Over the past few months, we’ve worked on improving our basic gymnastic strength and stability across a range of pulling and pushing movements. Our last cycle had us building our strength on the rings via pull-ups and dips, which leads us to our first real targeted focus of the year: Nasty Girls!
Nasty Girls is a classic CrossFit workout comprised of air squats, muscle-ups, and hang power cleans. The squats serve to increase the heart rate, which makes performing a complex movement like a muscle up more difficult, as well as taxing the legs and making the hang power cleans harder.
To keep up with the ever-improving CrossFit community, a Version 2.0 was released recently, upping the ante with pistols, muscle-ups, and significantly heavier hang power cleans. While we wanted to give our stronger athletes the chance to tackle the beefed-up movements, to keep overall volume and time domain lower we decided to scale down slightly to our own “Version 1.5” when testing.
We’ll be targeting pistols for this cycle, because even if you’re doing the standard version, improving your single leg strength and correcting asymmetries will make your air squats stronger and faster. For those who are comfortable with pistols already, we’ll be adding load and making the single leg component stronger. For those without pistols, we’ll be trying to find the missing link, whether it’s flexibility, strength, or balance, and working on progressions to hit those areas.
To address the hang power cleans, we’ll focus on strength, power, and precision at heavier weights as well as getting practice cycling the barbell for multiple reps. We want to get you more confident moving the bar correctly at heavier weights, as well as having the capacity to hold onto the bar at higher reps and hit those same positions under fatigue.
For the muscle-ups, we’ll be building on the last cycle’s ring work. For those with the adequate strength, we’ll work towards getting your first strict muscle-up or making your existing muscle-ups stronger. For those who are still improving their pull-ups and dips, we’ll keep our progressions going so that you have plenty of opportunity to practice. Additionally, we’ll be incorporating more muscle-ups, pull-ups, and dips in the class WODs so that you can work on your kipping technique.
We recently tested max weights at rep ranges of 5 and 10. On top of our “Nasty Girls” work, we are going to continue to test some different movements within those ranges before we shift to heavier weights of 3’s and 1’s in the future.
It’s going to be fun to see how all this base-building work over the past few months transfers over to this cycle! As always, if you need any help with anything or have any questions, let us know as we move forward.
