I’ve gone to CrossFit Cayman the last few days. Every day is a different workout and for the most part everyone does the same thing. Sometimes it gets modified if people have an injury or can’t do a certain exercise the “hard way” (ie, like when people do push ups on their knees) but it’s mostly the same thing.

The workouts are definitely hard, there’s no doubt about that. Not hard in a heavy sense but hard in a speed and repetition sense. They want you to do things in a fast/explosive manner and rep everything out really quickly. Doing things that way can make something that is routine seem really hard. I’ve definitely gotten my ass kicked on the things that require a lot of speed over the course of a large number of reps because I’ve never trained like this before and I’m totally out of shape when it comes to doing things in this manner. But, like anything else when it comes to exercise, I know it will come around as long as I keep at it.

For an example of a workout, today we did the following:

Ab Mat sit-up
Good mornings
Knees to elbow
95 pound stiff legged deadlift

And we did 30-25-20-15-10-5 repetitions of each. So 30 situps, 30 good mornings, 30 knees to elbow, 30 stiff legged deadlifts, 25 situps, etc. On down the list until you finally do 5 stiff-legged deadlifts to wrap up the workout.

Ab Mat sit-ups are basically just a full range of motion sit up. I had to switch to crunches partway through because I couldn’t keep doing full range of motion sit ups. My core was just totally blown up.

Good mornings are done like this:

The difference is that we did it without weight and just a light bar. We were supposed to do them fast so you can’t really do that with much weight on it.

Knees to elbows have you hanging on a bar and you need to bring your knees up to your elbows. They are ridiculously hard. I couldn’t even come really all that close to touching my elbows with my knees so I settled for getting my thighs to parallel. Still really hard when you’re doing that many and you’re combining it with the other stuff.

And, lastly, stiff legged deadlifts (also called Romanian deadlifts) are done like this:

Instead of 95 lbs they had me do it with 65 lbs. Especially considering that we did deadlifting yesterday and I’m new to the whole thing, it was probably a good idea to do that. The stiff legged deadlifts were challenging at 65 lbs within the context of the workout even though they would be really easy if I was just doing a set of them at 65 lbs.

Anyway, so that’s one workout. You do it as fast as you can. My time was… not all that fast. I’ll improve though.

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