Tips and Strategies CrossFit Open WOD 15.1
Open WOD 15.1 – AMRAP 9 minutes:
15 Toes to Bar
10 Deadlifts (115/75)
5 Snatches (115/75)
Open WOD 15.1a – 6 minutes to establish 1 RM C&J
Time begins at 9:01, and continues until the 15-minute mark
Hey team San Diego Athletics – Welcome to 15.1! This is a two-part workout where you are required to work hard and fast for 9 minutes, and then immediately switch to a strength movement – Find ONE REP MAX Clean and Jerk in 6 minutes. These two unique parts make this workout a difficult test of overall capacity and technical proficiency under duress. There are many considerations for how to properly strategize as you progress through these movements. I will break it all down for you.
Initial Preparation Concerns:
The warm-up should consist of “general warm-up” to get a light sweat going. Ideally, this should be done on the rower, since we will want to gently start to warm-up the grip, without fatiguing the grip substantially. As you progress through the rowing warm-up, start incorporating some faster intervals. It’s important to get your heart rate elevated by completing some intense “intervals” for 20-30 sec on the rower. This will prepare the body for the work ahead.
Next, you will need to do a bit more specific warm-up. The first step would be to loosen up the shoulder girdle. Include some Band Pull-Aparts, Face Pulls and Dislocates. Then move on to some short-duration dead hangs from the pull-up bar. Switch between engaging the lats, and letting the lats hang loose, but do not spend more than 15 seconds unbroken on the bar, or this will begin to fatigue the grip.
You will then need to warm-up your Clean and Jerk. I recommend keeping the reps low, and working up to about 75% of your max. No need to do anything more than singles on the last 3 sets.
Finally, you will need to do a quick run through of the movements in the WOD. Nothing much, because you want to stay fresh. Two rounds of 5 TTB, 5 DL and 2 Snatches should work just perfectly.
Other considerations include the set-up of your equipment. Try and keep everything as linear as possible so there isn’t a whole lot of wasted movement as you transition from exercise to exercise.
Pacing will be an extremely important aspect of this workout. I will delve deeper into strategy for each specific movement, shortly. For right now, just understand that the key is to avoid burnout on the TTB, and staying shy of technical breakdown. The goal of the pacing is to stay as fresh as possible for the duration of the workout, working to avoid any extreme shoulder and grip fatigue. See specific movement recommendations:
The Movements:
Toes to Bar should be performed in sustainable, repeatable sets. At no point (until the last minute or two) should you come close to breakdown. If you are an athlete that is proficient with the “fast kip,” than you must ensure you are not ever relegated to performing the “double-kip” hanging onto the bar. This can be aided by keeping sets small and manageable. If you are ELITE at TTB, one set of 15 reps unbroken might be ok, but for the majority of people, including myself, the TTB should be broken into manageable chucks the entire way. You have to understand that this workout is just a TTB workout for most people. The Deadlifts and snatches are thrown in there as a minor annoyance before you have to go back and do more TTB. You must be aware of your own level of ability, and be ready to break strategy if needed. It would be more beneficial to do a smaller set, than to grind and fight for that “difficult” rep, just to stick to some arbitrary plan that you created in your head. This would inevitably lead to excessive fatigue. Important to keep your eye on the clock and make the rests as short as possible between small-rep sets. Finally, for athletes with a tendency to breakdown on high-rep TTB, or tend to use the double-kip method, you would be much better off saving your grip and doing singles. In a workout that is all grip, you want to spend as little time as possible holding onto the bar. Choose a low bar, and just try to be a quick as possible cycling through singles. Make sure that you are still starting from full extension and that the feet go behind the body before kipping the toes to the bar.
Deadlifts should be the opportunity for you to recover during this workout. It would be a huge mistake to try and make up time on the deadlifts. The weight is light, and you should use this as a chance to breathe a little bit. Definitely do not hold onto the bar longer than needed, but also don’t be in a rush to get back to the TTB immediately. Find a pace in which you can breathe and compose yourself, because you will be back on the TTB before you really want to be…
Snatches are an interesting movement here. It’s a movement in which the best approach will depend a lot on your level of proficiency in the movement, as well as your proficiency on TTB. What I mean by this is, if you are a bit less proficient at TTB, you may be benefited by doing singles and/or smaller sets on snatch so that you can continue to recover and let your grip relax, before you have to go back to the TTB. However, for most athletes, the snatch weight will be very light, and won’t present much of an issue. If your grip is fatigued, you may want to consider breaking the snatches once, just to shake it out. For most people, you will be able to go by feel on this movement, and make a decision at that moment as to whether you will need to break the snatches or not. Here is a bit of food for thought – If you do 5 snatches unbroken, it will be about 15 seconds of work, but you might then need to take 10-15 second of rest before starting your next TTB set. If you dropped every rep and didn’t dilly-daddle, you could do 5 reps of singles in 25 seconds. That definitely sounds slower, unless you are able to enhance your recovery by doing singles, and then jump right back up onto your TTB without that 10-15 second rest.
The Clean and Jerk max weight must be achieved by the 15 minute mark. This allows for 6 minutes from the moment you complete the 9 min AMRAP. The weight is going to feel extremely awkward and wobbly on your first attempt or two. For this reason, you should do a couple progressive light reps, before getting into the challenging weights. I would generally recommend making your first attempt about 60% of your desired goal weight. Just add weight to the bar instead of stripping weight and having to add new weight. This will save time and energy. For those that are proficient in the squat clean, you will find significant benefit in squatting the weight. Your legs will be the freshest part of your body at this point, and you will find it very difficult to pull the bar high enough to power clean with your grip taxed so heavily. For this reason, you must be very aggressive as you pull under the bar into the squat clean. As far as the jerk, the shoulder girdle will also be fatigued from the TTB and snatches, and so must be extremely aggressive and confident with moving your body UNDER the bar in the jerk. Put the load onto your legs, and not into your shoulders. Once again, do not try to push the bar up, as strength will be diminished by this point. You will probably have enough time for 4-5 quality attempts. A good approach would be 60% x 1, 70% x 1, 80% x 1, 90% x 1, and then see what sort of time and energy you have remaining to continue progressing from there.
Good luck!
