*Share the Pain is a chance for CFM members to bring a friend to try out CrossFit.  If you decide to bring a friend, please be sure to find a coach after you WOD, give us your feedback, and discuss setting up a one on one training session to further introduce them to our program!

- WOD -

Teams of 2 complete the following for time:

100 Wall Balls

22 Sprints (cone to cone outside) complete together

100 SDLHP

16 Sprints

100 Sit-ups

10 Sprints

Finish w/ 30 Man-Makers each (Beginners do no more that half)

*One partner works at a time

Robin Wilson-Neeley

These Ain’t the Same Grains!

by Sean Croxton

Last night, I cracked open my copy of Wheat Belly by next Tuesday’s Underground Wellness Radio guest Dr. William Davis. I’ll admit that after reading hundreds of health-related books, I’m becoming quite the book snob. If the author can’t get my attention within the first ten pages, I’m done. Moving on!

Wheat Belly had me hooked from page one. This guy can write! The information is scientifically backed, written in plain English, and absolutely spot-on. I even let out a giggle here and there. Can’t wait for our interview!

You know a book is good when you’re carrying it around the house with you – which is exactly what I was doing around dinner time. While cooking up a lamb burger (no bun), I recommended Dr. Davis’s book to my very fitness-minded roommate Jennifer. She and I have talked about the evils of grains several times before. Despite our discussions, she’s still not sold.

It’s cool. She’ll come around. 

To her credit, my roomy brandished what I consider to be the most powerful dogma-defeating weaponry in the entire arsenal: logic.

When confronted with the erroneous misgivings of saturated fat and cholesterol by Real Food skeptics, I routinely respond by wondering aloud how an old school food (or nutrient) can cause brand new diseases. To her credit, Jennifer threw that very same logic right back at me. She wondered how grains – which have been around for at least ten thousand years – can all of a sudden cause so many health problems.

How can something that The Bible refers to as The Staff of Life be the source of so much modern illness? Didn’t God nourish the Israelites with the bread (manna) from Heaven? Well, according to gluten expert Dr. Thomas O’Bryan, seven out of ten people are sensitive to gluten, the toxic protein found in most grains! Were the Israelites somehow exempt from gluten’s wrath? Or was the all-knowing God just a little behind on his research?

The truth is that we are not eating the same grains that Moses may have snacked on as he hiked up Mount Sinai. In fact, we’re not even eating the same grains our grandparents ate! In just a mere 50 years, grains – wheat, in particular – have become a mutant species crafted by the hands of human intervention in the name of increased crop yields, resistance to drought, disease, and heat, as well as an end to world hunger – all of which are honorable causes and tremendous scientific achievements. However, the accelerated evolution of wheat through hybridization – a feat that would make Gregor Mendel proud – has been to the detriment of human health.

- SKILL WORK -

Turkish Get-Ups

- WOD -

3 Rounds for time:

Run 400m

10 Burpee Pull-Ups

20 Box Jumps

Beginners: Do a jumping pull-up after the burpee

- CASH OUT -

Partner Prowler races

2 Teams of two people

Push partner down on sled, switch and come back

Todd Slusher

Good fat, bad fat

by Dr. William Davis

No, this is not a discussion of monounsaturated versus hydroxgenated fat. This is about the relatively benign fat that accumulates on your hips, rear end, or arms–the “good”–versus the deep visceral fat that encircles your intestines, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and heart–the “bad.”

And I’m not talking about what looks good or bad. We’ve all seen the unsightly flabby upper arms of an overweight woman or the cellulite on her bulging thighs. It might look awful but, metabolically speaking, it is benign.

It’s that muffin top, love handle, or wheat belly that encircles the waist, a marker for underlying deep visceral fat, that:

–Increases release of inflammatory mediators/markers like tumor necrosis factor, leptin, interleukins, and c-reactive protein
–Is itself inflamed. When examined under a microscope, visceral fat is riddled with inflammatory white blood cells.
–Stops producing the protective hormone, adiponectin.
–Traffics in fatty acids that enter the bloodstream, resulting in greater resistance to insulin, fat deposition in the liver (fatty liver), and increases blood levels of triglycerides
–Predicts greater cardiovascular risk. A flood of recent studies (here’s one) has demonstrated that larger quantities of pericardial fat (i.e., visceral fat encircling the heart, visible on a CT scan or echocardiogram) are associated with increased likelihood of coronary disease and cardiovascular risk.

You can even have excessive quantities of bad visceral fat without much in the way of fat elsewhere. You know the body shape: skinny face, skinny arms, skinny legs . . . protuberant, flaccid belly, the so-called “skinny obese” person.

Nobody knows why fat in visceral stores is so much more evil and disease-related than, say, wheat on your backside. While you may struggle to pull your spreading backside into your jeans, it’s waist girth that is the problem. You need to lose it.