Offseason Workouts

It’s time to start preparing your body for the upcoming season. Besides playing pickup once a week and enjoying other Winter sports, you should be working on your strength and conditioning, so as to have a solid fitness level by the time tryouts start.

If you have access to a gym, then you should invest most of your time towards increasing your strength:weight ratio by performing heavy and/or explosive lifts involving multiple joints, such as deadlift, squat, shoulder press/push press/push jerk, pullups, clean (& power clean), and snatch (and power snatch). As a general rule for maximizing strength vs mass gains, you should perform 3-7 heavy sets of no more than 5 reps (decrease sets as reps increase). For more thorough information on basic strength training, you should check out Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength Basic Barbell Wiki and books. You may also check out the Exercises and Demos section at  Crossfit.com for video demos of all exercises.

If you do not have access to a gym, then you may still train hard by performing bodyweight exercises. You may choose 2-5 exercises and an adequate number of reps for each and set up a circuit, trying to complete a number of rounds within a preestablished amount of time or time yourself and try to finish the circuit as fast as possible. Another excellent option is to perform Tabata intervals of any given exercise, which  will increase strength, endurance and recovery rate. To learn more about bodyweight training, you may visit Ross Training (and/or read his book Never Gymless), Beast Skills, Bodyweight Culture or Crossfit. Here’s a list of bodyweight exercises and here’s a comprehensive list of Crossfit (HQ, affiliates and users) bodyweight workouts.

To help you prepare and get in shape, we will start posting 3-4 workouts each week. They will all be based on bodyweight exercises, may be performed in 20 minutes or less and will require minimal to no equipment. And we’ll make sure they keep you entertained.

We encourage you to do these workouts and post your results to the comments section of the respective post. This will help you keep track of your progress and will encourage your current and future teammates to work hard as well. If you follow your own program then, by all means, you may also post what you do.

In regards to equipment, the two main things you could use would be a pullup bar and a speed rope. As a pullup bar replacement, you may use stairs, ledges, scaffolding, tree branches, or you may even throw a towel over something that will hold your weight and perform towel pullups. However, you could also consider investing in an Iron Gym, a simple pullup bar which you may hang from any doorframe. I’ve seen them at Walgreens for $29.99 (not bad at all). Speed ropes go anywhere from $5-40. I got an Altus Athletic ASR one from Amazon for $7.99 and it’s good enough for me.

Whichever way you decide to go, just make sure that you push yourself hard and that you share your progress with the rest of us.

Work hard, play hard.

Brooklyn #7