The Diane Challenge

I haven’t written about Crossfit in awhile. I’ve still be going consistently about 8 times a month. Recently Solcana held its first gym-wide challenge. The Crossfit workout called Diane was chosen as the challenge. It is a two part challenge – complete it once in October and then we’ll complete it again in December. Who ever has the most improvement based on an extremely complicated calculation wins!

So what is Diane? First, many Crossfit workouts have women names, we don’t have space here to dissect that! Second, these workouts usually aren’t easy (really no Crossfit workout should be easy). Finally, Diane is simply 45 deadlifts and handstand pushups done as fast as possible, broken down like this:

21-15-9 reps of:

225-pound Deadlifts
Handstand Push Ups

Yea, so I can’t deadlift 225 pounds or do a single handstand. My current 1-rep max deadlift is 185 pounds. The recommendation was to do about 70% of that, so I used 135 pounds. And then for the handstand pushups (HSPU), I’m still working on getting upside down for any length of time, let alone pushing up! There are many different steps to scale this down. I found this great article that talks about Diane in general and how to scale the HSPU’s. For me I felt that I would be happy to get through the whole thing doing regular pushups! They are right in the middle of the “scale” that we used.

All of this was timed. It took me 7:30 to complete this workout! Hannah suggested an easy way to break it down which really helped. Break each set into thirds and take a short break (walk to the wall). So for me it looked like 7 deadlift, 7 deadlift, 7 deadlift, 7 pushup, 7 pushup, 7 pushup, 5, deadlift, 5 deadlift, 5 deadlift, 5 pushup, 5 pushup 5 pushup, 3 deadlift, 3 deadlift, 3 deadlift, 3 pushup, 3 pushup, 3 pushup. Those last pushups were killer!

All of those numbers got broken down into a basic score that can be compared and improved on. My preliminary score is 63. The range of scores was 48-89, my rank is 23/32.

Here is how the score is calculated, from the Solcana Facebook group:

The scores are calculated based on your deadlift weight, time and pushup style. Each one is given a fractional score based on your effort compared to the maximum possible effort. So, if 225 was possible deadlift weight and you did 185, your decimal score was 0.82 out of 1.

HSPU were scored as 2 points total per rep, and each other type of pushup was given a fraction of those 2 points.

HSPU w/ 1 mat = 1.75 pts
HSPU w/ 2 mats =1.5 pts
pushups = 1 pt
PU to 20″ = .75 pt
PU to 24″ = .5 pt
PU to 30″ = .25 pt

So let’s say you did 45 regular pushups, your score for the pushups is 0.5.

Lastly, your time is calculated as a decimal of the best possible time. Since zero minutes is not possible, I used 4 minutes as the best possible time. So your time is a fraction of that. For example, if it took you 5:57, your decimal was 0.9. Based on a range of 4-20 minutes with 4 minutes being 1 and 20 minutes being 0.

If you add those together, it gives you a total possible score of 3. Multiplied by 33.33 gives us a nice number out of 100 for your possible score.

At my request, Hannah posted a spreadsheet template so we could play around with improving our score. Basically the most improvement is seen by actually doing Handstand Pushups and going faster! Switching to straight HSPU’s for all 45 increases my score by 16 points, while increasing my deadllift to the Rx weight of 225 only raises it 13 points (both at the same length of time). Doing both 225 and HSPU’s in the same amount of time would increase by 30 points. Really there are a million ways to play around with the points and I could improve pretty much across the board.

Pretty much to improve you’ve got to do everything heavier, less scaled, and faster! That is a tough challenge. We are currently doing a 12 week deadlift progression and working 3x’s a week on handstand pushups so there will be improvement. Will it be enough?

Here is a video of Kristan Clever setting the new world record for Diane in 1:54: