Written by: Dan Colpo
CrossFit is unique; In many ways, but specific to this article, in its need for high level performance and competency in an abnormally high number of areas.I’m hard pressed to find another sport that requires such a vast understanding and capacity of complex skills from already existing sporting codes. The only two I land on are MMA and The Biathlon. Therefore the road to competing in CrossFit at the highest level is one that should not be undertaken lightly. CrossFit requires us to be absolutely world class at a lot of things.
That is precisely where the beauty in the methodology lies, in its ability to achieve that.
But, that can be an incredibly overwhelming mountain to climb, especially when standing at the bottom looking up. That coupled with the fact that our sport is in fact still new as far as sports go, means that there is still a lot of very conflicting and contradictory information out there. Enough to make even the most resilient of us cower to the comfort of our blanket forts.
In this article, I want to offer a roadmap of sorts. A simplified way of looking at what are; but don't necessarily need to be, complex topics. When it comes to the long term development of an athlete, I, like all coaches, like to approach things from a neat and tidy little Acronym. The 3 P’s. These being; Plan, Patience and Persistence. A plan is where I see a lot of our community going wrong. The constantly varied nature of our sport has had the unfortunate effect of giving a lot of athletes and coaches the idea that varied means random, and so if I just show up and do things randomly, then I should improve right? Right! - But only for the very early stages of your training journey, stagnation will find you and it will take you as one of its own. A long term plan of development means a system for dealing with the complexity of our sport. On top of having a plan you must have patience. As alluded to many times already in this article, we have to get good at a lot. The overused idea of Rome not being built in a day applies well here. It will take a while, less time with a plan, but it will be a journey. The journey will end up being the best part, I promise. And, finally, persistence. You have to show up and keep showing up. You have to stick to the plan and have the mindset of stacking days. A 1% win a day is a win, and a huge win at that. Find joy in seeking those out every single session. Embrace these ideas and you will climb the mountain. At least in a way that minimizes the amount of barbell induced tantrums you find yourself having.
Now, about that mountain. As promised, for the rest of the article I'm going to give you a map to the top, in as simple a way as possible. What steps you need to take and how to take them. The development of a CrossFit athlete can be divided into three main needs. These being strength and power, cardiovascular conditioning and skill development. As coaches do, I am going to metaphorically push you up the mountain of these 3 needs, Ascend if you will.
Section 1: Strength & Power
Components of Training:
Why is Strength and Power Important: We begin with strength and power. As I see it, this is the foundation of modern day CrossFit. At our core, we are a strength sport. You have to be strong and you have to have the capacity to express that strength in a variety of different ways. Before any worry about expression though you need to ensure that you are constantly working to build and improve your maximal strength. This can be seen as your raw strength, which simply put is your ability to move a large or near maximal load over a small amount of reps, around 1-5. The development of your basic, raw strength should be something that enters your programme in the start and never leaves it. Alongside your maximal strength development you need to be developing Power. Power can be seen as the ability to move a certain load, over a certain distance in as short a time frame as possible. I.e. being explosive. This is the strength type that will be most relevant to CrossFit, everything from Olympic weightlifting, to gymnastics, to the ability to sprint on an echo bike are all expressions of power. Power development then is paramount to your development as an athlete. The best and most effective way to develop power is at light to moderate loads. Essentially we want to teach the muscles to contract really fast. This doesn’t happen at large loads, not yet at least. That only happens closer to the top of the mountain. When developing power look to always work with weight that you feel like you’re able to maintain explosivity with. If you don’t feel explosive, you’re not developing power. The added benefit of this, in the context of Olympic weightlifting is that it allows us the opportunity to practice and develop the skill. But more on that later. Before I move on from strength there are two more concepts that are worth discussing. The first is hypertrophy. In order for a muscle to produce large amounts of force, it first needs sufficient volume. In other words; being bigger helps.Therefore, adding hypertrophy work to your training is always a good idea. Hypertrophy basically is moving lighter loads for larger amounts of reps. CrossFit as a sport offers this in most workouts, however it’s smart to identify your weaker areas and spend some time developing those specifically
Progressive Overload:This doesn't mean smashing out heavy singles every week. Again, there needs to be a plan. This comes down to periodization. In the early parts of your journey or in the early parts of the season you want to be prioritizing this. But as we get closer to competition we want to focus more on maintaining this and prioritizing other elements that are more conducive to doing fitness fast. Having an annual plan for maximal strength development gives us the opportunity to ensure we take moments to deload and rest which gives our body the chance to recover and adapt. This adaptation is precisely where we get stronger. When we lift weights, in any context we are essentially damaging the muscle. Once the session is over and we enter our recovery period the body begins work repairing that muscle. The repairing of the muscle is essentially what strength and size development is. After muscle repair the muscle comes back bigger and more resilient and as such, the load that caused the previous damage is now something the muscle can handle in its sleep. It no longer gets damaged from said load. We therefore need to increase the demand in our next training session in order to cause the damage again and repeat the process. This is progressive overload. We need to actively and consciously (plan) add intensity and/or volume to our sessions to ensure the continued need for the body to adapt from the training session.
Section 2: Conditioning
Purpose: The next phase of our mountain is conditioning. Simply put, conditioning is your body's ability to express work, recover from that work and, often, repeat that work. Having a solid base of conditioning means that you will be able to put out high amounts of intensity for a longer period of time. You will be able to maintain that effort and most importantly, you will be able to recover from that work in as short a time as possible. The quicker we recover the sooner we can go again, which in the context of CrossFit competition is exceptionally important. Without going into a super boring physiology lecture, your needs in terms of conditioning come down to two parts. Aerobic conditioning and anaerobic conditioning. One is rooted in the use of oxygen and the other in lactic acid. But that's more of the boring lecture stuff.
Conditioning Components:
Aerobic Conditioning: Aerobic conditioning is the base and should be treated as such when going about training your conditioning. Before we try and set the table for thanksgiving dinner, we need to ensure that the table has legs! I’m aware that that was an awful analogy, but I'm also aware that you got my point and so it didn't get deleted. Without a solid aerobic base you will not be able to express any form of sustained intensity. Aerobic capacity simply put is longer, lower intensity forms of training. Think 20-90 minute efforts at an easy to moderate pace. The accumulation of volume here is the key, not how hard you make it. So find something you enjoy doing for longer periods of time and that doesn't cause excessive muscular or joint fatigue, and spend anywhere from 30-120 minutes per week on it. The duration per week really depends on what you need. If your background is track and field as a 100m specialist then you probably need the full dose. If your background is rowing then you probably don’t need much of it and you can focus your time on other things.
Anaerobic Conditioning: Anaerobic conditioning very basically is your body's ability to express work at high intensity, over a shorter period of time. For this type of effort our body produces high levels of lactic acid. We need two things in order to be comfortable and effective at this, we need to firstly be comfortable with the pain that comes with this and that unfortunately only comes from spending time with that pain. Secondly and more importantly though, we need to condition the body to clear this lactic acid as rapidly as possible so that we can begin to work again. This is our bodies ability to recover and like building strength we need reps of this to teach the body how to do this.
Metabolic Conditioning (MetCons): When it comes to CrossFit and its demands you need to make sure you are exposing yourselves to all of the common workout types to ensure you are priming your system to handle these demands. As a priority you should therefore expose yourself to very short, moderate and longer time domains weekly. A really effective method of priming the body for the lactic acid clearing mentioned above is the use of interval type workouts as well as Emoms. These pieces allow you to accumulate a large amount of work in a very short period of time, they also offer a mandatory short rest period before having to repeat the effort. The larger your aerobic base the higher you can push your anaerobic development which in turn leads you to be able to spend more time at higher intensities with different types of demand, it also allows you to recover from those which in turn allows you to repeat that process. All of that equals faster fitness which in our sport, is the primary goal.
Section 3: Skill Development
Our last topic is that of skill development. This in a lot of ways is where play comes into your training. In CrossFit we have a lot of skills to gain competency in. We have to become olympic weightlifters, we have to become gymnasts and we have to become skillful tacticians of our sport. The last one essentially is figuring out how to express our fitness in the fastest, most efficient way possible. This is our sport. The important thing to focus on here is two words I used earlier on in this article, journey and play. We have to remember that skill development takes time and I could write an entire article on this, that may look a bit more like a rant but skill development needs to resemble play. You need to explore and experiment without pressure and in that space you will be very surprised at what you are capable of. I think a lot of CrossFit has lost sight of this. When developing skills in CrossFit you need two things. you need to focus on a small number of skills at a time, no more than 3 but ideally about 2. And you need to focus on setting yourself up for success. You can’t develop skills under fatigue so keep it frequent, keep it short and keep it light. CrossFit skills fall into 2 main categories but to me, they fall into 3. As i mentioned above weightlifting, gymnastics and the sport.
Key Areas of Focus:
Gymnastics Skills: When it comes to gymnastics we want to focus on being as efficient as we can possibly be. Gymnastics, in the CrossFit context, will always be accompanied with some sort of fatigue, so spending time focusing on first acquiring the skill but then making the skill as efficient as possible will only make you more effective when it comes time to compete. Again, this is best achieved, at least initially, outside the context of fatigue. Start with the most accessible foundational skills like your understanding and ability to acquire and maintain an effective hollow arch and then progress to the capacity to express force through a violent hip extension and then progress to expressing that in movements like pull ups and toes to bar. Start simple and work your way outwards toward complexity.
Olympic Lifting Technique: Olympic weighting is incredibly technically demanding, Olympic weightlifters spend their entire careers dialing in their techniques and so we should approach the development of these skills from a lifelong standpoint. With two movements that have as many moving parts as the Snatch and Clean and Jerk, it is in your best interest to pick one element of the movement and spend time focusing on just that. As you develop you shouldn't worry too much about being strong in these movements, remember, we’re dealing with that at the base of our mountain, so you can afford to keep it light as you develop and make sure that you’re as technically proficient as you can possibly be. You should live between 60-75% of your 1 rep max. As a rule of thumb I like to look at developing both of these movements from the top down standpoint. Develop your ability to receive the bar effectively, then develop your ability to express hip extension into that receiving position and then work your way down to the floor.
The Sport of Fitness : Lastly and I think most excitingly is the sport side. You can choose two paths. You can choose to see every workout you do as just that, a workout, and this will benefit you in that you’ll gain the necessary fitness. Or, you can choose to see it as a race, often against training partners but mostly, and more importantly, against yourself. I encourage my athletes to approach every workout consciously. From 3-2-1 GO, you should be aware of everything you do. Because staying conscious means we are aware of what went well and what didn’t. This gives us the opportunity for reflection and it's in that reflection that we learn how to be even faster next time. I encourage you to obsess over this. How long did I stand still for? Was my rep scheme effective? What small moments in the workout allowed me a few seconds here, or there? Did I walk to the chalk bucket or did I already have chalk in my sports bra? Did I sit on the rower and start pulling to gain those few extra meters or did I sit still while tying my feet in? All of this matters and this, outside of how fit you are is the sport. And, to me atleast, It's where it really begins to get interesting. I am a firm believer that the smarter athlete will beat the fitter athlete more times than not. Be the smarter athlete by not waiting until competition day to think like this. Approach every workout ever with this mindset and you will become a rockstar. This is yet another promise I make to you.
Conclusion
To conclude I want to drive home the fact that the simpler you make the journey the more enjoyable and more sustainable it will be. If you are lifting heavy progressively, you are doing your olympic lifting at a moderate load, you are systematically checking skills off one at a time and spending time in the week doing fast and slow CrossFit then you will develop and you will grow your fitness. Do all of that with a plan and you will without a doubt see the results you’re looking for. The key to everything I've said is that you need to take care of the basics first. Once you're comfortable with those, spend time figuring out what key areas you’re lacking in and then spend time on those things 2 at a time.
If however, you read this and still feel overwhelmed by the mountain. Then find comfort in the fact that there are those out there that absolutely love figuring out a path up. We make it our life's work to carve that path and we also enjoy the complexity that I’ve tried to keep out of this article. If you’re serious about wanting to develop your ability in CrossFit then seek out our help! Much like it is probably a good idea to seek the help of an architect when building a house, it's likely also a good idea to get the help of a coach when going on your CrossFit development journey. If that resonates then reach out to us at Ascend and we’d love the opportunity to help you up the mountain.
Encourage athletes to commit to the process, consistently train in these areas, and watch their performance soar. The road to building yourself into a top Crossfit athlete is one that is going to take time and commitment. However, if you stay focused on the areas discussed above you will be moving down the right path!
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