June 2010 Newsletter
June News
Summer is officially here. The
weather is warming up. Remember to
stay hydrated and drink enough water
even before your workout. Don’t wait
until you are thirsty to take a sip. Don’t
hit the wall.
Crossfit Games is next month
July 16-18 at The Home Depot Sports
Complex in Carson, CA. We want to get
a group together to go down and
experience the games atmosphere. Let
Rick know if you are interested in going.
In July we will also start testing
CrossFit fitness levels. If you look in
the success journals there are levels 1-4.
We would like to test everyone to see
what level they are at. This is a great
way to test for improvement and
readiness for the CrossFit games.
In this issue we will feature Mark
Rippetoe and his expert advise on bench
press, active hips, and bad form.
The Slow Lifts by Mark
Rippetoe
The bench press is the best
exercise for absolute strength in the
upper body. So says Mark Rippetoe of
The Wichita Falls Athletic
Club/CrossFIt Wichita in part 4 of his
series on the Slow Lifts.
The bench press allows the lifter to
move heavier weights with the arms than
any other exercise. It should be included
in every barbell-training program. But it
is not the only lift we should do, as is too
often the case in typical gyms.
Benching provides hard active work for
the chest, shoulders, and arms and
isometric work for the forearms. It trains
novice lifters the fundamental skill of
pushing on a very heavy load, perhaps
its most useful function. When people
first start training, they have no
experience with maximal effort. The
bench press is a very good place to learn
how to bear down and push hard, and
this invaluable lesson translates to all the
other slow lifts quite well.
There is a little trick I use to make the
bar go to the right place, through the
right path, every time. Find a place on
the ceiling to stare at and nail your eyes
to that place. This point will be your
positional reference for the bar path and
its lockout position over the chest. If you
return the bar to the same position at the
top of every rep, having touched the
same place on your chest every time,
you will find that your bar path is
uniform as well.
Active Hips and Butt Winks
 Drawing on more than 30 years
in the fitness industry, Mark Rippetoe
writes that an “active hip” can help clean
up problems associated with the squat.
Dr. Stef Bradford and Dr. Lon Kilgore,
Rippetoe’s long-time collaborators, also
contributed to this article.
When we squat, the standard range of
motion criterion for the exercise is
“below parallel.” This is defined as the
hip joint identified at the apex of the hip
angle (the “corner” in your shorts over
the hip) as it drops below the knee (the
top of the patella).
Most people who have trouble with the
squat are having trouble getting good
depth while keeping their low back from
rounding. Pretty much anybody can get
deep if they allow the lumbar spine to
relax into flexion, a phenomenon known
in some circles as the “butt wink.”
Shoving the knees out of the way on
descent and keeping them there so that
the adductors can do their job is
accomplished by an external rotation of
the hip.
The concept of the active hip is best
understood as the use of an actively
locked lumbar extension and actively
shoved-out knees, which results in a
below-parallel squat that incorporates a
stretch reflex using all the muscles of the
posterior chain in the most optimal way
possible. The active hip gets the thighs
out of the way of the pelvis so that good
depth can be more easily obtained. At
the same time, it makes the squat
stronger and more powerful because of
the more effective use of more muscles
over a wider range of motion.
Bad Form
Bad form is bad in every way.
Citing specific examples from lifts,
Mark Rippetoe co-author of Starting
Strength and owner of Wichita Falls
Athletic Club/CrossFit Wichita Falls,
writes that what constitutes bad form is
not a matter of opinion.
Bad form occurs when a movement
pattern is executed inefficiently. The bar
is moved by incorrect biomechanics.
Instead of all the muscles in the system
making their anatomically efficient
contribution to the loaded movement,
some muscles do more than they are
supposed to and some do less.
Good form (or technique, or kinematics,
or whatever you’d like to call it) should
depend on the logic of a dispassionate
analysis of the body-and- barbell system
in the motion required by the exercise.
The exercise is chosen to work a
particular movement pattern normal to
the human skeleton. The bar has a
certain path it most efficiently travels
through space for the exercise. The
skeleton must move in ways defined by
its segment lengths and articulation
points to enable this bar path, and the
muscles must move the skeleton exactly
this way. Anything that deviates from
this is bad form.

It’s never an advantage to move a load

inefficiently. It is usually just learned
wrong through a lack of feedback at a
crucial time in the learning process. Or
sometimes it’s form creep, bad technique
acquired so gradually that it is never
perceived as wrong until someone else
does you the favor of pointing it out.

Good form is not arbitrary, and its

purpose is not aesthetics. It is based on a
logical analysis of the relevant
mechanics, what works and what
doesn’t.

CrossFit Chula Vista

821 Kuhn Dr. Suite 106
Chula Vista, CA 91914
(619) 934-9934
www.crossfitchulavista.com