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Impromptu CrossFit Workout

I think I've mentioned it before, but for about a year, I've been doing a type of workout called CrossFit. I usually describe it as "circuit training on crack," because most of the work outs involve cycling through various exercises as fast as you can. I don't know how they always pick combinations of exercises that kick your butt, but they do.

Anyhow, one of the things that the guy who got me started on it used to always say was, "a lot of the motions are directly applicable to every day life." I've never thought about it much, it was just some little tidbit of information I tucked in the back of my brain. Until today.

I'm home sick today, so I get to see the little kids during the day. Well, they get bored after a while, so they usually ask me to play with them for a bit. One of the things they like to do is to have an adult "fly" them. Basically, you throw them up in the air a few times. I remember the first time I saw it done, I was scared something bad would happen. But after seeing quite a few parents do some variation of it to their own kids, I figured it was safe so long as you were careful. And the kids seem to really like it.

Anyhow, there are two kids floating around the house today, so they both wanted me to fly them. I did it to one of them, then the other wanted a turn. Then the first one started in with, "again! again!" Halfway through all that, the motion started to feel really familiar. After about the 12th rep, I realized that it felt a lot like WallBall. If you don't feel like following the link, it's essentially a squat followed by throwing a medicine ball straight in the air. Catch the ball in front of you, back down to squat, repeat. It's not identical (I'm not bouncing anyone off a wall anytime soon), but it's pretty darn close.

Between the two kids, I probably repeated this a couple dozen times, and they probably weigh about as much as the prescribed medicine balls for that exercise. And since I've done that exercise way more than I like (we once did 150 of them just as a warm up), it wasn't nearly all that bad. Suddenly, the burning in my legs I usually get from doing a gazillion of these seemed worth it.

So, thank you CrossFit for making me much better at flying little kids. I've got a couple of 2 year-olds here that think it was time well spent.
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