REMINDER: CrossFit Roots will be closed Saturday, March 20th for renovations.

16 min. AMRAP
3 ring dips
7 butterfly or C2B pull-ups
15 air squats

Balancing Form and Intensity – Ring Dips

Today’s WOD includes sets of 3 ring dips.  Ring dips are a perfect example of learning to balance form and intensity.

Let’s start with a quick review of the ring dip.  A ring dip begins with hands on the rings, feet off of the floor, and elbows fully locked out.  To perform the ring dip, lean the chest forward and allow the body and chest to lower until the bicep touches the top of the ring. Press the body out of the ring dip until the elbows return to their fully locked-out positions.  Throughout the exercise, the hands should travel so close to the body that they graze the waist, ribs, and armpits.

Now that you have a picture of good ring dip form in your head, let’s play out the scenario that often happens in the thick of a workout. The athlete must complete 3 ring dips.  The first ring dip is money! ONE.  The athlete goes for the second one and holding onto that solid technique squeezes out the full elbow lockout.  TWO.  Without resting, the athlete goes for ring dip three.  The athlete lowers the body but the biceps do not touch the rings.  As the athlete presses from the dip, his hands migrate away from the body. The athlete gets to a very close but not full lockout on the ring dip and hops off the rings.  Close enough, right?  No!

Remember that we want form and then intensity. A quick rest between reps 2 and 3 would have yielded a solid 3rd rep, that produced a productive training response. We often see workouts like this and want to do “the real thing.”  It takes an athlete who is honest about their training and their current ability levels to scale now to avoid scaling later. Ok, nagging coaches help in this area as well.

Scale when appropriate to maintain good form without sacrificing all of the intensity, because close enough is never ok.