If you haven’t read Part I yet, you can find it here.

Gymnastics

1) More Development of Strict Variations

In past years, my programming has included plenty of work on developing fundamental gymnastics strength (hollow rocks, anyone?) and skill, but relatively little on strict variations of the actual movements commonly seen in competition.

Two years into seeing a strict gymnastic movement (handstand pushups) on the Regional stage, I’m left wondering if other movements, such as pullups, muscle-ups, and toes-to-bar will head down the same path. Just in case, I plan on a slight tipping of the scales towards strict movements.

This is particularly important, I think, for particular athletes. Disregarding the obvious case of athletes with a significant weakness or disparity with regard to strict movements, it seems that female athletes and long- limbed athletes see substantial carryover into their kipping movements from strict development.

This does not suggest that there is any less importance in developing efficiency and capacity with kipping movements, which will continue to be an integral part of competitive CrossFit.

2) More Max Effort Work

With regard to developing capacity, my gymnastics programming has typically focused on pacing, volume tolerance, and reducing rest periods between manageable sets with relatively little focus on being able to do very large single sets. The last few years of the Games and Regionals have demonstrated that there is a great advantage in having a high threshold for top end sets, through events like the pullup/overhead squat at 2014 Regionals, the Muscle-Up Biathlon at the 2014 CrossFit Games, and the muscle-up/squat clean ladder at 2015 Regionals.

Accordingly, this year I will spend more time helping my athletes develop that max effort capacity in the “big three” gymnastics movements.

Muscle-Ups: These will see the most focus in this area, because they have the highest cost of failure (breaking a set of muscle-ups has a higher time cost and fatigue cost than breaking a set of pullups or handstand pushups) and the lowest cost of training (max sets of kipping muscle-ups present far less total volume than max sets of kipping pullups or kipping handstand pushups.)

Pullups & Handstand Pushups: These will see less max effort work than muscle-ups. Pullups have arguably the highest cost of training for top sets, due to the risk of tearing the hands, which can impede training for days. Handstand pushups for max sets can present a tremendous amount of stress to the shoulders, in a sport which already emphasizes a lot of work overhead. Both pullups and handstand pushups have a relatively low cost of failure compared to muscle-ups.

Energy Systems

1) Row for Calories

As much as it must irk the rowers amongst us, in competitive CrossFit calorie rowing is at least as prevalent as rowing for meters. Since the first inclusion of rowing in the Open in 2014, both Open workouts (14.4 and 15.5) and both Regionals workouts (the 50s chipper in 2014 and the row/chest-to-bar pullups/strict handstand pushup in 2015) involving rowing have been performed for calories, with only the rowing event at the Games (Triple 3) being contested for meters.

If specificity is king, and it is, then it’s time I start programming rowing for calories as seriously as I program rowing for meters. Athletes will find value in developing familiarity with their calorie per hour rate, just as they develop familiarity with their 500m split.

It is also important to bear in mind that the Concept 2 rewards input differently for distance (linear increase relative to input) and energy (exponential increase relative to input.) This chart illustrates the concept nicely. As such, it is important for the athlete to know what to expect when they choose to work harder, or not, when rowing for calories.

2) Up the Intensity (Where it Counts)

In the 2015 Games season, one of the major changes to my programming was regular, focused, progressive low intensity steady state training. This type of work was accomplished through two primary means: Firstly, classic, steady state efforts, such as 60 minutes at a low rate of perceived exertion (around @ 6), and secondly, long intervals at a moderate intensity (around @ 7-8) with short rests, such as 3-5 sets of 5-7 minutes of work with 60 seconds moving recovery between sets.

I strongly believe that this has been a great improvement in my methodology. Not only does it have a direct impact on athlete’s performance in aerobic dominant events, it seems to be allowing them to handle higher training volumes across domains.

However, several of my athletes have noticed that while they are able to maintain consistent intensity for longer durations with relatively little fatigue, they find themselves unable to really push themselves to a near redline effort when the time comes.

As a result, I’m taking a more cyclical approach to the programming of monostructural aerobic training, to allow for greater translation of basebuilding work into higher intensities, moving from low to moderate/high to high intensity phases. An easy way to think of this is to make it analogous to commonly used strength training phases, transitioning from hypertrophy (low intensity) to strength development (moderate/high intensity) to peaking or intensification (high intensity.) Below are possible examples of rowing interval workouts for the three phases.

Low Intensity: Row 4×6 minutes @ 7-8, Rest 1 minute between efforts

Moderate/High Intensity: Row 6x500m @ 8-9, Rest 1:1 between efforts

High Intensity: Row 1x500m @ 8 Rest 1:1, 1x500m @ 9, Rest 1:2 3x500m @ 10, Rest 1:3-4

It is important to recognize that while nearly all athletes will benefit from periodizing in this fashion, the top level of intensity which they train at will vary.

3) Integration

I’ve long espoused the importance of creating competition like scenarios in training, especially close to the competition season. I’ve particularly spoken about lifting on a clock and/or under fatigue.

However, I’ve done relatively little of this type of work with energy systems development, instead allowing sport practice to play that role. This year, I’ve decided to take more multimodal work into fully organized, repeatable energy systems development training, particularly for higher level athletes and particularly approaching competition.

As written above with more conventional methods of energy systems development, this multimodal approach can be applied at low, moderate, and high intensities. Below are examples example of a short (three workout) progression for all three.Although the workouts are not identical through the progressions, they contain elements which are similar enough in terms of time domain to be comparable from week to week. It could just as easily be done with identical elements, increasing certain elements each week, such as more repetitions on a particular movement or adding a round.

In the third and final installment of this year’s edition of “I Make Mistakes So You Don’t Have To,” we will delve into concerns of sport specific preparation.

RELATED ARTICLES

[Strong360] Balancing Energy Systems Needs for CrossFit Athletes

I Make Mistakes So You Don’t Have To: 2015 Edition Part 1

 Stop Treating CrossFit Like a High-Intensity Sport

I Make Mistakes So You Don’t Have To: 2014 Edition

Jacob Tsypkin is the owner and founder of TZ Strength, a company providing programming, coaching, and consulting for competitive CrossFit athletes. He is dedicated to an athletes-first philosophy designed to give the athlete access not only to expertise in the sport, but a network of specialists in other domains, as well as a support structure built around a microcosm of the strong community CrossFit is known for. Jacob focuses on improving athletes inside out, from snatches and muscle-ups to mindsets and gameplans.

To make the event a truly CrossFit experience, of course, the clean and jerk was the second part of a two-part workout. Athletes would have 6 minutes to establish a 1RM immediately after a 9 minute triplet of toes-to-bar, deadlifts, and snatches. 

No one predicted the rash of PRs that would follow, including from highly qualified athletes; though I don’t think anyone who’s been involved with CrossFit for any appreciable length of time should be particularly surprised.

I personally know one Games athlete who PRed both clean and jerk, and clean in 15.1a. I know another just-shy-of-Games athlete who PRed clean. Secondhand (from their coaches), I know of two other Games athletes who PRed their clean and jerks. All of these athletes posted very high-level scores on 15.1, and all of them have clean and jerks that would be nationally competitive in their respective weight classes.

This leads me – and I assume others – to wonder at the mechanisms behind this phenomenon.

The easy way out, of course, is to downplay the athlete’s ability in the lifts or the intelligence of their training. But this seems backwards to me. After all, the CrossFit athlete’s goal is to excel in CrossFit, and hitting a PR clean and jerk (at national-level weights) under fatigue is about as CrossFit as you can get. So let’s take a look at some possible reasons for why this occurs, and how you can best prepare for it.

How It Happens

Specificity of Adaptation

If you read Juggernaut regularly, you’ve likely come across this term before. It’s fairly self explanatory: The body will adapt directly and specifically to the stressors imposed on it.

Fairly often, distance runners will run their fastest 400m at the end of a max effort 5k, or their fastest mile at the end of a marathon, sometimes even hitting lifetime PRs in the process. Some of this, of course, comes down to masterful pacing. However, it would be foolish to downplay the role of their training for this specific ability. 

In light of this, it becomes clear that hitting PRs under fatigue is not all that strange an occurrence. CrossFitters train (or should train) in a way that demands them to maintain near maximal strength levels when pre-exhausted from other events.

Specificity of Stressors

It seems intuitive to assume that being pre-fatigued from a workout like 15.1 would preclude any possibility of a PR, or near-PR lift. This assumption, however, warrants further investigation, specifically into types of stress and types of fatigue.

15.1 is a 9 minute triplet, particularly fatiguing to the grip and midline. The primary energy sources for the workout are likely to be local glycogen stores, particularly in the abdominals, hip flexors, forearms, hamstrings, and lats.

Obviously, these muscle groups are active and important in a maximal clean and jerk, and reduction in local glycogen stores does have the potential to impact a 1RM effort. However, it is important to consider not only the musculature in use, but the energy source: A 1RM clean and jerk is powered primarily by ATP, not glycogen. While ATP stores will have been impacted early in 15.1, an athlete with good aerobic development will have had sufficient time during the workout, and in the 60-90 seconds of relaxed movement during the shift from 15.1 to their first attempt in 15.1a, to recover ATP stores to a level where high force and power production are possible.

CrossFitters are primarily aerobic athletes, so it isn’t unreasonable to assume that the difference in a CrossFit athlete’s ability to pull this off comes down to aerobic capacity.

Head Games

The nature of an event such as 15.1a is such that it creates an odd dichotomy. The competition aspect raises arousal, while the clock functionally destresses the athlete by not allowing her time to think about the lift very much.

Many CrossFitters, and a good amount of weightlifters as well, have set a PR in a timed set type of workout – something like every minute on the minute. There are, of course, physiological factors at play here, but I believe the psychological factors are more important. The athlete is put into a situation wherein she is unable to dedicate much mental energy to worrying about how heavy the bar is, how close she is to her PR, or how unlikely it’s supposed to be that she can make this lift under these conditions. Instead, she simply makes a game plan and sticks to it, with no hesitation – simply because she has no other option.

Additionally, it is important to consider the power of the athlete’s psyche in such scenarios. In fact, that power is perhaps the most compelling reason to watch sports in the first place: watching athletes overcome tremendous obstacles in pursuit of victory.

Couple these conditions, and it is easy to see the potential for big lifts in 15.1a.

How To Prepare For It

Understanding the phenomenon is well and good, but what we really want is to understand how to prepare for it. Fortunately, it’s a fairly simple task – albeit not at all an easy one.

Timed Sets

The first step is to get yourself used to lifting on a clock, and the safest and most productive way to get started is by using timed sets in your strength training. I believe this is the best first option for a few reasons:

1. Timed sets are valuable not only to prepare you for maximal lifts under fatigue, but are an effective strength development tool on their own. They allow the athlete to accumulate substantial training volume and improve special work capacity for greater training loads down the line, with the sport specificity to CrossFit as an added bonus.
2. For relatively novice lifters, a scenario more like 15.1/15.1a is more likely (though not inherently so) to degrade technique. For these same lifters, repeated timed sets of the same pattern can actually improve mechanics as fatigue accumulates.

Check out Jacob on The Strong360 Podcast with Chad Wesley Smith

Practice The Sport

The second step is as simple as it gets: Do CrossFit. In that prescription, include varied forms of lifting under fatigue.

It is wise to wait until an athlete’s mechanics are firmly cemented before practicing this type of training. Then, work on reducing the amount of time between the pre-fatiguing element and the lift.

As an example, an athlete may start preparing for this type of event by doing a conditioning session in the morning, and lifting in the afternoon. Gradually reduce the break to 30-60 minutes, and eventually start practicing events like 15.1/15.1a, with the lift immediately following a CrossFit piece of some type.

Stay Cool 

As important as training the physical element is training the psychological element.

First,  learn to approach each day’s work with a calm and collected mind. Stop getting hyped up for every lift and every workout. This is likely to lead to burnout. Instead, treat training as a professional: Show up, do your work, enjoy it, but don’t let your emotional state be in a constant flux of highs and lows. Strive for equilibrium.

Second, let go of what you can’t control. 15.1/15.1a calls for you to clean and jerk as close to maximum as possible while fatigued. You don’t have a choice in the matter, so why worry? Commit to performing to the extent of your ability, period.

Finally, keep a positive mindset. Don’t ever convince yourself that you “can’t” do something, either on the macro scale (“I can’t possibly qualify for Regionals with a 20 person cutoff”), or the micro scale (“I can’t possibly clean and jerk close to PR weight after 15.1). This is simply not something that top athletes succumb to.

 As you approach this event and events like it, practice positive affirmations, and don’t be afraid to go big just because you’re not “supposed” to be able to. You may surprise yourself with your strength and capacity.

RELATED ARTICLES

[Strong360] Balancing Energy Systems Needs for CrossFit

Maximal Strength Programming for CrossFit

Jacob Tsypkin is a CrossFit and weightlifting coach, and the co-owner of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club in Monterey, CA.

Website, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

For many athletes, the off-season represents a time to get back to the barbell and build strength. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Strength is, after all, an important component of the sport, and the limiting factor for many an athlete.

However, there are some common mistakes that most athletes taking this approach seem to make. Below are some do’s and don’ts to help you build an off-season strength program that is as productive in the long term as in the short, and is geared toward developing strength specific to the sport of CrossFit.

Do

Do start with a base-building phase.

It’s likely that leading up to and during the Open, your strength training was not organized in a conventional model. You probably had a little more intensity and variance, frequent sport specificity, and a little less volume.

Training like this is an important component of the competition season, but it means that you could probably do with some time refining technique on the big lifts, building specific work capacity, and preparing your joints for high-volume strength training.

Start the off-season with a 3-6 week base-building block. Focus on explosive, technically perfect reps with controlled rest periods. Keep the average intensity around 70%, with workouts as light as 55% and as heavy as 80%.

Do vary your strength inputs.

It’s easy to get caught up with the barbell – and for good reason. It is, without a doubt, the best tool we have available to us for developing maximal strength. It’s also highly sport specific. In 2014, the barbell made an appearance in five of five Open events, five of seven Regionals events, and six of thirteen Games events.

However, in our pursuit of mastery of this most hallowed of strength training tools, it can be easy to forget that in competitive CrossFit, you need to be strong in a variety of modalities which respond best to specific training.

The barbell should be at the center of any effective strength program, but don’t be afraid to dedicate some time to improving your proficiency with strongman training, heavy kettlebells, and other, less conventional, tools.

Remember that strength isn’t just about moving weight. A sound strength base in gymnastics movements is crucial, and this is the time to nail it in. Work on strict variations, tempo development, weighted exercises, and technical progressions.

Lastly, spend time strengthening movement patterns and ranges of motion that may fall by the wayside during the high volume and relatively narrow focus of training later in the year. Rotational exercises, unilateral squatting, pulling and pressing variations, and unconventional exercises can all fit into a well-rounded off-season strength program.

Do maintain existing skill sets.

High-rep weightlifting, kipping pullups, and handstand walking are all skills, and skills take practice to maintain and refine.

During off-season strength building, it’s important to keep working at these abilities, typically at lower volumes and intensities, so that you don’t need to spend more time than necessary rebuilding them as you move into later parts of the year.

Keep in mind that changes in strength can change the way your body moves, and by continuing to practice technical skills as these changes occur, you can smooth the transition. This is especially true if your strength cycle induces substantial weight gain and hypertrophy.

Do maintain your aerobic base.

Perhaps the single most common mistake made by CrossFit athletes looking to build strength is to completely drop low intensity steady state training, and heavily bias very short, very high intensity pieces for their conditioning.

Superficially, this seems sensible. After all, aerobic adaptations occur on the opposite end of the energy systems spectrum from strength adaptations. Not to mention the substantial caloric impact of low-intensity, moderate-to-long duration cardiovascular training.

However, these short-term differences don’t tell the whole story. We must consider the global impact of foregoing intentful low-intensity aerobic training during a strength-building phase for the CrossFit athlete.

Firstly, we must consider the impact of hypertrophy on perfusion. Perfusion is the process of the body delivering blood to capillary beds in biological tissue. Sufficient perfusion is how the athlete shuttles blood and all the things that blood brings into muscles during exercise.

The importance of sufficient perfusion for any athlete competing in endurance events is clear. Perfusing mass is a longer, more difficult process when there is more mass to perfuse. So by maintaining the aerobic system during strength-building phases, an athlete avoids the much harder task of, effectively, building a new aerobic system.

It’s true, of course, that this may make the strength- and mass-building process slower. But that’s the name of the game. And fortunately, with the right strategy, aerobic training doesn’t need to affect your strength development nearly as much as you may think. Check out “The Hybrid Athlete” by Alex Viada for the best resource out there on concurrent strength and endurance development.

Don’t

Don’t jump into Program X.

High-volume weightlifting and powerlifting programs like Smolov, Sheiko, and Hatch may all have value, applied for the right athlete. However, these programs are not designed for the CrossFit athlete.

When planning your off-season strength development, it’s crucial that you consider both the context of the sport, and long-term training impact.

Can you afford to reduce the volume of everything else you do in order to bring your squat up? If not, can you afford the increased risk of overuse injury brought on by undertaking a very high-volume squat program while also trying to maintain other facets of your game?

There are certainly cases where an athlete genuinely should drop everything in an effort to get stronger. But in my experience, they are few and far between. The wiser approach is to develop a program suited to your sport, not someone else’s.

Don’t overdo the HIIT.

Interval training is a fantastic tool, but high intensity comes at a high cost. Intervals may be closer to strength development on the energy systems spectrum, but they are much harder to recover from. Anaerobic intervals in particular use up precious glycogen stores, which require roughly 48 hours of rest to be fully replenished.

During strength-building phases, I prefer to keep the intervals to what I refer to as aerobic

base intervals. In this type of work, the work period is significantly longer than the rest (3:1 or greater). This allows the athlete to work at higher intensity than a steady state piece, while staying aerobic and practicing pacing strategies.

Don’t try to build strength with your WODs.

Let your strength program do its work. The occasional heavy metcon is fine, but don’t try to build it in as part of your general strength development. If anything, spend more time with light weights and bodyweight movement, to allow your joints to recover from the heavy loading.

There are exceptions to this rule, particularly with high-level athletes who need to develop this specific ability. But typically, these athletes already have sufficient base strength and need to carry it over into the sport. In this case, a program based around heavy WODs is what they need. Most people are not this athlete.

Don’t stop practicing your sport.

You are still a CrossFit athlete, and that means you need to continue practicing CrossFit.

Where needed, limit volume, loading, duration, and intensity. But, at least occasionally, make sure you practice all facets of your game in some way. These skills and capacities will be much harder to regain further down the road if you ignore them completely now.

Take the full year of training and the context of the sport into consideration. Develop a program designed to build strength for the specific needs of the CrossFit athlete. Lift responsibly.

Related

Delineating Levels in CrossFit Athletes

Maximize Your Off-Season

Jacob Tsypkin is a CrossFit and weightlifting coach, and the co-owner of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club in Monterey, CA.

Website, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

To make the event a truly CrossFit experience, of course, the clean and jerk was the second part of a two-part workout. Athletes would have 6 minutes to establish a 1RM immediately after a 9 minute triplet of toes-to-bar, deadlifts, and snatches. 

No one predicted the rash of PRs that would follow, including from highly qualified athletes; though I don’t think anyone who’s been involved with CrossFit for any appreciable length of time should be particularly surprised.

I personally know one Games athlete who PRed both clean and jerk, and clean in 15.1a. I know another just-shy-of-Games athlete who PRed clean. Secondhand (from their coaches), I know of two other Games athletes who PRed their clean and jerks. All of these athletes posted very high-level scores on 15.1, and all of them have clean and jerks that would be nationally competitive in their respective weight classes.

This leads me – and I assume others – to wonder at the mechanisms behind this phenomenon.

The easy way out, of course, is to downplay the athlete’s ability in the lifts or the intelligence of their training. But this seems backwards to me. After all, the CrossFit athlete’s goal is to excel in CrossFit, and hitting a PR clean and jerk (at national-level weights) under fatigue is about as CrossFit as you can get. So let’s take a look at some possible reasons for why this occurs, and how you can best prepare for it.

How It Happens

Specificity of Adaptation

If you read Juggernaut regularly, you’ve likely come across this term before. It’s fairly self explanatory: The body will adapt directly and specifically to the stressors imposed on it.

Fairly often, distance runners will run their fastest 400m at the end of a max effort 5k, or their fastest mile at the end of a marathon, sometimes even hitting lifetime PRs in the process. Some of this, of course, comes down to masterful pacing. However, it would be foolish to downplay the role of their training for this specific ability. 

In light of this, it becomes clear that hitting PRs under fatigue is not all that strange an occurrence. CrossFitters train (or should train) in a way that demands them to maintain near maximal strength levels when pre-exhausted from other events.

Specificity of Stressors

It seems intuitive to assume that being pre-fatigued from a workout like 15.1 would preclude any possibility of a PR, or near-PR lift. This assumption, however, warrants further investigation, specifically into types of stress and types of fatigue.

15.1 is a 9 minute triplet, particularly fatiguing to the grip and midline. The primary energy sources for the workout are likely to be local glycogen stores, particularly in the abdominals, hip flexors, forearms, hamstrings, and lats.

Obviously, these muscle groups are active and important in a maximal clean and jerk, and reduction in local glycogen stores does have the potential to impact a 1RM effort. However, it is important to consider not only the musculature in use, but the energy source: A 1RM clean and jerk is powered primarily by ATP, not glycogen. While ATP stores will have been impacted early in 15.1, an athlete with good aerobic development will have had sufficient time during the workout, and in the 60-90 seconds of relaxed movement during the shift from 15.1 to their first attempt in 15.1a, to recover ATP stores to a level where high force and power production are possible.

CrossFitters are primarily aerobic athletes, so it isn’t unreasonable to assume that the difference in a CrossFit athlete’s ability to pull this off comes down to aerobic capacity.

Head Games

The nature of an event such as 15.1a is such that it creates an odd dichotomy. The competition aspect raises arousal, while the clock functionally destresses the athlete by not allowing her time to think about the lift very much.

Many CrossFitters, and a good amount of weightlifters as well, have set a PR in a timed set type of workout – something like every minute on the minute. There are, of course, physiological factors at play here, but I believe the psychological factors are more important. The athlete is put into a situation wherein she is unable to dedicate much mental energy to worrying about how heavy the bar is, how close she is to her PR, or how unlikely it’s supposed to be that she can make this lift under these conditions. Instead, she simply makes a game plan and sticks to it, with no hesitation – simply because she has no other option.

Additionally, it is important to consider the power of the athlete’s psyche in such scenarios. In fact, that power is perhaps the most compelling reason to watch sports in the first place: watching athletes overcome tremendous obstacles in pursuit of victory.

Couple these conditions, and it is easy to see the potential for big lifts in 15.1a.

How To Prepare For It

Understanding the phenomenon is well and good, but what we really want is to understand how to prepare for it. Fortunately, it’s a fairly simple task – albeit not at all an easy one.

Timed Sets

The first step is to get yourself used to lifting on a clock, and the safest and most productive way to get started is by using timed sets in your strength training. I believe this is the best first option for a few reasons:

1. Timed sets are valuable not only to prepare you for maximal lifts under fatigue, but are an effective strength development tool on their own. They allow the athlete to accumulate substantial training volume and improve special work capacity for greater training loads down the line, with the sport specificity to CrossFit as an added bonus.
2. For relatively novice lifters, a scenario more like 15.1/15.1a is more likely (though not inherently so) to degrade technique. For these same lifters, repeated timed sets of the same pattern can actually improve mechanics as fatigue accumulates.

Check out Jacob on The Strong360 Podcast with Chad Wesley Smith

Practice The Sport

The second step is as simple as it gets: Do CrossFit. In that prescription, include varied forms of lifting under fatigue.

It is wise to wait until an athlete’s mechanics are firmly cemented before practicing this type of training. Then, work on reducing the amount of time between the pre-fatiguing element and the lift.

As an example, an athlete may start preparing for this type of event by doing a conditioning session in the morning, and lifting in the afternoon. Gradually reduce the break to 30-60 minutes, and eventually start practicing events like 15.1/15.1a, with the lift immediately following a CrossFit piece of some type.

Stay Cool 

As important as training the physical element is training the psychological element.

First,  learn to approach each day’s work with a calm and collected mind. Stop getting hyped up for every lift and every workout. This is likely to lead to burnout. Instead, treat training as a professional: Show up, do your work, enjoy it, but don’t let your emotional state be in a constant flux of highs and lows. Strive for equilibrium.

Second, let go of what you can’t control. 15.1/15.1a calls for you to clean and jerk as close to maximum as possible while fatigued. You don’t have a choice in the matter, so why worry? Commit to performing to the extent of your ability, period.

Finally, keep a positive mindset. Don’t ever convince yourself that you “can’t” do something, either on the macro scale (“I can’t possibly qualify for Regionals with a 20 person cutoff”), or the micro scale (“I can’t possibly clean and jerk close to PR weight after 15.1). This is simply not something that top athletes succumb to.

 As you approach this event and events like it, practice positive affirmations, and don’t be afraid to go big just because you’re not “supposed” to be able to. You may surprise yourself with your strength and capacity.

RELATED ARTICLES

[Strong360] Balancing Energy Systems Needs for CrossFit

Maximal Strength Programming for CrossFit

Jacob Tsypkin is a CrossFit and weightlifting coach, and the co-owner of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club in Monterey, CA.

Website, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

In his book “Zero to One,” Peter Thiel puts forth this principle. While the context is different, it’s no less relevant to training than it is to building startups.

The importance of planning in the short, medium, and long term cannot be overstated. However, planning well and planning a lot are not the same thing, and sometimes, over-thinking and over-planning lead us into under-executing and under-performing.

A good plan is a roadmap. It presents the coach and athlete with an understanding of the direction the athlete’s goals are in and provides various options for getting there. The longer term the plan, the larger the scale of the map, allowing the coach and athlete to keep the target destination in sight without getting bogged down worrying about road signs on opposite ends of the world.

A bad plan is a road without a map. All that it reveals to the coach and athlete is what’s directly in front of them.

Inexperienced coaches may understandably find themselves traveling down this directionless path due to a lack of planning. But for more seasoned program designers, the opposite is often the case. One can create a plan so inundated with details that the details become the plan. The road becomes the map, and the target destination slips from sight, leaving the driver with only intuition (a powerful tool but insufficient on it’s own) to guide her.

Good and bad planning is often not in the scheme itself, but in the approach to following it. Outlined below are five important aspects of creating a plan, ranked from largest to smallest scale, with commentary on good and bad ways to treat each of those elements.

Disclaimer: Yes, sometimes the best plan is to stick to the plan even when the plan isn’t going to plan. Stop neckbearding.

Goals

Goals are the impetus for any plan. One makes a plan because they have something they wish to achieve or attain. Accordingly, the way one approaches their goal is of utmost importance to their success.

Good plan: The goal and the plan are disparate elements. This allows the coach or athlete to make changes as they go, as their commitment is to arriving at their goal destination, not to staying on the road they started on. The focus is on making the best day-to-day decisions, fostering the most effective processes to accomplishing the goal which the plan was created for.

Bad plan: The plan becomes the goal. Executing the plan as it was put forth takes precedence in the mind and therefore in action. The coach and athlete develop an emotional attachment to the plan and lose sight of the goal. Components of the plan which should be treated as small pieces of a larger process – like individual training sessions, short-term goals meant to lead into the larger final goal, etc – become of utmost importance, and the trainee, or the trainer, are hesitant to sacrifice these parts for the sake of the whole.

Schedule

The schedule provides an outline, balancing variables in the plan across the training week. It’s formation is important not only because it ensures that the program encompasses the full spectrum of the athlete’s needs, but because, utilized properly, it allows for undulation of stress throughout the microcycle, mesocycle, and macrocycle to allow for adequate recovery.

Good plan: The schedule is a framework aimed at accomplishing certain ends, such as balancing volume and intensity throughout the microcycle. Keeping that in mind, the schedule is written in such a way that day-to-day and week-to-week changes are easy to make so that the ultimate purpose of the schedule can be maintained.

Bad plan: The schedule is written in stone. It is crafted with such precision that any changes will adversely affect the stimulus, to the point that the athlete is better off sticking to the schedule no matter the circumstance.

Training Sessions

Day-to-day training forms the crux of the training process. While the larger scale of the schedule and largest scale of goal setting are important, they do not have the same effect on the athlete as her actual daily time in the gym. This is the first level of planning at which the athlete’s involvement is greater than the coach’s.

Good plan: Each day’s training is conducted with a weather eye on the higher levels of planning, i.e. maintaining the weekly schedule and maintaining focus on long term goals. The athlete is committed to the process of her daily training, but understands that ultimately, she is using today’s training session to move one step closer to her goals, and bases her daily decision making upon that understanding.

Bad plan: Each day’s training is an event unto itself. It exists in a vacuum, and priority is placed on executing the planned elements rather than maintaining the purpose of the daily training within the larger context.

Training Elements

An element is a single piece of a daily training session.  Monday’s anaerobic intervals, Tuesday’s squat session, Wednesday’s awful 20 minute AMRAP. Each of these constitutes a training element.

Good plan: Each element is one of several potential options aimed at achieving a particular outcome. If for any reason a specific element is causing problems, it is sometimes best to consider a different element which will foster similar or same long-term outcomes.

Bad plan: Each element is selected because it is that specific element. There is nothing else that can achieve the desired outcome, and that outcome is important enough to brush aside any potential problems for the sake of pursuing it.

Movement Selection

Movement selection is the lowest level of reduction within the training plan. Not just squats, but front squats with a two count pause. Not just anaerobic intervals, but intervals on the Airdyne. Not just a 20 minute AMRAP, but a 20 minute AMRAP of light barbell thrusters and chest-to-bar pullups.

Good plan: The movement is selected with a specific intent in mind, as part of the training element. That intent can be accomplished through a fairly large number of movements, and given the right circumstances, one of those movements should be substituted for the originally planned movement.

Bad plan: The movement is selected because it is that exact movement. The parameters are so precise that no substitution can have the same general intent, and so changes to movement selection should occur rarely if ever.

Heuristics

You’ve probably noticed a theme in the good planning outlined above. Here are a few heuristics to consider when creating and adapting a plan.

Outside In, Inside Out. When formulating the training plan, start with goals, and move your way down the scale to schedule, day-to-day training sessions, elements in the training session, and finally movement selection. Before finalizing the plan, work from the inside out, and consider if each level of planning fits with the next.

Gaze Up The Scale. When making adjustments to one level of planning, look at the level above and see how that level is impacted. Considering changing your schedule? Look at your long-term goals and see if your changes fit. Do you need to substitute one squatting exercise for another? Think about how your change will affect the remainder of your training session.

Consider Intent. Don’t make changes in a vacuum. If you have reason to believe that a particular exercise or element is not your best choice for that day’s training, make sure you have an understanding of why that exercise or element was selected before making a substitution.

Control Your Variables. It’s fine to make changes if things aren’t working out. But changes should be small, subtle, and occur one or two at a time. By avoiding wholesale program changes,  you allow yourself valuable insight into which changes actually made a difference.

These heuristics can help you to treat planning and training as organic, cohesive processes which evolve subtly over time. Always bear in mind that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

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Jacob Tsypkin is a CrossFit and weightlifting coach, and the co-owner of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club in Monterey, CA.

Website, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

Registration for the 2015 Open is upon us, and CrossFit athletes worldwide are gearing up to prove their fitness. This article aims to provide strategies and suggestions for athletes of any level who are taking on the Open this year.

1) Train through the Open, not for the Open.

There are three categories of athlete competing in the Open:

– You’re a serious contender for the Games. If this is the case, you’re already going to Regionals, barring a fluke, which is out of your control anyway. Your training focus needs to be on Regionals and qualifying for the Games, not on maximizing Open scores.

– You’re on the cusp. If the events are right for you, and you bring your A game to each one, you can qualify for Regionals. That’s a great accomplishment in and of itself, but if you’re coming into Regionals in the No. 20 spot, you’re not a Games athlete (Yes, I know about Cody Anderson. Stop). In this case, it’s best to foster a long-term view. Don’t take five weeks of your training and focus everything on maybe making it to Regionals at the expense of everything else.

– You’re not making it to Regionals, and you know it. There’s nothing wrong with being in this position, but it’s foolish to prioritize the Open above everything to come in 200th place instead of 220th. Keep getting stronger, keep developing skills, keep improving your aerobic capacity. Treat the Open as practice for next year and the years following.

2) Continue utilizing structured strength, weightlifting, and gymnastics programs.

Often, athletes get caught up in preparing for the tests of aerobic capacity the Open brings. Even ignoring the possibility of a more skill and strength intensive Open in 2015, this approach is a mistake for several reasons.

First, training with a heavy bias toward aerobic capacity pulls us away from training through the Open instead of for the Open. If you already have an aerobic capacity bias in your training to address a specific deficit, that’s one thing. But if you have been using a balanced program year round to make full spectrum improvement, it is unwise to move away from this in favor of a training plan geared toward five weeks of nonstop sport specific training.

Second, it is unwise to take for granted that just because the Open has had an aerobic capacity bias in previous years, it will again this year. 2014 included the heaviest weights yet seen in the Open, and with the introduction of the scaled division, there is a good chance that we’re going to see the classic tests of capacity, more heavy weights, and more skill components. Don’t train for the 2014 Open.

3) You get one.

Barring an absolute fluke, or a situation where a marginally better score will massively improve your standing (to the point that it greatly increases your chance of getting to Regionals), there is no reason to perform an Open workout twice.

Remember that every time you perform an Open event, you are skipping something else. Maybe you won’t push your squats as hard so your legs stay fresh. Maybe you’ll substitute a completely different sport piece to do the Open workout again. Consider training economy, and consider whether moving up 10 spots in a field of thousands really means much to you.

4) Build flexible training weeks.

With regard to planning your training week, the Open really throws a wrench in the works. Having a major component of your week unknown until Thursday evening makes organizing a challenge, but there are some things you can do to plan for the undetermined.

My athletes train five or six days a week, with Thursday as an off-day or as their lightest training day. They perform the Open event on Friday. These suggestions are built around that schedule, but can easily be modified to fit your own.

-Front load your week. Make Monday and Tuesday the highest volume training days, with a lighter day on Wednesday, and active recovery on Thursday. Friday should be based around the Open workout, making that the first item on the list followed with relatively lower stress work. Saturday should be similar in volume to Wednesday. I typically make Saturday our highest volume strength day. Sunday is off or active recovery.

-Think about which movements have a particularly deleterious effect on your preparedness, and do them on either Monday or Saturday. Are you prone to tearing after a lot of pullups? Put them on Saturday so that if they do tear, you have nearly a week to heal. Do muscle-ups leave you very sore? Train them Monday so that you’ll have until Friday to recover if they come up in that week’s event.

-Pay attention. Although it’s possible that a movement will be repeated in two events, it’s fairly unlikely, and therefore each week’s programming becomes easier to divine. If the first week had overhead squats, you can pretty safely assume the next four weeks will be without. Take this into account as you plan the next week’s training.

5) Make a plan, and prepare to be punched in the mouth.

Even assuming you perform the workout on Friday as suggested in the example above, you should plan to have some time the day before to play with the event and build a strategy.

After the announcement, spend some time playing with the movements involved at low volume, load, and intensity. Get an idea for how they feel, and how they influence each other. Think about how you’ll break sets, how long your rests will be, how you’ll organize your equipment, etc.

Then be ready for it to all go to hell.

Think about how things may go wrong, and how you can adjust for them. Prepare yourself to have a calm, forward-moving mindset even in the worst of circumstances. And when considering these possible scenarios, endeavor to make changes that allow you to stay as close to the original game plan as possible.

If you are an athlete who isn’t likely to go to Regionals this year, you may be tempted to write this practice off. I strongly recommend that you go through this process. It will make you that much better at it in subsequent years when you may be in the running.

6) Have good judges.

Knowing and understanding movement standards is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for someone to be a good judge. A good judge should also:

-Be honest and unbiased

-Communicate to you what they’ll be looking for before the clock starts

-Let you know beforehand how they will tell you if you miss a rep

-Be clear in telling you why they no-repped you

-Stay out of your way to the extent possible

-Be aware of their surroundings, including equipment, camera placement, and other athletes

7) Know the rules

Despite how glaringly obvious this is, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an athlete caught off guard in the middle of an event because they were unclear on a rule or standard. Review every last one, no matter how inane or mundane.

What are you expected to say to the camera before the clock starts? What angle should the workout be filmed from? Where does the bar need to be to be qualified as “overhead”? Knowing the answers to these questions is your responsibility. Not your judge’s. Not your coach’s. Yours, and yours alone. Do yourself a favor and take the judges course, thoroughly read the standards for every event, and if you have a question, email the Games support team and ask. The last thing you want is to miss out on a spot because of a stupid technicality or misunderstanding.

As you take all of these suggestions into account, don’t forget to have fun. It’s cliché, but it’s important. Every great CrossFit athlete I know genuinely loves the process of training. The Open, at it’s core, is about showing up to throw down with your friends. Have a blast.

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Jacob Tsypkin is a CrossFit and weightlifting coach, and the co-owner of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club in Monterey, CA.

Website, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

This view has long been held in the CrossFit community. But often – especially with competitors – intensity is applied with impunity, and no thought is given to gauging it to be appropriate within the context of an athlete’s long-term goals. By my estimation, though intensity is of great importance, CrossFit is actually a moderate-intensity sport, and training for the sport should reflect that. In Part 1 of this series, I will define and defend that stance.

What is Competitive CrossFit?

In order to effectively address the nature of the sport, we must first dissect what that nature is. This is extremely difficult with CrossFit, which incorporates elements and qualities from a multitude of disciplines.

I define competitive CrossFit as a multiday, multimodal endurance sport. This seems obvious on the surface, but unpacking these terms is critical to a complete understanding of what they entail.

Multimodal endurance means two things:

First, specific qualities like strength, power, and speed must endure. It’s well and good to squat 500 and clean and jerk 350, but the CrossFit athlete must be able to maintain those abilities under the fatigue from many and varied stressors.

Second, the athlete must be able to sustain submaximal power output for a relatively long duration in a multitude of disciplines. CrossFit athletes must be able to perform submaximal expressions of strength repeatedly and for extended duration, regardless of whether running, doing muscle-ups, or snatching.

Since Regionals and the CrossFit Games, as of now, occur across a total of three to four days, athletes must be both physically capable of recovering between events and days, and skilled enough to manage their output in order to do so.

Keep these concepts in mind, as they form the crux of the argument for moderate intensity in competitive CrossFit.

Understand The Average

Rich Froning is the undisputed King of CrossFit. Yet in 2013 and 2014, Froning seemed on the precipice of defeat. In 2013, he started off with a 30th place finish, his worst ever in the Games. The morning of the second day of competition in 2014 brought him 37th place, and 27th place in the afternoon. Over the remainder of the event, Froning steadily gained ground on his competition, culminating in decisive victories in all of the events on the final day.

Were the events on Sunday simply geared toward Rich? Or does something in his approach allow him to pull ahead in the final stretch of the long and grueling race?

Given that he dominated fairly different events in 2013 and 2014, it seems unlikely that the programming was simply biased toward him. The most likely solution is some combination of natural aptitude, game day strategy, and training. Here we will look particularly at the third.

Without delving into specifics of modality, method, or duration, an athlete’s training can be broken down into volume, frequency, and intensity.

Volume is how much total training the athlete is doing. In strength sports, this is derived as the athlete’s tonnage. 10 triples with 200lb is 6,000lb of tonnage. In CrossFit, there is not such an easy equation. However, with some experience, it’s relatively easy to deduce whether a program contains high, moderate, or low training volumes.

Frequency is the amount of training sessions the athletes perform across a week of training, (or whatever the microcycle is) regardless of each session’s volume.

Intensity is performance relative to top performance. In strength training, this is expressed as a percentage. 1RM = 100% intensity. 80% is 80% intensity. In endurance sports, it’s often known as race pace. Intensity is relative to the event – a maximal intensity deadlift single doesn’t look anything like a maximal intensity 5K run, but the intensity is high all the same.

Froning is renowned for training with very high volume and frequency. His intensity is less often talked about, but for many athletes, it may be the missing piece of the puzzle. It’s not hard to spot in the many videos of his training or in competition: Froning keeps his intensity reigned in, and this is of the utmost importance.

Training for advanced CrossFit athletes must almost always be high volume and high frequency. Between the multiday, multi-event nature of competition and the breadth of skills and capacities CrossFit athletes must develop, there is no way around doing a lot of work and doing it often. This will become more and more true as the sport and field grow.

But as volume and frequency climb, something’s gotta give, and where high volume and frequency are crucial, high intensity is not. In fact, while maximizing intensity may or may not be the best way to get results for general health and fitness, it may actually be detrimental to competitive CrossFit athletes. First, high intensity can prevent athletes from training with the volume and frequency necessary to develop the wide range of skills and capacities which they need. Second, high levels of performance can be attained with the judicious application of high intensity laid over a base of a lot of moderate intensity work. Third, managing output to avoid burnout in the later days of the contest is a dividing factor in athletes’ success. It is, in my opinion, the single major element that separates Froning from the pack. And an athlete will not develop that management without practicing it.

It should be made clear that moderate intensity does not mean low intensity. It means below threshold, leaving a bit in the tank after each piece.

TZ Strength RPE Guidelines

@ 6: Warm-up/cool down pace. Heart rate should climb, but you should be able to maintain this almost indefinitely.

@ 7: Heart rate is increased and muscular fatigue is noticeable after a moderate duration, but it should not be a limiting factor in performance.

@ 8: Muscular fatigue is substantial and heart rate significantly elevated. You should not be able to hold more than a brief conversation. You should feel uncomfortable but be able to control your output to stay in this zone. This is about the level of output most events, in competition and training, should be completed.

@ 9: Approaching redline. Going here is fine with known events. If you are unsure how you will respond to a particular event, going to this level presents an increased risk of crossing the threshold and being unable to recover for the duration of the event.

@ 10: Point of no return. Rarely, if ever, go here. In competition, it should be saved for the last event of the last day. Pushing to this level represents a very high stress to the body and can take substantial time (measured in days) to fully recover from.

When pieces are not assigned a particular RPE, I tell my athletes to be between @ 8 and @ 9. Pieces with which they are more experienced, such as benchmark workouts, certain combinations of movements, and events with relatively little variance – such as pure running or rowing pieces – are safer to push to @ 9. With new and unfamiliar events, it is hard to predict how the athlete will respond, and so in an effort to mitigate the risk of slipping past redline, I encourage athletes to stay closer to @ 8.

Not accounting for particular deficiencies which require a modified approach, my athletes do about 70% of their energy systems training between @ 8 and @ 9, and nearly the rest of it below that (low intensity steady state pieces @ 6-7.) We rarely, if ever, go to @ 10, and if so, it’s part of a lactate endurance training block which will last 4-6 weeks, before returning to our standard dispersion of training intensity.

In Part 2, Alex will discuss the physiological effects of low, moderate, and high intensities and their impact on training and competition.

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Jacob Tsypkin is a CrossFit and weightlifting coach, and the co-owner of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club in Monterey, CA.

Website, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter