Dos and Dont's of Game Day

switch
Posts: 675
Joined: 14 Nov 2012, 19:56
Contact:

Dos and Dont's of Game Day

Post by switch »

http://www.catalystathletics.com/articl ... cleID=1731
These are the do’s and don’ts of what to do and not do on meet day that I have either watched or experienced myself over the years.

1. Do make weight. Be prepared for this and buy a good scale or get there early enough to check the one they are using. Be polite and don’t cut in front of people who are actually weighing in. Just ask whoever is manning the room for a “courtesy weigh”.

2. Do make your opener. If you’re best ever snatch is 100k opening with 99k is a risky endeavor. Personally I like 5k under my current best but your coach should know best.

3. Do not take, eat or drink something you don’t normally ingest. If you have been eating carb free or very clean to make weight this is not the time to have a slice or 2 of pizza after you make weight to celebrate. If you have never had an energy drink this is also not the time to try it. Everything you take in before you lift is something you know works for you and you have used it with success.

4. Do lift with your singlet on at least one time before your meet. Lifting in a singlet is an odd feeling for some. Practice lifting with it on a couple of times before your meet. Most programs have you pull openers or close to a week or so out, wear it then and get used to it.

5. Do thank the meet director, loaders, coach, friends and family that showed up. You ever load a barbell for 8 hours? You ever count attempts for somebody and have to run back and forth from the platform to a card table 15 times? You ever sit around for 6 hours waiting to watch one person lift? Get my point?

6. Do not spike the barbell after you finish. You aren’t the first person to lift in a meet. Follow it down and act like you have been there before. Glaring at the judges is also pretty lame.

7. Do have a plan. What I mean by this is have a plan for after your 1st attempt. Also remember that everyone has a plan before they get punched in the face. Please see #2 about this.

8. Do have a Snickers for in between the Snatch and Clean & Jerk. I can’t tell you why it works but I swear to everything it does.

9. Do not start your warm up 2 hours out. You are wasting energy. I see this all the time with guys literally warming up for 90 minutes and they are in their 20’s. Trust me guys you are burning a ton of energy that would be better used on the platform. Same guys that show up with headphones on with their “I am going to run through a wall music” blaring. Save it. Use it when you really need it. For the love of everything RELAX until you don’t have to relax.

10. Do bring a bag of chalk. It happens by the time I get around to lift chalk is sometimes scarce. I always bring a fresh block in a Ziploc bag and sometimes end up using it.

11. Do bring a back up MP3 player if music is important to you. I love to listen to music while I relax before lifting and while I am warming up. There is nothing worse than pulling out your iPod and seeing it dead. Warming up with an Iphone sticking out of your singlet is just awful.

12. Do not hoard plates in the warm up room. It’s not cool. Sure if they have your name on them and you hauled them then that’s one thing but if they are provided by the meet then guess what everyone gets to use them.

13. Do bring the following items:

Foam roller: If you use one bring your own. I don’t want your sweaty ass on mine.
Water: 2x what you think you will need.
Food: Try and stick to the same stuff you have been eating the week before.
Caffeine: If that’s your thing bring it and if it’s not then odds are I don’t like you as a person.
Bandages: Nobody plans on ripping their shins open.
Shoelaces: It has never happened to me but it would suck if it did.
Camera or something to capture video: Just be cool when you ask them to tape you.
Sombra or Biofreeze: Why not? Make sure you wash your hands after and neither works as a deoderant.
Attitude: Competitive and ready to win.

This is important and you have to be of legal drinking age but 2 Tecate’s in a can are the best beers you will ever drink after you have finished a meet. Once again no scientific evidence, just take my word for it.

14. Do watch videos of great lifters the week prior. It works.

15. Do not be this guy “this is crap my openers went up way easier last night!!” or “I lifted more on Thursday than I did today!!” (meet being on Saturday). You might want to look back at your program because I am sure that it wasn’t planned that way.

16. Do know the total you are chasing if it’s a qualifying meet. If you need a certain total please be sure you are looking at the right total and not the total from last year etc… They change and sometimes by quite a bit.

17. Do thank anyone that has the displeasure of living with you or working with you after it’s over. Odds are you weren’t that fun of a person to be around and felt that unloading the dishwasher may be taxing to your system. (Em, folding clothes is bad for my knees though) Also thank your training partner even if he got deathly ill the last week and couldn’t compete. Once again Brad that really sucks.

18. Do not neglect your hands the last week. Take care of them and they will take care of you on game day.

19. Do be the guy that helps out after you lift. Especially if you have teammates etc going after you. Those bars don’t load themselves.

20. Do remember what you are there for. To lift big weights on meet day. Getting trashed the night before, showing up late, and not taking it seriously are just a sign that you don’t take it seriously enough to give it your very best.


These are just a handful of things that I could come up with that like I said earlier I have either learned or watched over the years. I want to say congrats to Morgan Murphy for a great meet even though he ignored rule #2 but came back and killed the rest of it and to Jim Malone who came out and had an incredible showing for his first meet.
When the Whiteboard gets in the way of Athletic Development…
Testing Frequency & Athletic Development

There are a lot of things I learned at University which I have long since forgotten; however one thing I do remember is talking about testing frequency and how it can impact an individual’s ability to pick up new skills and improve.

Specifically, we looked at

Continuous Assessment i.e. testing occurs daily and all scores are recorded

vs

Intermittent Assessment - I.e. testing only occurs on certain days or at particular intervals

And while both had pros and cons the general consensus was that intermittent testing led to better skill acquisition and long-term improvement in athletes.

So Why am I bringing this up now?

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/whfrank/
Photo Credit: Wei Han Frank Lin

Because as Crossfitters we sometimes get so caught up in our daily times & whiteboard scores that its easy to lose track of the big picture and long-term goals.

There are hundreds (ok maybe not hundreds) of ways to approach a workout and we need to figure out what works best for us as an individual.

E.g.

breaking up pull-ups into small sets
pushing hard during the row & ‘recovering’ on the barbell
how hard/fast to “come out of the gates” and what pace we settle into
Me and mah Older Sister competing as a Team at the Crossfit Squamish Fall Challenge. Photo by Caragh Camera
Photo by Caragh Camera

And It is through this experimentation that we can become better athletes in the long run. However, once we start playing around with different strategies there’s a good chance we’ll come across a couple that DON’T work for us and if we’re too concerned daily whiteboard scores we might be too scared to risk it’.

Yes there is a risk that we will get a couple of bad scores, tank a workout or even a competition, but its important to realize that necessarily isn’t a bad thing. The best athletes aren’t the ones who ‘never fail’ they’re the ones who are willing to fail, pick themselves back up and then try again using the what they learned to be better.

Share:
Share
Like this:
Filed Under: Posts
Tagged With: athletic development, crossfit, daily wod, testing, timer, whiteboard
Do you know what it means to ‘Get your Goat’?
May 29, 2014 by taryn Leave a Comment

Goats
Get Your Goat Blog

“Get Your Goat”

The first time I saw the phrase “get your goat” written on the whiteboard I had no idea what to expect, although I assumed (correctly) it wasn’t meant in a literal sense. So far I haven’t been able to find an official “Crossfit definition”; however there seems to be a general consensus that

Goats are skills we don’t like/aren’t very good at

and

‘Getting our Goats’ refers to the time spend correcting these deficiencies.

e.g. Double-Unders, Ring Dips, Muscle-Ups, Squat Mobility….
But, despite the fact that many of us use this phrase fairly regularly, no one (myself included) seemed to know where it actually came from.

What Does Google Have to Say About it?

I googled “Get your Goat Definition” and came up with….

“Get someone’s goat”

phrase of goat
1.
informal
irritate someone.
“I’ve tried to get along with her, but sometimes she really gets my goat”
which aligned with what Crossfit said (if its a skill that we’re bad at chances are it will irritate us); but how did the term ‘Goat’ come to be associated with getting annoyed? Because they’re grumpy?

Apparently not….

From what I could find (after some very extensive internet ‘research’) this is a twentieth-century American phrase related to horse racing. Goats (for whatever reason) have a calming effect on horses and it was a common practice for owners/trainers to use goats as a means of controlling particularly restless steeds. On race day thieves & gamblers who knew of this practice would attempt to steal (“get”) the goat and would then bet on the horse to lose as they knew it would be “off its game”.

wwo
Posts: 849
Joined: 13 Dec 2012, 14:35
Contact:

Re: Dos and Dont's of Game Day

Post by wwo »

Utter douchebaggery. He takes a photo of his fucking coat hangers in a closet, slaps some preset Flickr filter on it, and posts it like anyone else would ever give a shit.

Hey guess what I put strawberries in my frosted flakes now I'm a world class chef oh I also lift weights and talk way too much about it.

I don't want to know these kinds of people. I'd rather them not exist in the first place.

Pogue
Posts: 1218
Joined: 15 Nov 2012, 16:26
Contact:

Re: Dos and Dont's of Game Day

Post by Pogue »

That chink is far and ugly just like Lieutenant Dan's wife in Forrest Gump.

Image

Image

Locked

Return to “Myth World Cup 2014”