Fitness - Skinning the Cat/Front Lever Work & WOD - 12/22

My chest was rocking this morning from the ring push ups yesterday. It had been a while since we had done any push up work in our WOD's and the ring dips blasted my pecks. I was not expecting soreness of this magnitude.

Focus: Skin the cat and front lever work
Man, I'm so close to pulling off a front lever I can nail the position for a second then it fails. My lats, core, back and shoulders have gotten so strong in such a different way, it's pretty incredible. A few more months of work and the Level 2 skills class and I expect to stick and hold a legit front lever.

Skinning the cat felt great on my shoulders and really helped stretch and loosen them up. It's also a great movement for firing up the core and your lats.

WOD: 20 minutes, EMOTM build up of:
Dumbbell thrusters - 40# dumbbells
V-ups

Score/Time: N/A
Calories burned (focus & WOD): 578

first minute - 1 thruster, 1 v-up. Second minute - 2 thrusters, 2 v-ups. Third minute - 3 thrusters, 3 v-ups. And so on up to 20 minutes. So the last round would be 20 thrusters and 20 v-ups.

I got all the way through minute 16 before I was running out of time (and strength) and had to scale it back to 10 and start building up again. So my last 4 rounds/minutes instead of 17, 18, 19 and 20 reps of thrusters and v-ups, were back to 10, 11, 12 and 13.

My quads and hip flexers, along with my shoulders were burning during today's WOD. This started to get pretty brutal at around minute/round 10. Dumbbell thrusters take so much more from the shoulders. You have to stabilize and hold the dumbbells in the rack position where as if you're using a barbell for thrusters, you rest the bar on your shoulders (like a front squat) and it takes very little energy from the shoulders to keep it there.

My v-ups help up until almost the very end though. I had to scale them down to knees to chest only at the very end.