We got handstand push-ups in our WOD today.
These are one of those special movements to CrossFit that make it what it is. Movements that on first glance you say “no way” only to realize 3 months later you are so close to doing: pull-ups, rope climbs, body weight lifting movements. All of them seem so unbelievably undoable when you first step in the gym (trust me I remember the look on all of your faces when I mentioned pull-ups during your intro class), butt eventually if scaled correctly when working on them it happens, that RX movement. I’m sure most of us can agree that if somebody before we found CrossFit told us we would be upside down on a wall doing push-ups we would say they are crazy. I distinctly remember one time in college seeing a guy doing them as I walked down to get a solid treadmill session in and said out loud to myself “I will never be able to do that in my life”, and now look at me…I can do like 1 or 2.
Handstand pushups are very hard but like many of these difficult movements are very scalable. When scaling ANYTHING remember the point of scaling is to build towards eventually doing the movement as RX. It does us no good to just do something way easier than the movement at hand. You will be doing the scale forever. Take scaling to regular push-ups (a very reasonable scale for HSPU) for example. When scaling to push-ups then scale to the hardest push-up you can so you are building the strength to do the movement Rx one day. Someone who is average at HSPU would do this 10 in 2 or 3 sets each round, so doing push-ups the same way wouldn’t be out of the question. Sometimes when people are scaling to push-ups they scale too easily, so keep this in mind.
If you have never been on the wall then today we will try to get there!
WOD: 4 Rounds
10 Deadlift 225/155
10 HSPU
rest 10 full minutes
WOD: 2 Rounds
Row 300m
15 Front Squat 135/95
30 Toes to Bar
15 Front Squat 135/95
