Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition & Safety

The Best CrossFit Gym in Cardiff

by Colin McNulty on 15 June 2009

EDIT: Feb 2011 Since writing this post, a dedicated CrossFit gym has opened in Cardiff: CrossFit Cardiff funnily enough! I recommend you go there (near Boulders Climbing Wall) and get proper CrossFit coaching from my mate Jon Hares, he’s a top coach and top fella to boot. Failing that, there’s also Dragon CrossFit, who operate out of Train Station 2, closer to the city centre.

Looking for a Crossfit friendly gym can be a frustrating task. When I was looking in London, I put together a long post on all the Crossfit capable gyms near Farringdon, London. It’s about time I did the same for Newport and Cardiff.

When I started working in Newport it was obviously one of my first jobs. Clearly it would be great to find a Crossfit friendly gym on my doorstep, but that was too much to hope for. I also didn’t expect to find somewhere in Newport so expanded my search to Cardiff from the off. Moving to a new town I did what everyone does now when looking for local information: I searched in Google and spent several days phoning and visiting gyms.

It’s probably worth listing here what makes a gym suitable for doing Crossfit? At least in my mind anyway, in rough order of my importance (obviously more of each is better), this is my list:

1. An Olympic weight lifting bar. Eleiko would be best.
2. A modest selection of bumper plates for said bar. By bumper plates, I mean rubber weight plates that don’t break the floor or themselves when dropped from over head.
3. A suitable floor to drop the bumper plates on, with enough surrounding space for safety. Basically, can I do clean and jerks, snatches, thrusters, push presses, shoulder presses etc?
4. A squat rack for back squats and front squats.
5. Somewhere to do deadlifts.
6. A rower, Concept 2 is preferred.
7. Somewhere to run, outside would be best, but treadmills are likely to be the norm obviously.
8. A pull up bar, stable enough and with enough room for kipping.
9. A selection of rubber dumbbells.
10. Boxes to jump on.
11. Medicine balls to throw at walls.
12. Walls to throw medicine balls at! Though I do hate wall balls.
13. None bouncing balls for ball slams.
14. A set of gym rings… yeah fat chance of that.

Armed with my mental list, these are the list of gyms I checked out:

Peak Physique Gym, Rhymney River Bridge Road, Cardiff, CF23 9AF, 029 2046 2040
- I called, they didn’t have any Olympic lifting facilities.
Newport International Sports Village, 01633 656656
- I called, seemingly a normal gym, the woman didn’t really get what I was asking.
Sun Health, Risca Road, Newport
- I visited this small independent gym. It had a lot of potential but was quite cramped with no possibility for olympic lifting.
Daves Gym, Cardiff, 029 2046 0232
- Again I called, they didn’t have any Olympic lifting facilities.
The Welsh Institute of Sport, Sophia Gardens, Cardiff, CF11 9SW, 0845 045 0902
- A large complex, but the gym is split between 2 cramped rooms. There were olympic lifting platforms there, but there wasn’t a lot of room and not very Crossfit friendly.
Elite Fitness, Unit 2, Fairwater Industrial Estate, Norbury Road, Cardiff, CF5 3AU, 029 2055 5272
- This gym had potential, especially with 2 Avanco oly bars, but both were rusty and very obviously bent, which was a real shame. Their video motion capture setup was cool though.
Train Station 2 (TS2), 14-15 Curran Road, Cardiff, CF10 5NE.
- See below…
Aspire Fitness, Sanitorium Road, Canton, Cardiff, CF11 8DG, 02920 23 55 23.
- See below…

It’s worth mentioning the runner up first, which was Train Station 2 in Cardiff. TS2 has a lot of room and uniquely a 90m running circuit round the outside. It’s also allegedly the home of Crossfit Wales, which is a slightly ambitious title, especially as when I went to see the place, they weren’t doing any Crossfit classes. That’s actually changed now, and I know there is a Crossfit class being run on a Saturday morning, by a certified Crossfit instructor called Dav. I’ve got his number if you’re interested.

However I decided against Train Station 2 primarily because of the oly bar and plates. Whilst possibly adequate, there wasn’t a proper lifting platform and I was concerned about dumping the bar on the 1st floor. Having seen many places by now, I was thinking I’d been spoilt by Crossfit Manchester’s dedicated lifting platforms.

That was when I found what is undoubtedly the best gym in Cardiff to do Crossfit. I’ve mentioned it before, it’s Aspire Fitness on Sanatorium road. I should put the record straight right now: when I mentioned them before I called them a “Globo Gym”. Now when I said that, I meant that they appeared (at least to my inexperienced eye) like most other “normal” gyms out there, and not like a sparse Crossfit gym. I didn’t mean to allude to them being part of a large chain, they are not and the benefit from the very friendly small business atmosphere they have. What really sold me on Aspire however, was the brand new Eleiko oly bar they had, and the very nice personalised lifting platform in the corner.

At the time I looked, they had some dodgy Apollo bumpers that were falling apart (Apollo bumpers do appear to be rubbish):

But they assured me that they would maintain a decent set, and true to their word, they now have a full set of good quality York Fitness bumpers: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25kg:

Off my shopping list of requirements, Aspire Fitness cater for very nearly everything else as well as the Olympic bar and bumper plates. They have 4 power cages (I think they’re called) for doing squats in, plus a free standing squat rack. They have plenty of weight and space for dead lifts; 2 Concept II rowing machines; I think 8 treadmills; a selection of variable sized boxes to jump on; room for floor work like press-ups (push ups for the Americans), skipping etc.

Each power rack also doubles as a pull up station, by hanging on the horizontal bars at the top. They are even cunningly designed for just such a use. The designers were so nice, they thought they’d be really helpful: the knurled the bar! I strongly suspect that most people (like I hadn’t) have never tried kipping pull ups on a knurled bar… take my advice… don’t! It will rip your hand to shreds. Fortunately the second bar at the top, whilst painted with a rough finish, is not knurled and is usable, you just have to move the bar out of the way and put it on the floor.

So pretty much the only thing Aspire don’t have, is a set of gym rings and a selection of medicine balls. They also suffer the ailment that most normal gyms suffer, it’s called mirror-itis. There are far too many mirrors for my liking, but to be fair, they are by no means everywhere and I strongly suspect that just 1 mirror, would be too many for my liking!

However there is really only 1 place to do wall balls, and even then I need to move the bin, fire extinguisher, and ensure no one is using the power rack next to it. There’s no ball slam facilities either. I tried once with one of the heavy basket balls they had, nearly knocked myself out!

Oh yes, they also have an assortment of mysterious devices, contraptions and machines which I stay well clear of, but again, not too many as most gyms have. And as you can see, if you’re prepared to go a bit later, it’s pretty quiet too. This photo was taken about 20:45 :

The point I’m making is that nothing but a dedicated Crossfit gym is going to be 100% perfect for Crossfit, and even then, not always. Aspire is not perfect, but I’d put them 90% there on my “Crossfitoscale” and that last 10% can usually be subbed, as most Crossfit elements can be, e.g. sub wall balls for empty bar thrusters.

So if you’re looking to do Crossfit in Cardiff, or even Newport which isn’t that far away, Aspire Fitness is where I’d recommend you go. They are reasonably priced, but you should measure these things on value, not just price. If you are going to go, say hi if you see me, I’m most often there on a Tuesday and Wednesday around 5-6pm. Or let Pete (one of the owners) know you found them through this blog. Oh and one more thing, if you do see me, don’t hog my oly bar! 😉

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Friday Fun – Sporting Bird Deaths

by Colin McNulty on 12 June 2009

It looks like birds have more than cars to worry about during their next period of evolution.

Cricket fielder takes out a bird:

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Golfer kills a bird on tee off:

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Bird dies during tennis doubles:

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Complete explanation of a ‘Block’ on the Zone Diet?

by Colin McNulty on 8 June 2009

The most common question I see when people are new to the zone diet, is: “What is a Block?” usually followed by a whole host of further block related questions (especially when it comes to zone fat blocks) which only go to prove that the original answer wasn’t good enough. So I’ve decided to explain why all the confusion, in one place, here goes:

Basically there are 3 ways to measure food on the Zone. Each one is more accurate, but more complicated, than the previous one:

1) The Eyeball method.
2) The Block method.
3) The Gram method.

The Eyeball method says look at your plate, fill 1/3 with lean protein, the thickness of your hand, fill 2/3 with favourable carbs, and add a dash of mono unsaturated fat. Job done.

The Block method says you can break food into Protein, Carb or Fat blocks. Add blocks of food from each group so you have a balanced meal. Simplicity comes from each food belonging to only one type of block (with a couple of exceptions like milk or yoghurt). This is why an egg say, counts as protein only, even though it contains fat as well. Yes there is some fat in all protein sources, but the block systems averages it all out and takes away that complexity from you.

The Gram method is the most accurate but the most onerous and says that 1 block of carbs is 9g, 1 block of protein is 7g and 1 block of fat is 3g. This allows you to be more accurate, as if you know that an egg contains 4g of fat, you know that 1 egg also has 1 and 1/3 fat blocks in it, and can compensate accordingly. This is why it’s sometimes right to say that the egg counts as fat as well.

(As a slight aside, egg yolks are one of the few things that Dr Sears advises not eating, better to have 2 egg whites as a single block of protein. If you want to know why, it’s all to do with Arachadonic Acid and “bad” eicosanoids.)

So I suggest you pick a Zone method (2 or 3 usually) and stick to it, or you’ll get yourself confused as people appear to give you contradictory advice. I spend my life reading labels it seems, here’s how to interpret a food label:

Read the Protein in grams. 7g = 1 block of protein.
Read the Carbohydrates. 9g = 1 block of carbs.
Read the Fat. 3g = 1 block of fat.

So the pot of yoghurt I have in my hand has:

4.5g Protein = 2/3 of a block.
6.6g Carbs = 2/3 of a block.
4.5g Fat = 1.5 blocks.

Two factors complicate this:

1) For carbs, you should subtract fibre, in grams, before working out the blocks. This is because we only really count the insulin effecting carbohydrates, and fibre effectively protects us from the full effects of the carbohydrates.

2) Usually you would say 1.5g of fat is a block, not 3g as I did above, but that’s only because we normally assume that every block of protein contains half a block of fat as well. This is almost always true, unless you’re eating a specific zero fat protein source, like protein powder (yuck!). So if you are following method #2 above (the block method), you should count fat blocks to be 1.5g of fat. However if you are following the Gram method (#3 above) then you should be are accurately counting the fat in your protein source, so take a block of fat to be 3g.

I hope that makes sense!?

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Crossfit followed by Core Combatives

by Colin McNulty on 2 June 2009

Today I tried what I hope to be the new Tuesday night regime of first going to Crossfit after work. So leaving at 4:30pm I drove into Cardiff to Aspire Fitness and was in and changed by 5pm. 75 mins of Crossfit, which comprised:

Back Squat
5 – 5 – 5 – 5 – 5

Then;
5 Rounds;
Run 200m
15 Box Jump
15 Wall Ball

The back squats I did across at 85% of my 5 rep max (which is 130kg) so at 110kg and just about managed to do them. I couldn’t do the wall balls as the place was too busy, so I subbed 15 wall balls (typically with a 16lb / 7.5kg ball) for 10 Thrusters with an empty 20kg bar. Seemed a fair swap. For the workout I finished in 14:20 and was pretty knackered afterwards. 5 x runs, gah.

Then it was off to Train Station 2 (also in Cardiff) for my second session of Core Combatives with Mick Coup. To be honest I was pretty tired before we started and Mick soon noticed. Only 10 minutes in and I was getting a bollocking for “taking it easy”. I wasn’t actually taking it easy, I was hitting as hard as I could, well as hard as I felt I could anyway.

Last week was all open palm punches, this week we focused on elbows, then with combinations with punches. The drill at the end was interesting, I was really trying hard not to laugh. You had to stand in the centre of the room with your eye’s closed, waiting for someone to bash you, any way they liked, with a pad, then you had to spin and lay into them (their pads of course). Obviously you had no idea when, where or how hard you were going to get hit, it’s a freaky experience and it made me laugh.

I’m not sure I take it seriously enough for Mick, I got bollocked a lot today. But then so did the others, so I didn’t feel singled out. I think he knew he’d gone a little far, as he stopped to explain that being, (what I shall describe on a generally family friendly blog as) a meanie poo poo head (but have rather stronger language in mind!) was all part of the service. In a street fight situation, your assailant isn’t going to be whispering sweet nothings in your ear, he’s going to be rather abusive, so if Core Combatives is training for the real world, then the chat from Mick has to reflect that, until it’s just words and water off a ducks back. Seems fair enough, but it’s an unusual situation to be in, to be paying for a deliberately abusive coach!

(P.S. Michael wins the award for the longest comment on the blog in 2 years, check it out on the English Indoor Rowing post)

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Friday Fun: Random funny videos

by Colin McNulty on 28 May 2009

Beer your “Permanent Weight loss Solution”… I can’t help but think that they should give this girl a job doing governmental educational videos, she’d be great:

Farmer Giles wondered where all Daisy’s milk was going, mystery solved. It’s the look the cow gives the camera man at the end that cracks me up:

And there’s nothing like finishing with a double car crash:

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Core Combatives in Cardiff

by Colin McNulty on 26 May 2009

As recommended by my friend Ian Sturrock, tonight I went for a 2 hour self defence class called Core Combatives (or C2 for short) in Cardiff. Run by Mick Coup, who has spent his career in the forces and various self protection roles.

Mick has a rather abrupt style and his colourful use of language certainly isn’t Sunday best, but he cuts straight to the point: what’s going to work in a real fight? From his lifetime of experience in martial arts he has condensed everything he’s been taught and gained first hand knowledge of, down to a very simple system of self defence.

So my first lesson consisted quite simply of this: Learning how to hit someone, in the head, hard, repeatedly! In essence that’s it. Everything else was pretty much poo poo’ed: neck strikes, body blows, jabs, kicks, keying, eye gouges, shin scrapes etc, much of the usual stuff “self defence” classes teach, all have their weaknesses it seems. The argument goes, that nothing is going to end a fight quicker, than knocking your opponent out, and that can be most effectively achieved by hitting the head, hard. And you keep going till the guy is no longer a threat.

I say “the guy” because the chances are you’ll be fighting a fella, but I have to say that I was most impressed with a woman who was in the class. At about 5 foot nothing, she had a pretty ordinary figure (i.e. she wasn’t some she-hulk or some super ripped gym junky, not even a typical Crossfit physique) yet she could pack one hell of a punch. Certainly if she’d been hitting me rather than the pads I was holding, she’d have knocked me on my ass with the first blow. If it can work for her, it can work for anyone.

Physically it wasn’t that hard. Sparing was most intense at the end and even 2 minutes of repeating hitting pads as hard as you can, is going to tire you out, and it did. It will be interesting to see how things develop, as I know that simple punches aren’t the only thing taught, however they are the mainstay: simple, short, and effective. Already I’m looking forward to next week.

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Comments are working again

by Colin McNulty on 22 May 2009

I don’t know what happened to the blog this week, but I couldn’t login as administrator yesterday. I managed to fix that, though I don’t actually know how. Then I was told that comments weren’t working, somehow the option to force people to be logged in to comment was turned back on?!? Weird. It should be fixed now though.

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Friday Fun – American Outsourcing

by Colin McNulty on 21 May 2009

This is quality, if only life was this simple, I can’t wait to try it out:

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Why Crossfit is bad for your Marriage

by Colin McNulty on 18 May 2009

Last week was a relatively normal week: I left home on Monday morning for the working week away, went shopping Monday night for food for the week, went to work Tuesday, went to the gym Tuesday evening… all pretty normal. Until that is, on Wednesday morning I spotted something that was decidedly NOT normal!

My neck normally looks like this:

But on Wednesday morning whilst shaving, I noticed it instead looking like this:

Where the hell did that hickey come from?!? I couldn’t believe, what’s more I didn’t think my wife would believe it either! I go away for 5 days on business and come home with a mystery love bite on my neck, this I’m reliably lead to believe, is just not the done thing. This was seriously bad news in it’s own right, but even more so because I had no idea how it had happened.

After some thought and no small amount of panic, I came to the inescapable conclusion, that it was Crossfit’s fault. You see on Tuesday I’d been to the gym. Now I don’t actually follow the Workout of the Day (WOD) from the main Crossfit.com site, instead I do the previous day’s WOD from Crossfit Manchester, my regular gym back home. I do this because it guarantees an hours workout, it helps me to keep in touch with the members of the gym whilst I’m away, and I get an element of competition because I can see what weight / time my peers have done.

As it happens, the workout I should have done at Aspire Fitness (my Cardiff gym, more on them another day, I still owe them a setting the record straight post for erroneously calling them a “globo gym”, my bad) was this:

Deadlift: 5 – 5 – 5

Then 7 Rounds of:
– Run 200m
– 15 Wall Ball
– 10 Pull Ups
– 5 Push Press, 55kg
– Rest 1 min

But I’d done heavy deadlifts the last time I was there, and they don’t quite have the setup for things like wall balls. So instead I did this from the Crossfit Manchester WOD the Thursday before, which was:

Clean and Jerk: Doubles

Then:
– Run 860m
– 3 Rounds of;
— 5 Knees to Elbows
— 10 KB Swing
— 15 Box Jump
– Run 860m

There was my love biting culprit: the clean and jerk doubles. I’d worked up to 85kg and was getting pretty tired. I made a last effort for a 90kg double, I got the first one but it was an effort, I repositioned my grip on the bar, I set myself, I pulled for all I was worth, the bar was faster than the eye:

But I was trying too hard, was off balance, my legs were tired, I twisted slightly, over pulled, dropped under and promptly smacked myself in the neck with 90kg (200lbs) of Olympic Weightlifting bar! Not surprisingly, I didn’t make the clean and tried not to gag as I threw the bar away.
Still 85kg was respectable and I moved on to the rest of the workout.

You can see how it’s easily done, the above mid-clean photo was actually taken this weekend at Crossfit Manchester doing power cleans followed by front squats, here’s the bottom of the front squat position, which is where I would have been receiving the flying bar at the bottom of the clean (there’s 85kg on the bar in the pic):

And so there you have it. Doing Crossfit = doing clean & jerks with heavy weights = getting tired = hitting yourself in the neck = bursting a blood vessel = a dodgy looking bruise which gets you into trouble with the missus when you get home from a week away! Actually to be fair, I didn’t really get into trouble, well at least I don’t think so, yet….

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