9/23/11 "Seppuku"

We did a workout today that Josh and I used to do in our garage, before we had a gym or much equipment at all. We simply would go to the CrossFit.com mainpage and hunt for new workouts that we could do with what we had. This was a favorite workout of ours at that time, named "Seppuku" after a form of Japaneese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai bushido honor code, seppuku was either used voluntarily by samurai to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies (and likely suffer torture), or as a form of capital punishment for samurai who had committed serious offenses, or performed for other reasons that had brought shame to them. The ceremonial disembowelment, which is usually part of a more elaborate ritual and performed in front of spectators, consists of plunging a short blade, traditionally a tanto, into the abdomen and moving the blade from left to right in a slicing motion. The name suits this workout well.