Joe Tolles CrossFit Series: December ’23
Joe wraps up the year and the dumbbell portion of the series with the Dumbbell Snatch.
More Than Our Story
Joe Tolles CrossFit Series: September '22
Workout Of The Month
Keep On Climbing
4 Sets: 3:00 ON, 2:00 OFF
Set 1 and 3:
100 Double Unders
35’ Handstand Walk
MAX Rope Climbs
Set 2 and 4:
100 Double Unders
15 Handstand Push-Ups
MAX Ring Muscle Ups
*Score = Rope Climbs + Muscle Ups
What Was My Approach With This Workout?
(Gymnastics Day: Under Fatigue)
Today’s workout was gymnastics focused, but gymnastics under fatigue – that’s why I put the double unders in there. I think gymnastics is obviously very challenging, but the high skill movements like muscle ups and handstands walking are even more challenging when you’re under fatigue first. When you see gymnastic routines at the Olympics the competitors are fresh, in CrossFit it’s never that easy. If you’re doing a CrossFit competition it never starts with the gymnastics piece – it’s always like a 2K run, a 5K row into 30 muscle-ups at the end. It’s never like that when you do it in practice – everybody works on their pull-ups or muscle-ups when they’re fresh, but today’s challenge is can you put it together when you’re super tired from other compound gymnastic movements. I like to challenge everybody – I like to push the envelope a little bit.
What Do You Expect To Be Challenging?
Today is a workout where even if you have the ability to do the movements, it’s a bit of a mental challenge because the realization of doing these movements is hard enough. Starting CrossFit in general is challenging, then learning all the skills is challenging. Learning muscle-ups might take some people 8-10 years to do, so when you actually get that movement and it’s time to put it into play in a workout it’s very humbling. You have to check yourself a little bit with this workout. I thought that for a lot of people the scaled adaptations would be really challenging, but then if you are good at the scales, trying to figure out how to do them and how to approach the workout would be the challenge. For example, I’m pretty good at all these movements, so for the muscle-ups I need to figure out my pacing. Should I do three to start? If I do five will I blow up? In the past I would’ve done like five or six right out of the gate and then died, so I did sets of three this time and approached it smarter, and I got a better score then maybe I would have. So I thought it was challenging depending on where you’re at ability wise with the movements.
Starting CrossFit in general is challenging, then learning all the skills is challenging. Learning muscle-ups might take some people 8-10 years to do, so when you actually get that movement and it's time to put it into play in a workout it's very humbling. You have to check yourself a little bit with this workout.
What Do I Expect People To Like About This?
I think the fact that there’s a little bit of everything. When I program gymnastic workouts I try to mix in a bunch of different skills. We definitely do days where it’s muscle-up focused, or handstand walk focused, but I also don’t want to make people feel bad if they don’t have that movement – so that’s why I mixed in double unders and rope climbs. A lot of people – believe it or not – can do rope climbs before they can do pull-ups, and rope climbs are one of those things visually because you’re off the ground and people in normal society don’t do that in regular gyms, that I think for a lot of people they’re a big win. So when I do gymnastics, I try to mix in some really high-level stuff that maybe you can’t do, but you can challenge yourself to try, but also something where you get a little bit of a win for the day. If I programmed this workout and put in legless rope climbs that would totally bury people. So you have to play with pushing people, but also not going so far out of the realm of what people are able to do.
What Modifications Are Applicable?
For the skipping obviously there are single unders. I didn’t give people a certain number, I gave people a time – a minute and a half then I want you to stop whatever you’re doing: singles, doubles, attempts, whatever. Or you can do something different if you can’t jump, you could bike, ski, anything like that. For the handstand walks pretty much everybody did some form of that – but you could do wall walks or planks. For the rope climbs you can lay on your back and climb to a standing position or you could do pull-ups to work on strict strength. For muscle-ups you could do ring rows or dips, and then for handstand push-ups you could do dumbbell presses or pike pushups. It really depends on where people are at with those movements – some of you guys I know pretty well so I know what your goals are outside of the gym and I try to keep that in play. I want to challenge you, but I also want you to have fun.
I want to challenge you, but I also want you to have fun.
Difficulty Level?
All or some of the skills:
5/5
None of the skills:
3/5
If you have all of the skills or have some of them, it’s a five. If you have none of them, it’s a three. It’s such a different workout if you have every single skill, how they compound on each other. I don’t wanna say that one’s better than the other, but I think if you have all the movements it’s definitely very challenging to put them all together.
North Shore Athletic Club
Joe Tolles
Joe Tolles is a semi-retired, professional hockey player, CrossFit gym owner/operator, and organ donor. He is a down-to-earth person whose work ethic and motivation are infectious.
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Joe Tolles is a semi-retired, professional hockey player, CrossFit gym owner/operator, organ donor, and inspiration to others.