. This is defined as the
hip joint identified at the apex of the hip
angle (the corner in your shorts over

the hip) as it drops below the knee (the

top of the patella).

Most people who have trouble with the

squat are having trouble getting good
depth while keeping their low back from
rounding. Pretty much anybody can get
Bad Form
 Bad form is bad in every way. Good form is not arbitrary, and its
Citing specific examples from lifts, purpose is not aesthetics. It is based on a
Mark Rippetoe co-author of Starting logical analysis of the relevant
Strength and owner of Wichita Falls mechanics, what works and what
Athletic Club/CrossFit Wichita Falls, doesnt.
writes that what constitutes bad form is
not a matter of opinion. WERE GOING NUTS
Bad form occurs when a movement
pattern is executed inefficiently. The bar
is moved by incorrect biomechanics.
Instead of all the muscles in the system
making their anatomically efficient
contribution to the loaded movement,
some muscles do more than they are
supposed to and some do less.

Good form (or technique, or kinematics,

or whatever youd like to call it) should
depend on the logic of a dispassionate
analysis of the body-and- barbell system
in the motion required by the exercise.
The exercise is chosen to work a
particular movement pattern normal to
the human skeleton. The bar has a
certain path it most efficiently travels
through space for the exercise. The
skeleton must move in ways defined by
its segment lengths and articulation
points to enable this bar path, and the
muscles must move the skeleton exactly
this way. Anything that deviates from
this is bad form.
Its never an advantage to move a load
inefficiently. It is usually just learned
wrong through a lack of feedback at a
crucial time in the learning process. Or
sometimes its form creep, bad technique
acquired so gradually that it is never
From Crossfit Endurance
Eating nuts every day helps lower total
cholesterol and bad LDL cholesterol,
and improves the ratio of total
cholesterol to good HDL cholesterol, a
study reports.
Researchers pooled the results of 25
clinical trials that involved 583
participants over all. The study reported
that eating just 2.4 ounces of nuts of any
kind was associated with declines of
10.2 milligrams per deciliter in bad
cholesterol, a drop of about 7.4 percent,
and 10.9 milligrams in total cholesterol,
or 5.1 percent.

perceived as wrong until someone else The study appeared in the May 10 issue
does you the favor of pointing it out. of Archives of Internal Medicine.
Nuts are rich in unsaturated fats, and
that is a main driver in lowering
cholesterol, said the lead author, Dr.
Joan Sabat, a professor of nutrition at
the School of Public Health at Loma
Linda University in California.

CrossFit Chula Vista

821 Kuhn Dr. Suite 106
Chula Vista, CA 91914
(619) 934-9934
www.crossfitchulavista.com