Right on Greenville, this place is in a happening location. Sporting the converted space look that I love so much (Garage doors and exposed brick), this is a hip place as well. Surrounded by tattoo parlors and trendy restaurants like HG supply company, it makes sense that the people that work out here are also young, hip, and tatted up. I should point out that by no means does this group feel exclusive, everyone I talked to was friendly and open. I do feel the need to point out though that if tattoos and lulu lemon are your thing, then this is the place to be.
So what is the gym of social mechanics? SM purports itself to be a safer take on CrossFit. They claim that their workouts consist of all the safe exercises of crossfit, without any of the dangerous ones. So you get all the camaraderie and workout-induced high of a crossfit WOD, without those pesky trips to the doctor. Sounds like a great idea right? Well, it is a great idea, but whoever programs the workouts here does not have a complete grasp of what exercises are dangerous, as was demonstrated by my first workout here.
My first day I came in on a Tuesday, which is when they usually do their metabolic conditioning exercises. For those that don't know what metabolic conditioning is, it's a workout where you move light-medium weights around for higher reps and for longer periods of time (10-20 minutes).
During this metabolic conditioning exercise we did sumo deadlift kettle bell high-pulls (SDHP), box jumps (tons of box jumps), toes to bar or knees to chest, and wall balls. I was really surprised that they tout themselves as safer than CrossFit because those first three exercises are some of the most dangerous exercises in Crossfit.
First, the SDHP. It's been well known for YEARS in the crossfit community that SDHP’s can potentially hurt your shoulder, specifically the supraspinatus. Don’t believe me? I’m not offended, but if you are interested here are four posts about why the
SDHP can easily cause a shoulder impingement that
puts your supraspinatus at risk, making
it a stupid exercise. And yet, SM’s “safer programming” for that day was chock-full of SDHP’s. But enough of that, let’s go to another dangerous, and misused exercise: the box jump.
The box jump was originally used as a nice finisher after hard workouts; it was also originally a depth jump. For example, you do your workout, and at the end you do like 6 (AT MOST) reps where you jump from one box, onto the ground, and using the body’s plyometric abilities, bounce back up to another box. Here is a vid of Dwayne Wade using this technique. The box jump (jumping from the ground up onto the box without first jumping down off of a box) as it has now become popular, is just bad news in high reps. A single box jump can be a great test/demonstration of power and agility. If you can jump onto a box as high as yourself then you are quite the athlete.
 |
GHDs, something else that can
be really dangerous if you
don't know what you're doing |
But to try to jump somewhat high over and over and over again is just asking for a badly scraped shin at best or a blown Achilles tendon at worst.
The dangers of high rep box jumps has been
pretty well documented (
and made fun of); I don’t understand where Social Mechanic can think that doing like a hundred box jumps in a workout is safe for anyone. Hell, I missed a jump myself and almost got hit in the head by fellow box-jumper.
So that leads us to the last exercise in the workout: kipping toes to chest.
It’s not the knees to chest that is so bad, it’s the kipping action that is the element of danger. The kipping action is dangerous because it is easy to do incorrectly. Kipping pull-ups is If you don’t have a lot of shoulder strength and you perform the kipping mechanic, it exposes the joint to all types of damage. Kipping knees to chest does the same thing.
The reason why you don't seen the top CF athletes getting slap lesions is because their shoulder mobility sucks. If your shoulder mobility sucks when you relax your shoulder muscles at the bottom of the pullup you have your muscles contracting against opening the shoulder all the way thus mitigating any forces on the biceps long head tendon. In addition, the muscles do help bar forces from the shoulder.
However, when you get people who are weak (e.g. women in general, or those with good shoulder mobility) they're the ones getting the primary forces distributed through the muscles into the other soft tissues such as the long head of the biceps. This is especially the case with learning the kipping pullups where there's going to be a lot of jerking down into the motion while learning it.
I would never ever ever ever recommending learning kipping before you at least have 3+ deadhang pullups. It's not just not a good idea putting trauma on the shoulder especially when it's easy to not do it right and jerking down into the movement which is much more dangerous than a smooth movement.
Jerking down from toes to bar can do the same thing for reference.
Someone else has eloquently described what is going on with the kipping motion:
Just imagine the "peel-back" force in the shoulders when they are forcefully wrenched back at the apex/reversal point of the kip. If you really think about it, the head of the humerus is trying to push out the front of the glenohumeral (shoulder) joint, the kipper is trying to RELAX their muscles at the bottom to get the most out of their kip, leaving all the strain on the LABRUM (think of it as a suction cup on the scapula that holds the humerus on the body, with the greatest forces on the top/superior and the front/anterior parts), and the resultant forces--over time (repetition)--TEAR the TOP part of the labrum from the FRONT to the BACK...this is therefore a SUPERIOR LABRUM ANTERIOR-POSTERIOR injury mechanism, almost perfectly designed (as evidenced by the orthopedic doctors making a ton of money off of people who do them).
So yeah, kipping anything can be dangerous for your shoulder if you don’t have the technique or strength.
To sum it all up: this place can offer up some dangerous exercises if you’re not careful and aware of the dangers.
Afterwards I was told that they usually do a strength workout on Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays, so I decided to come in again and see how it works on strength days. I was curious as to how different their strength day is from their met-con day. …That and I still didn’t have a car and they were within walking distance.
So the workout was 5-5-5-5 of hang clean. The instructor said we could take as much time as we wanted between sets, so I was pumped. I usually take 2-3 minutes of rest between sets when the lifting gets heavy, and my moderate goal was to have the last set be 185#.
However, I never got to that weight because everyone else rushed through their sets, leaving me as the last lifter standing, so I ended on my third set. I was a little disappointed because it seemed that no one was really interested in trying to lift as heavy as they could. Maybe they were following some template I was unaware of, but I don’t think so.
Following the strength part was yet another metcon, a variation of Cindy: 10 rounds of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, and 15 squats. So really the main focus here is the met-con again, with a little strength on the side.
So all in all I don’t see how this gym is really any different than your normal crossfit gym except for the fact that they don’t do snatches and clean and jerks. (although apparently they do hang cleans). As a big fan of Olympic lifting I’m a little disappointed that they threw the baby (Oly lifting) out with the bath water (high reps Oly lifting), especially when they decided to leave a tub of acid (kipping, SDHP, and Box jumps) lying around.
Days in: 143
Money spent: $10
