Fitness - Windmill's - Over Head Squats - KB Swings - 10/28

My shoulders were rocking this morning when I woke up and gave a little stretch. The dumbbell snatches took their tole for sure. I was shocked when I saw more shoulder work on the white board today.

We started with kettle bell windmill's to get the shoulders warmed up and to stretch the hamstrings. I worked up in weight to a 32 Kg bell (70.5#). It felt good to warm up this way and get some active stretching with some heavy resistance.

Our Focus today was over head squats, which also takes an enormous amount of shoulder and lat engagement. The goal was to work up to a max weight, low reps.

Focus: Over Head Squats
1x8 - 40 Kg (88.2#)
1x6 - 60 Kg (132.3#)
1x4 - 80 Kg (176.4#)
1x2 - 85 Kg (187.4#)
1x2 - 90 Kg (198.4#)
1xfail - 92Kg (202.8#)

I'm pretty happy with this effort. It's the heaviest I've ever gone with OHS's and I need a lot of work on these, mainly with stability and/or balance. My depth and flexibility was great. It was weird, 85 Kg felt pretty light and it felt like I could have gotten about 8-10 reps. But just the 5 Kg increase was my ceiling. My shoulders, lats and wrists just couldn't support any more than 2 reps.

I tried 92 Kg but it was too much. I had a good lock out but coming out of the bottom of the squat my lock out collapsed.

We spent a majority of today's class time with the squats and with a few minutes left in the class we hit a short burner of kettle bell swings.

WOD: 150 American Kettle Bell swings for time
1x150 - Kettle Bell swings - 24 Kg (53#)

Time: 3:57
Calories burned (warm up, focus & WOD): 476

This was a pretty brutal 4 minutes. I was going to go with the 32 Kg bell but my shoulders and legs were already pretty wrecked, so I went down to the 24 and i'm glad I did so. My grip and forearms were on fire for the last 20-30 reps or so. I was holding on just by my fingertips.

I was pretty stoked on my time/effort because I got all 150 reps unbroken. Not one breath of rest. I didn't set the bell down once, and I didn't stop swinging until I hit 150. I was also the first to post a sub 4 minute time.

We've had enough shoulder work in the past 2 days to last a while. I'd be happy to not see any shoulder/press work until next week and let my shoulders recover.