One of the things that I’ve kind-of been avoiding learning is Double Unders. When I first started doing CrossFit a couple of months ago my knees hurt just from doing all the running, box jumps, jumping up and down from the pull-up bar, that my body wasn’t used to doing since elementary school, so adding in double under practice didn’t go so well. I tried pushing through the discomfort one day as I practiced my DUs, but I could definitely tell something was up with my knees the following day. It wasn’t like my knees were injured, they worked fine, it was just overuse, which I’ve honestly never felt before in my life.
Anyways, my knees are much better now, but I’m still just battling not getting shin splints from jumping so much. Now that I have my new rope, which I’ll talk about more later, I’m starting to focus on my Double Unders on a much more regular basis. Hopefully I can finally master this skill!
Wow, I think I’m finally getting a groove down with my double unders. I think March 16th was the first day that I finally felt like I could do them somewhat consistently. The problem is that I’m still battling shin splints and so there is only so much practicing I can get in. I am working on stretching more and making sure I don’t over do it, so that I can keep practicing regularly.
Today was a good day though. I decided after class today since I was all warmed up to do some double unders before heading home. Several times I was able to get over 50 in a row, and at one point I was able to do 67! So, huge progress!
Practice wise I have been just trying to be consistently doing 10, and then stopping. This way during a workout I could do 5 sets of 10 reps if I need to do 50 in a row. I want to keep increasing this number so that I can 20 in a row consistently, then 25, 50, etc. Otherwise I feel like I max out and then I can’t even do them anymore.
My goal this year is to be able to do 100 in row. If I can hit that that will be huge. Soon enough though. I’m getting there.
For Time:
100 double unders
2000m bike erg
300ft handstand walk
2000m bike erg
100 double unders
20 min time cap
On the second set of 100 I was able to hit 89 unbroken!!! After about 50 my form completely goes out the window as my heart red lines. One thing my coach recommended was to look at a single spot on the floor instead of looking up to keep from rotating. I tend to rotate in a circle as a jump and will sometimes due a full 360 if I can jump long enough. Hopefully looking at a single spot on the floor will help. Also yes, I still have shin splin issues and I’m dealing with. We did double-unders yesterday as well and I couldn’t even do them so I just did singles. We did double-unders last week as well which, along with snowboarding, didn’t help with my shin-splints. Oh ya speaking of shin-splints, I just signed up to run my first marathon (which I’m sure I’ll be writing about) in May, so we will see what that will do to my shins!
