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10 thoughts on “Wed, Dec 10th”

1. Ok, so continuing on my many long posts from the other day. I’ve been mulling over the idea of programming and trying to decide between mainsiting, SS, Oly (CA), or some hybrid of all of the above when I get back home.

   Now it’s important to state my ultimate goal which is broadly GPP but more GPP as it relates to athletic ventures (maximizing Mehdi’s jack of all trades idea, if you will). As such, it seems that CF is clearly the best program and therefore improving performance at CF WOD’s is the tangible goal, which, if I understand the CF methodology, is expressed by increasing power output.

   Now if Kelly Starrett is to be believed, and I have no reason to think otherwise (although anyone who wears visors and flip flops is under suspicion), metcon gains come quickly and relatively easily while strength is slower and more elusive.

   So the hypothesis would seem to be that if, say two people were looking to shorten their Fran times and one did lots of Frans while the other did half as many Frans but did some heavy FS and Presses, the latter would progress faster. This makes sense to me because while the former is getting more metcon and movement-specific work, the later is getting most of those benefits but is also getting stronger.

   It further makes sense to me that strength translates well to metcon performance because Fran performed at 50% of your thruster 1RM is much faster than Fran done at 90%.

   So. Does it make sense to have a strength bias in your programming? One might argue that Glassman and co. are already well aware of these ideas and have already programmed the best mix of metcon and strength in the mainsite WOD’s. One might counter argue that CF’s main attraction and selling point is its brutal metcons and folks tend to skip the strength days, resulting in a bias toward metcons.

   As I’m just getting into SS it seems like the linear program works toward a 3-4 week progress before stalling and backing off. This seems to me to lend itself well to a programming approach that did SS for a month then mainsite for a month and so on. Or if the benefit of the linear progression is the stall, back off and subsequent increase then maybe SS for three months.

   Now I know I’m not terribly clever so someone with bigger brains than me must have thought about and discussed this idea already, right? Can someone please do the rest of my thinking for me? I’m tired.

   And it turns out that all of this may just be academic because I really didn’t like last night’s workout at all. It felt way too much like chest and back day from the May issue of Muscle and Fitness. Even if there are great benefits to be had from implementing SS on a regular basis, I just miss the CF WOD’s.

2. Kyle,
   Yes.

3. This is fairly contentious stuff that doesn’t seem to have a clear answer at this point Kyle.

   The arguments for focusing on strength work to improve metcon performance are very compelling in theory, but it’s hard to find a lot of people for whom it’s worked out in practise (the extremely notable exception to this is Josh Everett).

   I’d imagine there’s some serious individual differences in how easily high levels of metabolic conditioning can be gained (or regained) after focusing on strength work. When I did Starting Strength for a few months last yeart, it took me about 6 months to get back to my pre-SS WOD benchmarks, and it was bloody hard. I didn’t come back crushing every workout in my path either, it was like starting all over again.

   Coach told us in Manchester that Kelly Starett spent something like a year focusing on strength work, and came back with a 10 minute Fran. It was reported that he felt he was a damn long way away from regaining his metcon abilities too.

   Purely rhetorically, if you’re trying to optimise all components of fitness, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to set out to achieve this by focusing on only one.

   When the day comes that a group of people who have focused on strength work march into the crossfit games and dominate every event we’re obviously in a different situation.

   If you’re going to bias your training towards anything for the purpose of improving your fitness though, I think it makes more sense to lean towards a combination of 1) Things you don’t normally do very often and 2) Things you’re bad at (of course, these are frequently the same thing).

   Obviously, if strength is your biggest weakness, it makes a lot of sense to focus on that. But if there are other things that you struggle with much more than max lifts, there’s probably greater fitness gains to be had from pursuing them instead.

   That said, being a lot stronger than you used to be is just plain great, so I don’t feel right about discouraging people from strength training.

4. “Coach told us in Manchester that Kelly Starett spent something like a year focusing on strength work, and came back with a 10 minute Fran. It was reported that he felt he was a damn long way away from regaining his metcon abilities too.”

   This was the first thing I thought of as well. It was the first time I’d heard someone in a position of authority within CrossFit question the idea that doing SS first was a good way to start CrossFit and ‘hit the ground running’.

   In addition to the Starett 10-minute Fran example he also said that there was a particular branch of the US army which had done a SS-type programme before moving into CrossFit workouts, and their benchmark times had been very shaky at the outset in comparison with comparable groups which had gone CrossFit from the outset.

5. Well all I can say is from my experience, as a complete no06 that crossfit got me in better shape quicker and starting strength is boring as hell compared to it,

   I will be beack in January, hating Colm and making not so funny jokes while all the long time hating signing up a years membership in Westwood……

   Why not do starting strenght for 2 months, crossfit for one, and so on..?

6. Thanks guys, that’s really all the excuse I needed because frankly I found the SS workouts boring. Nothing against them nor the programming, I just missed the standard metcons. I think I’ll get back to normal CF programming, modified for a gimpy toe and shoulder.

7. The other problem with SS is that the acronym just doesn’t fly in our current politically-correct climate.

   In fact, who is this Rippetoe guy and what is his real agenda? This business of making people stronger smacks of nazi eugenics if you drink ten pints and squint at SS excerpts just right.

8. Ruairi: 50-52.5-52.5; 9 Rounds, 5 K2Es
   Mike: 30-32.5(2)-30; 9 Rounds
   Paul: 40-45-47.5; 10 Rounds, 2 K2Es
   Phil: 40-45-40; 9 Rounds, 2 K2Es
   Pistol: 50-50-52.5; 4 Rounds, 10 Push Ups (subbed Cindy after 2 rounds – hamstring trouble
   Scotty: 50-50(2)-50(1); 7 Rounds, 10 Box Jumps
   Ames: 20-22.5-25; 9 Rounds, 1 Box Jump (Sit ups)

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