Tomorrow begins a new batch of programming, our first cycle after the end of the Open. Every year, we continue to gain insight from our programming, and strive to improve it so that every member, regardless of skill level and experience, can continue to make progress through our group classes. This past year has been no different, and we’ve seen the skill level of our members at CrossFit RVA continue to rise. For those that have had challenges in their training recently, we’re hoping that these lessons can push you to renewed progress.
Yearly Planning
We see the CrossFit Open as the culmination of our efforts during the previous 12 months Very roughly, we plan out our year in blocks of time with the Open in mind. Early in the year, we focus on building a base of strength, through longer, challenging strength cycles focused on squatting, pressing, and pulling. During this time, we’re also looking to make sure everyone is appropriately recovered from the Open, and we hope to address imbalances, movement flaws, and mobility issues now that we’re well away from the “Sport” element of the CrossFit Open.
Over the course of the year, we’ll gradually shift our training to ensure we can express our newfound strength and skill in typical CrossFit workouts. As we get close to the Open, we’ll train more using the weights, timeframes, and skills required to perform well in the Open.
Assess Your Weaknesses
As we begin to rebuild our “base” of fitness and strength, it’s time for each of us to take a very honest look at what we need to work on, and systematically attack the bottlenecks in our performance. We have your attention for an hour a day, at best, 5-6 days a week. Think about your goals, and what’s holding you back. If you’re not happy with your progress, look at your diet, recovery, and flexibility/mobility. Check out the folks at fED to get pre-made meals. Look into the Paleo diet, or simply, start eating better than you are now. Look up MobilityWOD videos on Youtube. Sleep more, and try to reduce your stress levels. For your movement proficiency, don’t be afraid to ask an instructor for help if you feel like you need to work on something. Very importantly, be mindful of your movement. Take care of any “slop” in how you move, and begin cleaning up some of the higher skill movements, since we won’t be seeing them with great frequency inside our workouts at the moment.
Leveled Training
Getting down to the nuts and bolts. As always, we’ll have 3 levels of programming. We feel that it’s simplest to call our levels L1, L2, and L3. To confuse things, the levels serve different purposes, depending on whether or not they’re for our strength progression, or our conditioning. For our strength progressions, the Levels are entirely about your prior training experience, the amount of time you’ve been training consistently, and whether or not you’re continuing to make progress at the current level. You should be doing everything to stay with the lowest Level as possible, as long as possible. Lower levels will be designed to get you stronger, quicker, and you should only bump up to the next one when you’re no longer making gains at the current level.
For our conditioning workouts, the levels are more concerned with safety; appropriate volume and movements for newer members. Everyone needs to start with the Level 1 workouts. From there, when you’re no longer so sore, you find that you can do all the level 1 movements with ease, and you notice your times/scores are exceeding the other people doing the L1 workouts, move up to tackling some L2 workouts. Choose workouts that you can do without scaling, and that you can do within a similar timeframe as everyone else. Maintain a high level of intensity on most workouts is extremely important! Finally, our L3 workouts are the most challenging, and for many, exceed the practical limits of training for health and wellness, and begin tackling fitness/CrossFit as a sport. More challenging movements, higher weights, greater requisite skill. As always, talk with your instructor about what is appropriate for you and your goals.
Strength Cycle Details
All 3 levels will be starting a 12 week cycle. We’ll be working mainly on the Back Squat, Bench Press, and Deadlift. Level 1 will be doing 3×5’s on the lifts, with a linear focus, increasing the weight every week. Level 2 will be adding a second squat day, Front Squatting on Thursday. They’ll also be performing 7×3 rather than a 3×5. We recently did a 10×3 Back Squat/Front Squat cycle with our weightlifters, with good results. Level 3 will be drawing out progress across the entire 12 weeks. Monday’s will be volume days, Thursdays will alternate Max Effort or Box Squatting. Everyone will be deadlifting on Fridays. To make it clear one more time – you should only be doing L2 if you have multiple L1 cycles under your belt, and have not made progress during the last cycle. You should only do L3 if you didn’t make progress on the last cycle, and have been training with us for at least a year.
Supplemental Work
Finally, we’ll be adding in some basic supplemental work. This is entirely optional, and will typically be fairly low stress, and work on improving weaknesses. We’ll post details to the website for any supplemental work. Do your supplemental work outside of the normal group class area, clean up your mess, and as always, be respectful of those around you. Be mindful of your recovery when attempting any more work. If you’re feeling run down, rest more!
Please come to us if you ever need help with your training.
Jake