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Whittier, California, United States
ATLAS FITNESS IS THE PROUD HOST TO WEST WHITTIER CROSSFIT OFFERING CROSSFIT 7 DAYS A WEEK .WE ARE LOCATED AT 8044 WESTMAN AVE WHITTIER,TUCKED AWAY IN A GRITTY AUTO AREA FOR YOUR WORKOUT CONVENIENCE. EMAIL atlasfit@yahoo.com OR CALL/TXT (626) 991-2486 for any questions.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Overhead Squat 3 3 3 Rest Then 5 Rounds Of 10 Ovh Squat, 10 Burpees

95/65



1. Stick your butt out.
It goes against everything you've striven for in general decency, but it's going to go out - way out. Focus on moving your backside backwards, away from your midline, and then focus on curling your lumbar up into extension, like a scorpion raising its tail. What this does is set your center of gravity, so you don't end up tipping forward or backward. Do it sideways in a mirror and try to keep your knees in line with/in the same plane with your toes; don't allow them to move in front of them.

2. Press into the bar.
This is one of the biggest things that can improve your performance. One reason the OHS can be so counter intuitive is that the body wants to move as a unit through the dynamics of physics - in this case gravity - which means that as you descend, the muscle groups involved in keeping the bar raised tend to relax, hold, and depress. So the scapular group try to switch from elevation to depression. The upper traps try to switch from concentric contraction to bigger balance with eccentric, to brace the body to catch the overhead falling weight. Use the cue to be constantly lifting/pushing the weight, never just holding it.
Furthermore, there are far greater instances in work history that a person, if descending with an overhead object, needs to buffet it away in order to keep it from crashing onto oneself, than to catch it and return with it overhead with arms extended. So there is a certain amount of instinctive response and primal muscle memory that must be overcome.
To learn to press into the bar continually, focus on it through auxiliary overhead work - overhead presses, the Jerk Support and Recovery, etc. - whatever exercises you're doing to assist in developing overhead strength. This means focusing on fully contracting every muscle involved in keeping a load overhead, at every moment. Thought cue: be constantly lifting/pushing the weight, never just holding it. This allows more muscles to support the overhead position.

3. Keep your chest, neck and head up, while bending over.
Building on the reasoning above, it's easy to let the chest and head fall slightly forward on the way up. Actively focus on keeping these up throughout the movement, especially when hitting bottom and beginning ascent. Fix your eyes on something straight ahead or slightly higher. Be aware of what your neck is doing. In order to keep everything tight, retract and elevate the scapula.
Now, don't confuse this with trying to maintain a vertical posture. It's not like a ball squat, where you try to keep your spine ramrod straight, like a chairback. If you do that, you'll fall down. You will fold a bit on the descent, basically bending over, but at the hip joint. So allow the angle of your torso to change, just don't round your back, droop your neck, unlock your shoulders, or look down.

4. Bounce out of the hole.
"When you master that bounce, you'll really take off in gains," Olympic silver medalist and coach Tom Hirtz told me. This applies in varying degrees to all squats and the snatch. It means learning where to stop on the descent and begin the ascent. Stop too soon, and you will perform only a partial squat, emphasizing upper glutes and hamstrings, and a legitimate OHS will be impossible. Stop too far down, and the squatting mechanism is completed, so major muscles will lose tension, and it's much more difficult to initiate the ascent. The goal is to stop descending when tension is still tight.
Focus on feeling it in your thighs, especially quadriceps, and think of your hip flexors as springloaded. By shifting your focus from taking your cue from the glutes to the hip flexors, you'll get a faster cue from your nervous system and be better able to detect the "bounce" point. You'll also consciously engage your anterior muscles. This is important because most people are trained to focus on engaging their posterior muscles in learning the basic (back) squat, but the OHS is more of a front squat exercise than back, so by focusing on the glutes instead of the hip flexors, your body is more likely to follow the neuromuscular pathways you've set up for the back squat than to engage the biomechanics necessary to maintain an overhead press while executing a squat. This means that you're likely to naturally fall into the pattern of leaning forward, which is what you do with a bar lying across your shoulders, and flex your elbows, which will lead to you tipping forward and possibly dumping the bar.

5. Use your wrists and hands.
It takes every muscle involved in the OHS to maintain the proper trajectory of the bar for balance. The bar should be situated in line with a point just behind the ears. As the body moves through the vertical plane, each joint must make slight adjustments to maintain this fixed point. Be actively aware of what your wrists and hands are doing, for they are primarily responsible for holding and positioning the bar, so hold onto it! The fine-tuning points on this grip may mean adjusting throughout the movement, so that the fingers extend slightly and the bar rolls out toward the fingertips as the body becomes closer to the ground. This is the opposite of what would happen if you were buffeting or catching an object overhead when you hit the bottom.

6. Push with your feet.
Your feet are your foundation. Assume your starting position by positioning your feet first. Your stance should be slightly wider than your shoulders, toes angled out. Note that if you're tall, and your stance is too narrow, you're going to have balance problems, so experiment until you find a secure width that you don't struggle in. Be sure your shoes have firm soles and allow the footbed to fully extend. Throughout the movement, be actively aware of the load on your feet, and when you transfer into the bounce, push your feet "into the floor."

courtesy of: Kat Ricker  of Weightlifting exchange

Monday, January 30, 2012

"Tabata This" Row, Squats, Pull Ups, Push Ups, Sit-Ups

*rest 1 Min. Between stations
blacken talapia, with spinach,mushrooms, and cherry tomato's
frozen talapia from costco $20 bucks (like 10 + filets, veggies from fresh and easy $6 bucks with left overs .


Monday, January 23, 2012

Overhead Squat 5 5 5 5 5



Everyday Paleo Pizza
Crust:
2 cups almond meal
2 eggs
3 tbsp olive oil
¼ tsp baking soda
1 tsp garlic powder
1 ½ tbsp fresh rosemary chopped
 1 cup organic marinara sauce from Trader Joe’s
Toppings : we used canadian bacon (nitrate free, pineapple, bell pepper, and mushrooms
add your own favorite paleo toppings

Preheat your oven to 350. Using a spoon mix all crust ingredients together until it becomes very thick.  Using your hands, form the dough into a ball.  Lightly grease a pizza pan or a cookie sheet with olive oil.  Place the ball of dough in the center of your cookie sheet or pizza pan and using your hands, push and pat the dough down into the shape of a circle (or an oval in my case…).  You want to make the dough as thin as possible.  Your pizza will be about 12 inches across.  Bake JUST the crust in your pre-heated oven for 20 minutes.  While your crust is cooking, prepare your toppings.  If you use sausage like we did, this is when you should crumble it into a large saute pan and brown.  After the crust if done, remove from the oven and evenly spread the marinara sauce over the crust.  Add the sausage and all remaining toppings evenly over the sauce and bake again for an additional 25-30 minutes.
 

Thursday, January 19, 2012

20min A.M.R.A.P. 100 W. Ball Shots, 2K Row, Run 800M then 50 Push Ups

*20 Min. Cap for score, all athletes must finish entire task one time around
*20 /14Lbs
Bday boy Steve, finishing up Helen .

Thursday, January 5, 2012

6 Rounds Of 10 Burpees W/lat Jump, 15 Barbell Jump Squats,250M Run

65/45 Barbell

                                                          Anthony and Aly post "MURPH"

Monday, January 2, 2012

5 Rounds Of 5 S.D.H.P, 7 Push Press, 9 Hang Clean

115/85
Happy New Year and Please check out our schedule for jan. for new class hours at Atlas  . 
lets not forget  how a good sdhp form look like, real eazy to get sloppy here .