Camille Leblanc-Bazinet didn’t become a CrossFit phenomenon without plenty of hard work. She won the CrossFit Games in 2014, and with that she earned the coveted title of Fittest Woman on Earth—and you don’t get to the top of the CrossFit world without incredible conditioning.
Crashed Ice, by the way, is a ludicrous-sounding sport that involves skating head-to-head against other athletes down a winding ice track with treacherous dips, twists, and turns—so as you might expect, the workout was grueling. In just three stations—the rowing machine, overhead squat, and toes to bar—the athletes had to survive a brutal combination of total-body cardio work, stability-taxing strength, and core muscle endurance. Each move targets a specific aspect of the athletes’ fitness, and the three of them combined makes for a sufficiently challenging WOD.
“I used two movements that demand a lot of core: Overhead squats are extremely demanding for the core, and so are toes to bars,” Leblanc-Bazinet says. “[Overhead squats] require isometric contraction, then [toes to bar] has you going into flexion.” Mixing and matching the exercises helps the athletes reap the benefits of both throughout the workout, she says.
Leblanc-Bazinet paired the two moves with some rowing sprints, which work a key group of muscles for any athlete: the posterior chain.
“Rowing is very demanding on the posterior chain and brings the cardio up, so these three movements demanded three aspects of what those athletes need. You mix them together, and the physiological and mental demand is that much higher.”
