By Coach: Mahmoud Elzayat
Introduction
Ascend Athlete is a company that offers remote coaching. While we as a company offer all kinds of programs in the strength and conditioning and general fitness realm, one of our major specialties is Crossfit training.
Crossfit, known for its unknown and unknowable, is the sport of non-specialized fitness. Most commonly, it combines the elements of endurance, moving heavy objects in space, and controlling your body’s movement in space at a high intensity.
While all athletes need to develop their fitness levels in all elements and aspects of fitness, strength tends to be a pre-requirements, to different extents, for each of those elements.
Not only is strength crucial for one to be able to pull a rower’s handlebar effectively, or pedal on a bike powerfully for a certain duration, or pull yourself up to a pull up bar, and so on, but also, strength is crucial to your longevity.
Building stronger muscles and stronger movement patterns will, in effect, lead to better preservation of tendons and joints moving frequently in a highly repetitive fashion. First words you hear in a Physical therapist office are “Your —- is weak and that’s why the joint is injured”.
Section 1: Why Strength Training is Vital for New CrossFit Athletes
Strength training has been associated with numerous benefits, but let’s talk about what it does for your daily life.
Strength is known to be associated with an improved bone density and a lowered risk of osteoporosis as a result of aging. Strength is also known to be positively correlated to high independence and functionality in older ages, providing a higher quality of life.
Aside from slowing down aging associated markers, it also provides an individual with a sense of independence in their daily life tasks, whether moving heavier objects, pulling heavy objects off the floor or even picking up your child and being able to keep up with them.
Finally, strength training is also associated with positive self-perception and having higher confidence levels, knowing deep inside your physical capabilities that you have gained through your journey in strength training.
From a training perspective, increasing your strength levels in various and different movements and planes of motion has a direct relationship on an athlete’s progress in other elements regardless of their kind. Strength lays the foundation and basic limitations for a body’s ability to move in different ways. For example, if you work on strengthening your lower body, your running would definitely start improving based on improved running power, or improved left-right balance or faster cadence or many other reasons that started with: A stronger lower body.
Section 2: Key Principles of Strength Training for Beginners
Starting athletes could be easily overwhelmed by how to train and increase their strength.
Let us start by putting down the first and most important principle, “Move well, before you move heavy”. Strength training might as well be renamed to “Conditional” Strength training, only performed if you pursue to perform at the best form possible.
Whenever an athlete comes to train a new movement or an unfamiliar one, they must seek proper education from a trainer or a coach on how to do the movement properly.
The best way to learn a new movement is to watch the movement being done in a proper way, then attempt to perform it with the coach/trainer watching for immediate feedback.
Once the fundamentals of the movements are practiced over and over until the movement patterns are refined and understood, then comes the concept of progressive overload. This concept dictates that as time goes, your total dosage of a certain exercise, that you aim to improve, needs to increase. Whether with volume, intensity or reduced recovery, progressive overload can take multiple forms. For most beginners, a linear approach of progressive dosage shows increase in strength numbers across a broad spectrum. Once an athlete shows a certain level of mastery and overcomes that initial phase, there are other ways of progressive overload that could be discussed with the coach.
Regardless of what phase you are as an athlete, whether you are new to strength training or you’ve been doing it for a decade, the one method we know works is Consistency in lifting.
It doesn’t matter what program you follow or how heavy you lift every time you do, if you don’t consistently lift and practice the motion often, the programming tends to be useless in giving you the progress you’re seeking.
Section 3: Essential CrossFit Strength Movements for Beginners
The Squat:
One of the main foundational movements in Crossfit and strength training, generally. It is a movement that mimics sitting and standing up with various ways of loading the body. This movement is a full body exercise, working the lower body, the torso and to an extent the muscles of the upper body, depending on the variation of the squat.
The Deadlift:
Another main foundational movement in Crossfit that lays down the infrastructure for any pull off the ground. The movement works the midline, the posterior side of the body, generally speaking and specifically the lower body. The deadlift mimics picking up any object off the ground and standing it up.
The Press (Overhead/Strict Press):
A Muti-variant movement that has many faces. However, all presses carry out the same function of pressing a weight from the shoulder level to the overhead position. This movement builds up pressing strength in the upper body and the midline.
The Pull-Up:
While this could be looked at and labeled as a gymnastics training movement, it still builds up pulling strength in the upper body and midline. Pulling strength is crucial for shoulder health in the long term and it does reflect in multiple functional, day to day pulling movements that aren’t just hanging from the pull up bar.
Core Stability Exercises:
If you read any one of the above foundational movements, you’ll notice one common part of the body that’s being worked on in every movement, the midline (a.k.a. The core).
In Crossfit, there’s a known principle of motion known as “Core to extremities”. This principle depicts the core as the glue that holds the body together and allows the extremities to develop acceleration and power in movement.
It is important to train your core strength via dynamic and static exercises (for example: Sit ups and planks). This way you ensure the stability of the core before the extremities move in any plane with whichever speed or power output.
Section 4: Tips for Building Strength Safely in CrossFit
The reason that you don’t see as many people squat or lift, generally, as they run or swim or cycle is the overwhelming fear of injury.
Injury can happen in any sport, however, there are proper steps to take to minimize the risk of injury during whichever sport or exercise routine you adopt.
Let’s start with the most understated strategy of going through a proper, relative and well-thought warm-up.
Gone are the days where the warm-up brings to mind an image of a person stretching before they exercise. Warm-ups need to be dynamic and specific to the session you’re about to perform.
Starting off with elevating the body temperature and heart rate with a general, easy on the joints, typically a row, bike or jog. Following that, mobilization of the joints and working through dynamic stretches to open up the body to its full range of motion. If the body is not “ready” to move, skipping mobilization could definitely lead to inflamed joints or overstretched muscles during the training session. Improving your mobility, generally, helps sustain injury-free longevity in strength training. Through lowering the stress on the joints during the movement and expanding the range of motion and ensuring the stability of the joint during the movement is another understated principle in injury prevention in any exercise routine or sport training. Final step of warming up is activation of the muscles that you’re about to use in your training. This is done through lightly loaded movements that engage the muscles in movements that increase their blood flow and lead to controlled and proper muscle contractions and relaxation to avoid any loading of the joints.
Another concept that helps reduce the risk of injuries is the concept of recovery and listening to the body. Recovery days are typically overlooked as part of any successful training program. Athletes, especially newer to exercise, don’t like “rest days” and partly believe that they’re only hindering their progress. However, the body requires time to adapt to all the stimuli that are loaded onto the body throughout the week. Overtraining could definitely lead to hindering one’s progress, by keeping the body into a deficit, preventing it from transforming the stimuli of training into progress in strength and conditioning performance markers.
Conclusion
To sum up, strength training is generally beneficial to all kinds of athletes, however it is crucial and foundational to a Crossfit athlete. Not only for strength specific progress, but it lays down the infrastructure for all progress in different aspects of training such as gymnastics or developing power or speed.
If we were to leave you with a few advice on how to best approach strength training, we’ll stick with: Don’t overlook the importance of technique, consistency in strength training is massively important and finally, find a programming philosophy that embraces a progressive overload approach in strength training.
We hope you found this informative and easy to apply to your training. We invite you to reach out or follow Ascend Athlete Training for more beginner tips and personalized coaching through our social media content and regular blogs.
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