Scrat Roars

My gym is different from your gym. Not to say that my gym is better.

Except that it’s better.

Ha ha. OK, fine. I’ll add one tiny prepositional phrase: it’s better for me.

I never thought I would look forward to going to a gym, but I do. I actually look forward to going to my gym. I’ve documented how much I love CrossFit here, here, here, and here. But there are myriad other reasons. For one thing, I love that they tell me what to do and I don’t have to think about it. I dig the fact that there are no mirrors—it’s never about how you look; it’s about what you can do. And I get all giddy about seeing the friends I’ve made there.

In some ways, though, my gym is just a gym. Dudes call each other pussies. “Sweet Cherry Pie” is on heavy rotation. There’s dropping of barbells and grunting.

And, I have to admit, I have surrendered to the siren call of dropping a bar with a bunch of bumper plates on it. First of all, often it’s absolutely necessary—you’re lifting an amount of weight that would be dangerous to lower to the ground. But more importantly, when you’ve just hit a new clean & jerk PR and you drop that heavy-ass barbell, it makes the most satisfying sound when it hits the floor. My friend Steve once wrote to a bunch of us about his emergency medicine internship. He told grisly tales of gunshot wounds to the head and shit, but the image that has stuck with me all these years later was of him and his cohorts standing in line in the cafeteria when a chorus of beepers sang out from their belts. All those white coats dropped their trays in unison and bolted for the ER.

Come on. That is some badass shit.

Dropping a heavy bar two feet in front of me is about the closest I’m ever gonna come to being that much of a BMF.

I always drew the line at grunting though. I mean, I make little runty-pig noises when I do push-ups and stuff, and when I’m trying to crack up my friend Erin, I’ll make this belabored “Eeeeeeeee!” sound

ice age squirrel — that she likens to the squirrel in Ice Age.

But never during lifts. No this-is-Sparta crap at the top of a front squat.

Well…

See, the WOD today involved a bunch of front squats, wall ball shots (pitching a medicine ball 9′ up a wall with a full squat at the bottom), and kettlebell swings.

One could argue that I sometimes go too light on WOD weights. It’s not that I’m afraid I’ll be last. I’m always last. I’m used to that. It’s that I’m afraid I’ll be so far last that people’s children will be at home sobbing from hunger pangs. Or worse, I’ll have a DNF. I’ve hated a lot of WODs; I’ve cursed a blue streak; I even kinda puked in my mouth once. But I’ve never logged a Did Not Finish.

So sue me, I go a little light on the weight, just to be sure.

Tonight, I was supposed to front squat 75% of my bodyweight. Ha! That’s, like, 130 pounds. My one-rep max is 115. I went for just under 75% of that: 83 pounds.

It was hard. It was so hard. The workout was a 21-15-9, which meant that you did 21 of each movement, followed by 15, then 9. I was breaking up the first round of front squats into 4 to 5 reps at a time. When I came up on about the twelfth rep, my lungs and throat emitted this great “Uhh!”…and I realized why people grunt.

It feels good.

It makes the lift easier too.

But mostly it makes you feel like a mythical beast.

I probably sounded like the squirrel from Ice Age, but I felt like a dragon. Rarrrr!

I love my gym.

6 thoughts on “Scrat Roars”

I will second that this was a highly grunt-inducing workout. Probably a third of the squats and half of the kettlebell swings elicited a sound from me. I have no idea what that sound is. I imagine and fear it’s something like the early stages of childbirth. But sometimes, I sound like Princess Buttercup throwing herself down the hill, I’ve been told.

I hope you sound like Scrat on steroids. I will listen for it next time.

It’s the Valsalva maneuver. Forceful exhalation against a closed glottis. It helps you move heavy shit and keep the veins in your eyeballs from exploding.

Here’s Mark Rippetoe on the Valsalva maneuver:
“If your car runs out of gas in an intersection, and you have to push it out of the way or get killed, you will open your car door, put your shoulder on the doorframe, take a great big breath, and push the car. You will probably not exhale except to take another quick breath until the car and you are out of the way. Furthermore, you will not even think about this, since the many millions of years your ancestors have spent pushing on heavy things has taught your central nervous system the correct way to push. Or you might find yourself grunting aloud during the effort, a vocalization produced by a marked restriction in the airway at the glottis which produces an increase in pressure during the partial exhalation. This is perhaps the origin of the “kiyah” in martial arts, the vocalization that allows for an increased focus of power at the striking of a blow.”
-Starting Strength p. 51