The Glassman Chipper

The Glassman Chipper from the CrossFit Journal.  CrossFit has seemed to evolve over the last 5 or 6 years in many aspects – as a lifestyle, and a business, a training program, and a sport.

But if you look at these articles, you realize this was all a part of Greg Glassman’s vision.  If you don’t know, Glassman created CrossFit. He is the son of a rocket scientist in Southern California.  Glassman was a gymnast that used weight training to prepare for his competitive season because he didn’t have access to equipment.  Later, he became a personal trainer in Los Angeles and was kicked out of all the gyms in LA because of his unorthodox training methods and strong following.  He relocated to Santa Cruz where he ran into similar problems until he opened his own warehouse gym, which he called CrossFit.  From there, he began training everyone from Olympic athletes to soccer moms.  soon after, he began posting workouts on the internet in 2001 and soon after started publishing the CrossFit Journal in 2002.  These first articles introduced basic CrossFit concepts like the conditioning workouts we do everyday, developing Olympic lifts, basic to advanced gymnastic skills, the importance of nutrition and more.

His writing style is fun.  He reads like a wry, sadistic, exercise scientist.  Glassman described the type of capacity needed to do the workout “Fran” in 3 to 4 minutes as “a weightlifting gymnast with lungs of a porpoise.”  Genius!

Muscle ups, peg boards, rowing hard and fast, walking football fields on your hands – it’s all there.  From the beginning, Greg required us to do hard stuff that would take years to master.  What I love is he explained this stuff with the vocabulary of a professor.  Who uses the word “efficacy?”  Glassman uses it regularly.

If you wanted to figure out how to attack CrossFit, you would need to break down the movements and learn them piece by piece.  If you wanted to understand what he was saying, you might need a thesaurus.  Either way, he’s not going to slow down for you – he wants us to catch up to him.  In my opinion, it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Workout of the Day

OTM 20

At the top of every minute, perform 20 Doubleunders

After the DU, you will alternate movements

On every EVEN minute, perform 5 Handstand Pushups

On every ODD minute, perform 5 Toes to Bar

DU sub is 20 seconds of attempts

For the HSPU, you may sub 1 Wall Climb or HS Holds for 20 seconds