Back to the pool folks...

Hey people!
I have a lot going on at the moment and i'm sorry that i haven't posted a new WOD before now. I'm starting my training for Afghanistan in the beginning of march and i will be taking a full month off work in february. So right now i'm in the process of handing over my position as 2IC to my successor. On friday i will be a free man!
On saturday i hope to be able to step by CrossFit Copenhagen  (aka "The Church of Pain") and cheer on my friends at the Danish CrossFit Open, before flying to Milan in the afternoon to go skiing for a week. It's gonna be a hell of a week, with my buddy Anders, his girlfriend and 6 other people i don't know so well. Hopefully there will be lots of snow, sunshine and good italian red wine (white wine is for girls).

Alright, enough about my awesome skiing vacation. On to the next CrossFit Submerged WOD. I thought this time it should be a chipper, including different kinds of swimming and exercises in between. Here goes:

Water chipper:
100m freestyle (meaning free choise of style...)
20 Burpees-pullups (only burpees if pullups are not possible)
50m sculling (see post from last week)
20 jump-squats
50m kicks on back (only using legs)
20 muscle-ups on ledge (see first post)
50m (12,5m submerged/12,5m above water)
20 HSPU
100m freestyle

This should be manageable for most to do. If not, you can scale it down to 50m instead of 100m and 25 instead of 50.
Last but not least, Sarah mentioned the possibility of doing a CrossFit Submerged event. I thought it would be great and my mind instantly wondered off the work i was doing when she brought the idea to my mind. I already know were to do this thing, and i know i can loan the place for free along with enough wetsuits, kajaks and cool gym stuff to go around. As you might have guessed, it will be an outside event including various activities in open water. I'm thinking 2-3 WOD's and a team kajak-polo tournament parallel to the WOD's going on. And don't worry, the WOD's will be manageable for everybody, no matter level of swimming experience. Being able to swim, is required though. It will be all about having fun and learing new sports. At the end of the day, there will be some kind of barbeque, before heading to town to get hammered. As some of you may know, Denmark is kind of cold at the moment, so june/july will probably be the proper time for an event like this.
Stay tuned for more about this crazy event and let me know if you got some crazy idea for workouts!  

Stay wet!
/Kasper

Friendship through sport...

That is the official motto of CISM, the international military sports council. And this weekend has absolutely lived up to that motto. It still amazes me, how friendly and coorperative, not only our norwegian friends, but all of the nationalities are, even though we are competitors. No one is keeping special training secrets to them selves and willingly shares them with others. But that off course doesn't change the fact, that at the end of the day i still wan't to kick their ass in competition. This friendly and sharing culture is somewhat simular to what i have found in crossfit.
I will try to recap what we have done this weekend, and let me start by disappointing those who were waiting to read about the walk under water WOD. I didn't do it and i will tell you why later.
Friday i arrived in Oslo a couple of hours earlier than the rest of my team, so i decided to squezze in a strength session before swimming in the evening. We were staying at the norwegian olympic training center and things were great. For a guy who likes lifting heavy, walking in to the weightlifting room was like a wet dream. 5 or 6 lifting platforms, various boxes and bars and a 40m track for short sprints. Nice! I did some snatch technical work, up to 80kg (176lbs) followed by frontsquat sets of 5, ending at 120kg (264lbs). At the end i followed my Jim Wendler routine for some deadlifts ending with 2 reps @ 200kg (440lbs) for my 1+ set.
First in the evening i met up with the norwegian team to do a swim session. My teammates didn't make it in time because they apparently are analfabetes and failed to read my directions. Getting from the airport to the hotel took me roughly 1,5 hours. It took them at least 5. Enough said about that. I have been picking on them the whole weekend. I'll put it to rest. ;-)
Saturday morning we did another swim session around 3500m with a lot of finswimming followed by a mobility, stretching and jumping/explosivity session at noon. Even though we didn't do a lot of work at the noon session, it was extremely taxing on the neuro-muscular system.
In the afternoon we drove in to Oslo, to run intervals at a facility i would wish i had at home. Right under the national track and field stadium, Bislett, there was a 500m indoor track, available for public use. Since it was cold and icy outside, it was perfect.
Below is the interval program:
3x (3x500m r. 1.00) 5min rest between sets.
Since this was my 10th training session this week, it was really hard. Not that it wouldn't have been earlier this week, but mentally and physically i was pretty wasted. I manages to stay below 1:40 on all intervals except the last one. I believe my average was about 1:37-1:38. I was pretty satified with that. After the running we went to eat some dinner altogether in Oslo. During dinner i wasn't being very communicative, since i was totally trashed and feeling like shit. I'm sure nobody was blaming me. Needless to say, i slept like a baby last night.
The weekend ended with another swim session this morning. I decided to take a rest day (i already made up my mind friday evening). If i was into new years resolutions, mine would probably be listening to my body and taking more rest days. Since i am not, i would probably just say that i am growing up (at age 28...). So, that is why i didn't do it. I'm sorry and i'm sure that i will die a slow and painfull death. I will try to make up for it later. Anyway, i volunteered to do the programming and be the coach for the morning, hopefully contributing with some new inspiration for the norwegians. The program was a little shorter than 3000m and with a lot of sprinting and underwater work. Everybody seemed to like it and i'm sure it was hard enough despite it's shortness and long breaks. Or maybe everybody was just happy that i had made a program that was about 2000m shorter than what the norwegian coach had planned. Who knows...
That will be it for now. I will try to post a new WOD in the following days. One not including as much breath holds. Feel free to comment if you have done some of the previous WOD's or if you got some good ideas for future ones.
Be safe!
/Kasper

Off to Oslo...

Greatings water lovers!
The weekend has started early for me. It's 6AM here in Denmark as i am writing this post, and i am on the train to Copenhagen where i should catch a flight to Oslo, Norway, later this morning. This weekend, me and a couple of other athletes from the danish national team in Naval Pentathlon are meeting with the norwegian team, to train together. All of this is a part of the great friendship and coorperation among the scandinavian national teams. Hopefully the norwegians will be able to visit Copenhagen later this spring.
I will probably not be able to blog during the weekend, but i plan on taking some pictures and hopefully capture myself doing the "walk under water" WOD on video for you guys to watch later.

I want to take a moment to talk about stroke efficiency and a nice drill to improve it. Those of you who are familiar with swimming, probably know the drill "sculling". Sculling is a drill intending to give you a better "feel" and "grab" of the water. If you got a pullbuoy/leg-float you can place between your thighs, do so. We want to isolate the forward motion, to only being created by the scull.
I found a video that i hope will illustrate how it is done. You simply move your arm back and forth, diagonally to the direction in which you are moving, creating forward motion through the water resistance against the angle of your hand. This is a great exersice and you can play around with it in a lot of ways, sculling overhead, below your shoulders, hips or going legs first on your back. Try to do a test/re-test with this drill. Notice your feel for the water before and after you did your sculling and you should be able to tell a difference.
Now i will try to catch a little sleep since it is way to early for my liking!
/Kasper

Carlos Coste

After all the talk about holding your breath under water and the mental battle going on in your head while submerged, i found a stunning video about the amazing freediver Carlos Coste.
Venezuelan born Coste is a well known name in the sport of freediving and holds numerous world records. The video is from his Guinness World Record, "the longest apnea in a cave". In the caves of Dos Ojos in Mexico, he performes a linear dive of 150m on only one breath of air. The stretch he dives, is completely flooded and offers no opportunity to come up for air. That not being challenging enough, the cave is a labyrinth of different caves and tunnels and he therefore holds a flashlight at the end of his streamlined position to guide him. Of course he has a lot of safety divers to guide him through and to come to his rescue if something should go wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that the guy got some seriously big "cojones"! The mental challenge alone is huge. Imagine yourself panic half way through with 75m to go and no opportunity to take a breath.
He completes the dive in 2 minutes and 32 seconds. Notice how calm he looks going through the maze. He doesn't race through the cave, which would make him fail, but remains calm, with steady movements to reduce the physical impact on his ability to hold his breath for so long.
As the video tells, Carlos does a lot of freediving and training in a pool to prepare for these kinds of challenges. But he also tells us that he does a lot of powertraining, cardiovascular training, yoga and of course a lot of mental training. Notice how he uses a special technique, that allows him to compress big amounts of air in his lungs, just before he submerges. As i said earlier, don't attempt doing some of these special breathing techniques unless you have a good amount of experience with freediving and without someone watching you.
/Kasper

Walk under water...

Okay, i want to start this second post with talking a little about shallow water blackouts. Yeah i know what you are thinking, i really know how to make a sales pitch. Everybody who took a closer look at the blog, might have noticed that i placed a disclaimer on the right. People post a lot of shit on the internet, and the disclaimer is to remind you guys to use common sence. As it says, think before you do something stupid!
This is not to scare people from doing these WOD's, but just to say, be safe.
Back to shallow water blackouts (SWB). SWB can happen to anybody. Everybody who has taken a diving certificate has probably heard about it and knows it can happen to anybody. Most SWB actually happen to experienced swimmers, divers or people who generally are considered fit. SWB is a loss of conscience (fainting) caused by cerebral hypoxia towards the end of a breath-hold dive, typically in water shallower than 5 meter, when the swimmer doesn't experience an urgent need to breathe and has no other medical condition that might have caused it (thank you wikipedia).
As i said earlier, i don't tell you this stuff to scare you from doing my WOD's, but i'm just being responsible about this, and therefore you should be too and don't do these things on your own. Bring a friend or make the lifeguard at your pool aware of what you are doing. I'm not saying this will happen to you, most likely it will not, but there is no reason to act stupid about your own safety!

Alright, time to reveal the next WOD. All the above mentioned warnings will probably make sence now.

3x 3min AMRAP, two min break between each
10 clapping pushups
10 V-situps
20 Mountain jumpers
Do the above mentioned reps and excersices only once per AMRAP. For the remaining time move a KB or any weight/object that stays on the bottom of the pool, as far as possible, by pushing it in front of you, or picking it up and walking on the bottom. You can go for air as much you like, but the object only moves forward as long as you are submerged. The result will be the total distance you move the object.
You can scale this WOD by doing it in the deep or the shallow end of the pool, off course making it more challenging in the deep end. Try not to hyper ventilate when taking in air in between dives. Breathe as calm as possible until you decide to go for it, then take two or three deep breaths and dive. Hyper ventilating can ultimately make you faint, and we don't want that. The secret to holding your breath for a long time is staying  calm. It's a mental game and mostly not a question of lung capacity. You can train these things by praticing it on a regular basis and thereby becoming more calm and familiar with the wet element. Freedivers have a lot of experience holding their breath and use different techniques which can be dangerous to people who don't know what they are doing. So unless you know what you're doing, don't do it.

I will be going to Oslo, Norway this weekend and train with the norwegian naval pentathlon team. I plan to do the WOD friday or saturday at one of the two planned swim sessions. So stay tuned for a report on how it went.
Last i want to thank all you guys who have visited the blog the last 24 hours, and especially thank my good friend Sarah from Fit as Fu*k for making a post about it and now linking to it.
Below is a video showing a SWB. As you can see, they are being safe about it and watch the diver closely.
/Kasper

Welcome to CrossFit Submerged!

Hello water people!
After doing a CrossFit workout with a swimming content along with a lot of friends, more than a few of them thought it to be very fun and something we should do more often. So after a lot of comments and new ideas for future workouts i thought i might just start doing a blog, containing swimming/water WOD's. The idea is not me posting something on a daily basis, but when ever i feel like i got something fun and challenging to put out there.
As a former high level swimmer i tend to get a little ahead of myself and might post something too challenging for the average swimmer. So please let me know if i'm being rediculous. I don't intent to be, but sometimes things that seem easy to me, might be a big challenge for others. I will try to keep i simple.
I already got a lot of fun ideas on my mind, but today i will post the WOD i did with all of my friends.

5 rounds for time:
25m swim (15m underwater, 10m above)
10 Burpees
25m swim only using legs (kicking) no board allowed
10 muscle ups on the ledge (don't push of the bottom of the pool!)
The hight of the ledge above waterlevel tends to be different i every pool, but if there is a difference between the two ends, pick the high one. You should do this one in a 25 meter pool.

I didn't really know what to expect, since this was a first for me. The pool was crowded on a saturday morning and the prospect of embarrasing myself, jumping around in speedos in front of everyone took me a minute or two to overcome. But when i first went at it, i totally forgot all about me looking stupid. It was way harder than i anticipated, but also extremely fun. Everything went unbroken, except for one or two short breaks on the MU's. My time ended up being 8:35 which i know is pretty fast. We did this one as an internet challenge, so people are doing it all over for the rest of january. At the moment a couple of guys have done it, and except Peter's strong time around 11 min, most times are around 14 to 16 min.

I already got the next one planned, but i will wait and post it tomorrow.

/Kasper