Welcome to Fran!

We put our guys and gals through what is perhaps the most famous CrossFit workout of all yesterday:

FRAN

21-15-9

Thrusters (42.5kg/30kg)

Pull ups

In fact, scrap that. Its definitely the most famous CrossFit workout there is! If you are a CrossFitter and meet a fellow CrossFitter before long the question will be asked, "Whats your Fran time?" Its like a badge of honour, a quick test. Exactly how fit are you?!

Fran, despite being one of the shorter benchmark workouts in the CrossFit repertoire, is just brutal. It takes you through some of the biggest range of motions the human body can go through in the Thrusters before making you shift your own bodyweight up over a bar a beautiful 45 times! It takes it out of you like nothing else and leaves you feeling completely worked over despite taking less than 10 minutes (and often less than 5 mins).

Of course you may have to scale it accordingly first if you cant quite manage the Rx'd weight or havent quite got that many pull ups yet. Even still, to be able to complete Fran Rx'd (or As Prescribed) should be a good goal of most every CrossFitter. Just to see what it feels like. Oh, and in the process you might just become very fit.

It is the workout that got me addicted to CrossFit as my goal was to keep lowering my time as much as i could. In fact that still is one of my goals! I started at 7mins 30s am now down to 3mins 54s and would like to get sub-3 mins if im honest. We'll see. Oh and just so that you all have hope, thats taken me 18 months to improve that time. These things dont happen overnight!

For a brief history of Fran i'll leave it to Greg Glassman, CrossFit co-founder to explain how and why it came about:

So yesterday was the second time since CrossFit Connect has been open that we programmed in Fran. A few had done it before but for most it was the first experience.
We scaled it to suit everybody including ring rows and sand filled pipes for those very new to CrossFit and held back on the weights even for those who have been coming a while. To do Fran with 42.5kg Thrusters takes a hell of a lot of practice, midline strength and flexibility.

We saw some great results with those repeating it knocking good chunks of time off their previous best and a few managing to do it rx'd whereas previously they had used scaled weights or pull up bands. It was great to see.

We'll give the good lady a rest for a while now but she'll be back soon to see how everyone is progressing.

Until next time.......