Crossfit Carson Valley is the winner from last month! Their score was 276. Nice Job Ron and everyone that participated. Check out a video Ron put together here. Ron Haskins is the owner and programmer. He had this to say of the challenge and his clients:

When the challenge was posted I was stoked, but knew it was going to be an arduous task. Not having much exposure to the Olympic lifts was and continues to be one of my weaknesses. I have been to Greg and Aimee’s Oly class, bought the book and dvd before that and have been spending lots of time working on the moves myself. And here it was, time to get everyone at CFCV to move barbells from the floor to overhead as efficiently as possible. That’s not to say they have not been exposed-they have, but not with the focus we would need to pull the challenge off.

The baseline workout indicated that the lion’s share of work would necessarily be directed at the clean portion of the lift. We have always worked on the pressing moves and that was the member’s strength of the two. With that said I knew there was only one or two members that would be able to do the challenge as rx’d (bodyweight) and it turned out to be only one.

After the baseline workout on 7/6 we worked hard on the clean progressions. We used the Burgener warmup somewhat modified by a narrower grip (clean grip) and bringing the bar to the rack position instead of the muscle snatch. We did lots of medicine ball cleans as part of our workouts and as cash outs at the end. We practiced clean deadlifts , and used most all of Greg Everett’s progressions as skill practice during cash outs. We used push presses and push jerks as strength moves during buy ins before our wods just to assure the clean did not become out of balance with the press or jerk.

Bottom line is we only did clean and jerks as a wod once during the month about half way through. That workout is a favorite AAW of mine, in teams of 3 move 20,000# from the floor overhead and row 10,000 meters. I haven’t used this wod with the gals before, just the firefighters at work. The high repetitions involved did get everyone a little more experience at moving weight from the ground to overhead. I set up bars ranging from 135 to 55 lbs and encouraged folks to try different stuff, power snatching, clean/jerk, clean/press, deadlift power clean and press.

As a plug for your program Dutch, I don’t think the members of CFCV could have improved this dramatically without the focus I learned from you seminar. Like I said before, at the level I cert you get barraged with info and some will not sink in and some is too obvious to make an impression. After attending your gig, I have learned to identify a goal and focus our efforts on that goal.

And of course the members themselves are the ones that really applied themselves to make this happen.

Thank You Ron and everyone that participated this month. Now get to work on August!!