Getting Your Success in 2019 Means Starting Today
https://ift.tt/2kx3mLu Photo of Coach Tromello with Team Training Labs at West Regional 2018
Watching the CrossFit Regionals you might be sitting at home wondering, “Hey, I didn't get there or I really want to make it to that level next year, I want to do better on the Open.” If you want to do better next year then it's time to get started now. Being better at the Open means different things to different people. For example, I worked with obstacle course racing (OCR) champion Hunter McIntire. Sure he was trying to go to the Regionals but he uses the Open as a gauge to see where he stands in terms of his fitness and then he still goes and wins a bunch of OCR races. He can be a champion athlete in one sport, possibly be a champion athlete in CrossFit. Then there’s another trainee I work with, she just wants to do the Open just to see if she's better than last year. Her goal may just be to do her first pull up. It’s complete opposite sides of the same spectrum.
Ultimately, what’s cool about the Open is that it does measure fitness. If you can’t do the workouts as recommended, you can do the scale division and it’s just a basic set of fitness challenges you can do to measure yourself against people like yourself around the world. If you’re to be doing any personal training, any type of fitness work, you should be able to do basic functional fitness challenges like a clean. It’s picking up something off the ground and putting it up on the counter. Farmers carries is carrying your groceries in the door. What I'm trying to emphasize is that the Open is a great fitness benchmark and something that you can set as a goal for year round motivation.
Not Doing Things You Normally DoThe workout of the day at my gym recently was a 25 minute AMRAP:
40x Burpees 100x Double Unders 800m Run
A guy doing it comes up to me and says he can go to a 24 Hour Fitness and walk in the door, put on his headphones, do bench presses and all that usual stuff. He tells me he comes to do CrossFit with me because I am going to make him do things he would never ever do on his own. And if you're going to go to a CrossFit gym that's going to be well rounded, you're going to do things that you wouldn't normally do. The Open is a way to test yourself doing things you wouldn't normally do but you can prepare for anyhow. There are people who can make it through to Regionals but right next to them are people who are just pushing themselves out of their comfort zone and trying to better themselves.
Training is Year RoundLike I said, now is the time to start training for next year’s Open. For my gym, I have everyone on 40 weeks of 8-week cycles getting ready for next year. And next year will be very different than what we have come to expect from Opens in the past. I have been looking at the programming of events this year and I think there are a lot of challenges waiting for athletes next year, challenges that require preparation over the course of the coming year because you won’t be able to just gut your way through those future workouts. You have to build skills that are new to you and you are going to have to be stronger than this year demanded and have more endurance. Expect the unexpected but be prepared for the inevitable.
It’s All in the HandsGymnastics-like movement is going to become more of a factor in future Opens. The organizers definitely want to see you be proficient on your hands, so start working on handstand walks now. Being able to do those 25-foot increments or, at least, 5-foot increments, is important. Rope climbs were introduced in the online qualifiers this year so, you're probably going to have to go climbing in next year’s Open. Rope climb efficiency, specially being able to get down that rope fast, is something you have to work on. I'm going to start teaching my gym how to do a handstand walk with various progressions over the next 12 to 36 weeks.
Strength Routines Are KeyStrength has become a component, however, it hasn't become a component where it's going to make or break you. If they come out with a max lift, again, you need to be strong enough to do well enough in the lift segment. My gym is weak in the upper thoracic area, so I'm going to spend more time building up their max lifts in that area. From there, I'm also going to start building more of my trainees’ core stability because I'm thinking that there's going to be a lot more overhead work in general. I am going to build up shoulder endurance because I shoulder work plus endurance was there for everyone to see in WOD 18.3. That means that I'm going to start having my athletes do overhead squats and variations. We saw in this year’s competition that a competitive enough lift was right around 320 pounds for the men and for the women it was about 215 to 220 pounds. These aren’t trivial numbers. Your max lifts should be solid and at levels that can safely keep you in these ranges for competition. And remember that all of your lifting is done under fatigue. In WOD 18.3 and online qualifiers they had you doing double unders and wall balls followed by those overhead squats. So, it’s literally a line in the sand, you have to be strong under stressed and fatigue situations.
Jump Rope and Jump Rope OftenFrom what I can see, you're now being asked to do somewhere between 400 and 800 double unders in a workout. That means that I have to increase my athletes’ capacity for doing double unders and if my athletes are doing it then, you should be, too. CrossFit does an amazing job of evolving every single year and if you're not evolving with it, you're going to fall behind. When they introduced handstand walks over obstacles, the organizers took it to another level and that means that they want to make sure that you do, too.
Energy EfficiencyYou need to be working your energy systems efficiently. So many CrossFitters are just staying in that 10 to 15-minute range and they’re not expanding their fitness. They're not going out there and running and swimming and biking and doing triathlons and doing other things, playing sports. They're just doing CrossFit 15 minute workouts because they're fun. Well, sometimes the stuff you need to do isn’t fun.
For example, you really need to add more rowing repeats, that’s sprint repeats like 400m and 800m. A lot of people in WOD 18.1 did not do well enough because they couldn't row at a high enough calorie per hour and it had nothing to do with their overall endurance, they just didn't do enough row repeats in their training. As a result, they lost precious time on that rower.
So, the repeats, gymnastics under extreme fatigue, higher up double unders, getting stronger, it's all going to be needed. Also, just fixing those small things, fix any technical glitches in your handstand push-ups, your handstand walk, getting down the rope climb with a speed descent. You should see next year's Open as a way not to keep the status quo in your training. If you failed to meet your goals this year, you're going to be outside looking in again next year if you don't take things to another level. For coaches like me, this is the time when we have to also say that we can't keep our programming as status quo for next year. Now is the time to change and prepare, and with 5 training cycles left until next year's Open, you may think you have a lot of time but you're going to be working across such a range of movements and on so many different things, like strength and endurance, that it's not really that much time at all.
Fitness via Breaking Muscle https://ift.tt/1hdUh1E May 29, 2018 at 04:28PM
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