01.09.10
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff at 9:49 pm by Colin McNulty
Working away can be a pain for anyone used to the pleasure of having a local Crossfit gym to go to. God forbid you have to go to a Globo gym and try to do your Crossfit workouts there. But what can you do?
It occurred to me that there’s one group of people who are pretty athletic, that given their underground nature, probably don’t frequent the mainstream gyms, but clearly have great strength and flexibility. Parkour types (what’s the collective name for people who do Parkour??). Look and you will find and all that, so here ia a Parkour strength training video, from my very own Manchester no less.
Checkout the weighted squats, pistols, burpees, broad jumps, human flags for reps(!), deadlifts, L-sits, muscle ups, L-sit muscles ups(!!), plus a load of crazy made up body weight exercises. I like their attitude too, I have no doubt they’d do very well at Crossfit!
It just goes to show, no kit is no excuse not to exercise, and the things you can do out and about are only limited by your imagination.
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27.07.10
Posted in General Colin McNulty Stuff at 9:38 pm by Colin McNulty
As rubbish as it is to announce this sort of thing on the net, working away from home currently means that it’s the simplest way of not having to repeat myself over the next few weeks. As of yesterday (Monday 26th July) I’m no longer a member of Crossfit Manchester, something I never thought I’d ever say. As I was one of the original members when they first opened their doors, and so have been a member for 3.5 years, have long been a huge supporter of Crossfit Manchester and was a personal friend of Mark Beck, I figure I probably need to expand on that statement.
I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to say about it and also what I feel I can say about it. I am privileged enough to have been told some things in confidence, I haven’t betrayed that confidence and I have no intention of starting now. It’s no secret however that last year Karl Steadman left Crossfit Manchester in Stockport, and setup Crossfit 3D in Trafford. That event set the wheels in motion that have ended up with my decision of yesterday.
I don’t think it’s a secret either, that sadly the relationship which built the first Crossfit gym in England, soured as a result of that split. Once wrangling over who gets what in the divorce start (for divorce is essentially what it was), it’s inevitable really that it starts to feel personal and people get upset. I had hoped that I could remain impartial, as I have the greatest respect for both Mark and Karl, as I have attested to many times on this blog. They, as instruments of Crossfit, have had a profound affect on my life, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. Mark in particular spent a lot of time helping me attain my British Masters title this year, and I’ll long be grateful for that.
However it has become obvious in recent months that Mark and I were not seeing eye to eye on many things. I am not going to go into the reasons, as to do so would only give the impression that I’m airing my dirty laundry in public and I have no intention of doing that. Suffice it to say, that I’ve become increasingly unhappy this year, though no one thing was enough to tip the boat.
Fast forward to Monday and I decided that it was time to have a heart to heart, and Mark and I spent a good hour having a reasonably amicable, open and honest conversation. Mark is after all, a very nice and agreeable fellow. Someone who’s company I have enjoyed many times over the last 3 years outside of the gym environment. It was a useful conversation for many reasons, not least of which I felt it cleared the air and got stuff said.
To my surprise however I did learn that Mark and I disagreed on several more things than I’d even thought going into it, but he’d not felt in a position to say so before then. Notwithstanding that however, I was rather hoping we could work things out. Sadly, we couldn’t get past the sticking point that hopefully in the very near future, I’ll be working on a joint venture with Karl (more on that another time).
So before it came to a head, I decided to leave whilst Mark and I were still on amicable terms. I’d like to think I could pop in and say hi to Mark and Jo and the members I know down there occasionally. I still have a lot of affection for Mark and Crossfit Manchester and look forward to seeing them go from strength to strength. I certainly have no hesitation in continuing to recommend Crossfit Manchester to anyone that hasn’t got bored of my spouting off about Crossfit by now!
It’s always sad when a door closes on something that’s been a big part of your life, and I feel rather melancholic about it. Life is full of surprises though and you never know what tomorrow will bring. 
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20.03.10
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff, Olympic Weightlifting at 12:09 pm by Colin McNulty
As many people have noted from my earlier post, snatch practice for the British Masters has not been going well. Dropping six 70kg (154lb) snatches in a row, 2 weeks before competition day, is never a good sign.
So this weekend, with 2 sessions back at Crossfit Manchester, I desperately needed the experienced eye of my Crossfit Coach Mark Beck to sort out what on earth was going wrong. First the result:
Friday: 2 out of 3 snatches at 70kg successful.
Saturday: 3 out of 3 snatches at 70kg successful!
(Plus I did the daily Crossfit Manchester WODs to follow, of course.)
To say I’m pleased and relieved is an understatement. In fact, I’m looking forward to the possibility of having a good crack at a new PB come competition day. Current PB is 77kg, so opening at 70 looks achievable, giving 2nd and 3rd lifts of 75 and 78 if all goes well.
What was the magic ingredient? Simply finishing the pull. It’s probably one of the hardest things to get right in the snatch: when to stop pulling up on the bar and when to start dropping your body under the bar. Clearly I’ve been dropping down too soon and Mark’s guidance to make sure I properly come up on the balls of my feet, actually feeling the weight there, definitely made the difference.
Simple huh? The point is, that even if you workout on your own, it’s worth making the effort to get to your closest Crossfit Affiliate, at least once a month say, just to get that bit of expert coaching that can work wonders to your form.
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14.09.08
Posted in Crossfit Workout & Exercises, General Colin McNulty Stuff at 9:07 pm by Colin McNulty
At the risk of sounding like Bill and Ted, day 2 of the Crossfit Certification at Manchester was another totally awesome day. The day started off with a lecture from Todd on the 3rd set of the 9 core Crossfit movements: Deadlift, Sumo Deadlift High Pull (SDHP) and the Medicine Ball Clean, followed by practice outside.
After was an open floor Q&A session with Coach Glassman. I’ve read a few things online about Coach, but Greg is in reality a most unassuming man. This is me with Coach, he was very gracious to pose for so many pictures.
For someone who heads up an international exercise movement with an estimated 300,000 followers, he’s surprisingly modest about his achievements. I took several key points away from the session, which covered a whole host of topics:
- Glassman is not precious about the Crossfit way / WoD (Workout of the Day) He actually hopes one day someone will show that they have a better, more efficacious approach than the WoD!
- There were various conversations about other approaches and variations of Crossfit, for which Greg was completely happy to entertain the idea and watch the experimentation of people doing it. Of course his reaction was simply this: If some other approach is better, let’s see it do well at the Crossfit Games. Then I’ll take notice.
- He admitted to making mistakes with the WoD’s on occassion. E.g. 400m of 10 lunges + 15 reps of 35kg Push Presses. Sounds tough but doable? It took Greg Edmundson (a Crossfit poster boy) over an hour to finish it! Coach described it as “An Abomination!” lol (I can laugh cos I didn’t have to do it.)
- There was talk about the future of Crossfit and where it can go and Greg made the point that they have more ideas than they have staff to cope with them.
- I was also surprised to learn that Crossfit Inc has only just turned a profit for the first time this year. Bare in mind that Crossfit, it terms of what Greg Glassman has been doing, is coming up 30 years old now! That’s one hell of a gestation period.
- On a Crossfit note, Glassman really stressed the point that the heavy days, e.g. the 5 x 1 rep Dead lifts etc, are *really* important to the Crossfit methodology, and shouldn’t be considered easy or rest days. They really should be absolute max strength days.
One thing that I really came away with was simply this: Greg Classman has a great manner about him, he’s an unassuming but capable orator, who engenders trust and loyalty in those that listen to him.
After lunch was a lecture by Nicole Carroll on nutrition and recommended Crossfit diet: The Zone Diet. In case you can’t guess, I’m the not the pretty one on the left! 
The Zone diet stuff was nothing new to me, I’ve been on it for 18 months after all, but it was interesting to see some of Nicole’s slight variations on the Zone prescription in terms of things like the frequency of cheat days and the minimum blocks to prescribe for small people.
There followed the main workout activity, which included 5 stations:
- Push Press practice
- Medicine Ball clean practice
- Kipping pull ups and rope climb technique
- Muscles ups
- And the main workout of the day: 30 – 20 – 10 each of Thrusters and Burpees. To coin a phrase from Crossfit Manchester coach Karl Steadman: That sucked a fat mans arse!
Later Todd talked again about general Crossfit methodology, the ways to combine the 3 main types of workout: Weightlifting, Gymnastics and Mono-structured (running, rowing etc). It included topics on the 3:1 work to rest day ratio vs the 5:2. Also an example of how to scale a WoD for different ability levels of Crossfit client.
Ultimately that was it. There were photo sessions and plenty of time for questions of all kinds to all people and I don’t believe anyone went away with anything they wanted to ask unanswered. All together, the weekend was great, and that’s all I can say about it. If you get the chance, you should go on a Crossfit cert. This is the Crossfit Manchester crew with all the Crossfit Coaches: Greg, Nicole, Todd, Jimmy and Andy:
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21.07.08
Posted in General Colin McNulty Stuff at 8:53 pm by Colin McNulty
I would never say I’m the most cultured person in the world, but occasionally it’s nice to soak up the cultural offerings that living near a city like Manchester has to offer. I’d say once a year I thing about doing something for cultures sake alone. As this whole week is Manchester Jazz Festival I went with the nipper and some friends to St Ann’s Square to watch a free performance of a Spanish Jazz Band called 12twelve (the fact that there were only 4 of them perhaps should have been my first warning of things to come).
It was a dicey affair as the typical British July summer had heavy rain showers all morning, but we were lucky that it dried up just in time for our arrival in Manc. After a nice cheap lunch at the relatively new Wasabi Sushi Bar in China Town (like Yo Sushi, but half the price):
With the Jazz performance starting at 3:30pm we arrived promptly at 3:15 full of sashimi, just in time to get 5 seats together. The band were on stage milling about and setting up and I happily awaited my annual cultural injection.
Sadly we had to wait a looooong time. The band came and went and came and stomped about and tried a few instruments and went and came and tinkered a bit more and cellotaped stuff down and fiddled with settings and generally wasted a whole heap of time, for about an hour while a few hundred people sat in typical stoically English fashion, not complaining about their tardy start. Well maybe except for yours truly who was getting rather bored myself, not least of which with how to keep a 7 year old entertained out in the cold, with the threat of rain and no toy related props.
As my mate Mark said, to expect a Spanish Jazz band to care what time they should be starting, was possibly being rather over optimistic.
To say the crowd was pleased when they finally started was an understatement, although we first had to endure a rather silly and overly long opening speech that was given in Spanish and then translated into English by one of the Manchester Festival organisers. I was beginning to wonder if the price of this “free performance” was one that was too steep to pay? As I said, to much relief the crowd (well me) was finally happy when the band started playing.
That didn’t last long!
In hindsight I should have listened to the downloadable audio snippets before going because, to put it bluntly, they were rubbish! The “combining features of contemporary music, psychedelia and electronic music” was it seemed an excellent excuse to take all that is good about Jazz and rip the heart out of it. In fact I would say that the only reason they called themselves a Jazz band at all was because one of them played the Saxophone.
Now I’m quite prepared to accept that I know nothing about Jazz and I’m talking rubbish, however my opinion was backed up by at least 10% of the audience, who all rose and left immediately after the first song. (It of course wouldn’t be very English to walk out mid performance, oh no, that would be a rude step too far.)
I should I suppose point out that the 10% that left were the oldest segment of the crowd, which only goes to prove that I’m an old fuddy duddy at heart, which is fine. Though I should also point out that that oldest segment probably had more experience of being “influenced by the ‘free jazz’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s” that 12twelve were meant to have taken as inspiration, than the band clearly had.
Fortunately there were 2 ancillary forms of spontaneous entertainment the first in form of a clearly insane dancing chap (I’ve seen this fella and his troupe of dancers before once in Exchange Square, they’re actually pretty good). My kid wanted to go dance with him (she didn’t like the band either!) but was too nervous until she found another girl who was also too nervous to go on her own. Strength in numbers won the day and the dancing bloke seemed pleased as punch with his 2 new acolytes.
The second ancillary entertainment was a pair of (probably student) hippies from the Free Hugs movement (website is currently hacked, actually worse than my website was hacked a few weeks ago) so you can see an old cache of the site here: Free Hugs Archive.
I actually like the free hugs movement, it’s one of those warm fluffy aspects of the human community that the world is generally sorely missing. So for fun, me and the nipper joined in for 10 minutes and became honourary Free Hugs members, which brought a smile to our and others faces. Good harmless fun.
Sadly the tardy Spanish meant that we were later than planed at our backup cultural offering of some Chinese festival thingy that was going on in Exchange Square. We arrived just as a major spectacle was ending, and all that was left was a group of martial artists. Whilst impressive, they were not enough to keep us there as the first drops of rain of the late afternoon started to fall.
So there you have it, abortive culture maybe, but I’ll take the afternoon in preference to sitting at home watching Road Wars on tele.
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