We’ve had a few questions about tendonitis lately from people who train other sports extensively. Here’s an excellent article on the subject from fellow CrossFitter Steven Low. Remember we can always substitute or replace an exercise in an area that might be overstressed if you let us know. It’s sometimes frustrating to not be able to do certain things, but it’s always better to get the rest and recovery time rather than aggravate an issue to the point it becomes a severe problem.

How Tendonitis Develops / To the top

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Tendonitis is an overuse injury. This condition arises when the volume of the workouts exceed your body’s ability to recover. Since our muscles have better blood supplies than our connective tissue (tendons, ligaments, cartilage) and bones, they often are able to adapt to the stressors of exercise placed on them faster. This leaves our connective tissues and bones vulnerable to overuse since they cannot heal as fast. If excessive stress is placed on them, they start to break down and subequently become inflamed and painful.

There are some alternative applications of how tendonitis develops. For example, for tendonitis of the lateral and medial epicondyles of the elbows there are a lot of muscles that have a common origin (or insertion for other muscles). If the muscles become inflexible and tight then that puts additional stress on the tendon which may not let it heal correctly after exercise. Similarly, our individual muscles have sheaths they slide in against other muscles when they contract. If they are are not moving and sliding correctly it can often recruit multiple muscles that do not need to contract to put additional stress on the tendons as well. This also may not let the tendons heal correctly. The application of prehabilitative and rehabilitative protocols will address all of the above reasons including plain overuse in the next two sections.

Tendonitis starts out as an inflammation injury (-itis is the suffix for any inflammation). If a person continues to work through the injury and pain, it will lead to chronic degeneration. Thus, tendonitis may lead to tendonosis which is characterized by (1) a lack of inflammation, (2) continued degeneration of the tendon, and (3) pain that usually worsens and intensifies.

Once an overuse injury starts to develop, if rest and ice is prescribed right away the body will heal itself because the natural inflammatory processes that arise promote healing. However, if this process is aggravated into a chronic state over weeks and months, then the inflammatory process goes away leading to the chronic degeneration. In these cases, rest and ice may not promote full healing of the injured body part because of the lack of inflammatory healing processes.

Read the full article here.

Both of the Olympic Lifts (Snatch and Clean) each have three distinct pulls to them in order to get the weight from ground to either overhead or to the rack position across the shoulders. Knowing the difference between these three pulls and when to properly engage them are vital to move more weight with sufficient efficacy. Start one pull too early or too late and it will be possible to have a successful lift, however, it will not be nearly as efficient and you will have to “muscle” the weight up to the receiving position. The Olympic Lifts are in their truest form “Power”, meaning they are fast lifts requiring speed to elevate the bar. “A slow Clean is a Deadlift”- Mark Rippetoe. It will behoove you to learn to efficiently move the weight.

The First Pull starts from the floor and moves to the top of the knees. It is critical that the set up is perfect. In a slow lift, such as a Deadlift, there is sufficient time to make corrections throughout the lift. This is not the case with the Olympic lifts as they are too fast to make corrections once the lift is initiated. The hips are much lower in the set up for the Olympic lifts than they are in a Deadlift with the knees flared out to the sides to allow for a more vertical bar path and the toes angled out slightly for comfort. Pull the chest up, take a deep breath and extend the legs at the knees making sure the hip and back angle rise at the same rate while driving through the heels. We do not want a stiff-legged Deadlift; as always HOOK GRIP! At this point, with sufficient weight, the bar should feel heavy, let it feel heavy. The lifter is still pulling with enough speed to quickly get the bar to the receiving position, but this is not where the explosion comes into play. While the first pull is slower than the second, the lifter should not purposely make it slower.

Set up of the Snatch

First Pull

The Second Pull is from the top of the knees to the crease of the hip. This is where the bar really gets moving as the lifter will violently stand up to full extension significantly increasing the velocity of the weight. Sometimes the lifter will hear this referred to as “speed through the middle”. A number of verbal cues can be given to signify to explode with the weight. The lifter needs to put as much power behind the weight as possible to allow the bar to become as weightless as possible for as long as possible. This is what takes the strength aspect out of Cleaning a new PR (Personal Record). Think of the Wall Ball exercise, throwing a 20#, or even a 4# ball, 10 feet does not happen slowly. One must apply speed to the ball to get it up there, it is no difference here. The Laws of Physics still apply.

Second Pull

Now, this is where things usually go wrong with most everyone. Most, if not all, beginners want to start the Third Pull halfway through the Second Pull. Fine, the lift is still good considering if none of the rules were broken (different story at a later time). While the lift will still be good, the lifter is taxing their biceps by pulling, and therefore, muscling the weight up. It is easier just to stick with this philosophy and be content with an early arm pull than taking the time to make corrections and get it right. Here are the choices: Pull early with the arms, fatigue the arms, and never lift as much weight as possible, or learn to hesitate on the arm pull, take the arm fatigue completely out of the equation, and lift more weight with less effort. I’ll opt for the latter, I hope you will too.

Another common mistake that comes from pulling too early with the arms is not reach “Full” or “Triple” Extension. What I mean by Full Extension is that the lifters ankle, knees, and hips are extended with a slight layback to counteract the weight of the barbell. This sufficiently finishes the Second Pull and begins the transition into the Third Pull.

One more common fault before we put this dead horse to rest is to maintain the bar in constant contact with the body throughout the Second Pull. This isn’t a very common fault in the First Pull. By not running the bar along the thighs the lifter is negating much of the second Pull and will not apply sufficient speed to the bar.

“Triple” or “Full Extension”

During the Third Pull the weight should still be moving upward as the lifter is PULLING their self under the weight. This is the point when the bar should be free floating in mid-air and the lifter moves in to position to properly receive the weight. Falling under the weight will not suffice. The lightest bar with no added load will still fall fast. This is why the lifter needs to engage, get aggressive, commit to the weight, and forcefully PULL their self under the bar.

Third Pull

The Olympic Lifts are a game of patience for everyone involved. With patience on everyone’s part (lifter and coach) in due time anyone can learn to Clean and Snatch with proper and efficient form.

Photos courtesy of USAW’s Club Coach Manual

We choose to train a template of CrossFit called Max Effort Black Box (MEBB) here at CrossFit Orlando. There are several reasons for our choice in this template and I will address those reasons as well as some questions that have come along during our tenure as your coaches.

MEBB was created by Coach Micheal Rutherford from CrossFit Kansas City because he noticed that while CrossFit WoDs did develop strength, it took some time to develop optimal strength.

A perfect example of this was when I was running an affiliate out of my garage, I had (and still do) a client that was great at bodyweight WoDs, but sorely lacking in the strength department. When he first came to me he could barely Overhead Squat a PVC pipe and had a low 200# Deadlift. Lori actually brought MEBB to my attention and what I saw was that trainers from other affiliates claimed to have impressive times/lifts while their clients were still struggling to Rx many WoDs. This was exactly my problem and I jumped on it.

After four months of MEBB Joel went from an OHS of 20# to doing 125 for a double, 215# Deadlift to 320# for a single, 5 minutes off of his “Fran”, 7 off of “Angie”, and several other impressive achievements. Bottom line, he was getting stronger and faster by lifting for a Max Effort (ME) for a specified number of reps prior to the metcon.

Joel shortly after PR’ing on the deadlift at 300#

 

So that’s the “why” to our MEBB training approach, now for the “how”.

You may notice a rep schemes of “5-5-5-3-3-3″, “1-1-1-1-1-1-1″, or “2-2-2-2″ and get a little confused by this. Let’s look at the first scheme, the idea is that when lifting, the lifter has 3 attempts at getting a ME lift for 5 reps and then 3 attempts at getting a ME lift for 3 reps. For the 7 singles, it’s the same principle. Look at it from the standpoint of a weightlifting/powerlifting competition where you warm up prior to lifting and then get 3 attempts to lift. Try to determine an “opening weight” while warming up and after the warm up go for the ME. Note that the warm up does not count in that rep scheme. Always warm up prior to lifting.

The idea is to give your ME for that lift for the specified number of reps. We are not trying to set a PR (Personal Record) everyday, but we find that tends to happen, but not always.

When a beginner comes to MEBB we need to be careful to not overload them so we will work to a moderately heavy weight (about 65%-85%) for several weeks as the beginner will respond to reps better than weights. Take advantage of these few weeks to learn proper form and safety. This will be beneficial when it comes time for going for an all out max.