Last week we talked about programming for the class. If you missed that article make sure and go back and read it because it sets the stage for this one. This week we will talk about programming extra work. Let’s say there is a specific area that you want to improve in. What should you do? How much should you do per session? How many times a week should you do it? Should you do it before or after class? With so many of aspects of fitness tested in CrossFit it can be overwhelming to determine what to work on. I want to use this article to talk about our additional programs, common mistakes that I see with extra work, and how to determine what you should be doing.
The first thing we need to talk about extra work is making sure that you need to be doing it. If you are still making great progress from doing just the class then I would think long and hard about adding more. In your training your goal should be to make as much progress as you can with as little work as you can. By adding more work you are training your body that it needs more and more work to make progress. You can even slow down are bring progress to a halt by adding more that you can't recover from. If you feel like your progress is slowing and you want to add more then I would look at every aspect of your training and lifestyle before adding more. Are you getting 8 hours of sleep every night? Is your diet on point? Are your stress levels low? Are you getting enough water? Are you bringing enough intensity to your training every day? If all of these things aren't in check then adding more work isn't going to fix the problem. Focus on these areas first before adding more.
Let's say that you do have all of the things listed above dialed in and you are ready to add more work. What should you do? The first thing you need to do is look at your goals. What do you want to get out of fitness? Why did you start? The extra work should align with those goals. If you want to compete then adding more work at this point makes sense. If you want to get a lot stronger or burn a lot of fat then that could make sense as well. The important thing before starting is talking to a coach who can guide you in the right direction. One mistake we see a lot is when people want to get a lower body fat percentage and think that they need to do more cardio. For some people this might true, but for a lot of people this is not the case. Their body fat percentage is high because they don't have a lot of muscle. Adding more cardio is not only not help them reach their body fat percentage goal, but it will actually hurt it. They will not be putting on muscle and they will likely be actually losing muscle from all of the extra work. All of this to say you need to talk to someone who can guide you in the right direction before adding in extra work with no real plan.
Extra work should never take away from your class workouts. The key ingredient for success is intensity and anything that you do to take away from intensity is going to hurt your overall fitness. This is one of the biggest mistakes that I have made in my CrossFit journey. When I first started out I saw so many things that I wanted to get better at that I worked on a lot of them before I did an actual CrossFit workout every day. What ended up happening was that by the time I got to the CrossFit workout I was only able to give at best 80-90% effort. Do this over time and you have a recipe for plateau and injury. If you are a competitor you will never know what workouts are coming up in a competition, so adding 20 pounds to your snatch might be great but it might not show up at all in your next competition. I can promise you, however, that there will be CrossFit workouts. If you are just training to get better at a specific area then the same rule applies. You are getting the most benefit from the high intensity CrossFit workouts so make sure and bring as much intensity as you can. Another issue that comes with extra work is doing too much that you can't recover. Your body can only get better from the work that it can recover from. If you put too much stress on the body that it can't recover it stays broken down. In many cases doing less is more. Only when you feel like you are recovering decently from all of your sessions each week should you think about adding extra work.
Let's say you check all of the boxes and are ready to start adding some work. What should you do and when should you do it? At our gyms we have four supplemental programs-strength, conditioning, competition prep, and games prep. Each of these programs is designed for a different type of person and is designed to be supplemental to the class and performed AFTER class. The strength program is a three day a week strength program and the conditioning is a three day a week conditioning program. Each of these programs is designed to be performed in about 20-30 minutes each session. The strength program is for people looking to get stronger and/or add muscle, while the conditioning program is designed for people who are looking to work on their aerobic capacity and/or burn fat. Our competition prep is a five day a week program designed to be done in about 30-45 minutes and is designed for people who want to improve their open finish and/or compete in local competitions. Our games prep program is a 6 day a week program and is about and hour to an hour and a half of extra work each day. The games prep program is a combination of the strength, conditioning, and competition prep programs which is a cool way for everyone to be able to do the same work each week and compare their results.
The major point to be made about our supplemental programs is that they are designed with the class program in mind. Every week parts of these four programs is part of the regular class session. They are also designed with what we are doing in class in mind. They aren't random programs that we place on top of the class and hope it fits. One of the biggest mistakes that I see is people taking other programs and trying to put it with the class. This program was designed to be done independently and not with another program. The moment you start combing programs is the moment you stop doing the program. You are creating your own program. This ends up leaving the athletes beaten down, not progressing, and many times injured. I know the mindset because I have tried it before. The thinking goes "I will take this 12 week squat program, this ring muscle up program, and put them with the class and in 12 weeks I will have added 30 pounds to my squat, 5 ring muscle ups to my max, and have gotten fitter." What really happens is this. 5 weeks in your knees are killing you because you had to do 5x5 at 85% the day after doing a 1 rep max front squat and 150 wall balls in class. 12 weeks in you haven't gotten any stronger, your knees still hurt, and you have missed 15 out of the last 25 classes because you are hurt. Two months later you have either quit going to the gym or are starting over at where you were 6 months ago. I have seen this play out so many times over the years that it makes me sad when I see someone making these mistakes. If you take nothing from this article but this then it will be a success-don't layer programs on top of each other and expect them to make you better.
So how do we actually program our extra work? The supplemental programs have a set goal so we have a lot more progression work than in class. We will start off each 5 or 10 week cycle with a test (2k row, 1 mile run, 30 ring muscle ups, 1 rep max front squat, etc.), then spend the cycle working on this specific goal. There are too many aspects of CrossFit to focus on them all at once. We break it down by trying to get better at different parts at different times of year (using the Open as our base). Depending on where we are in the year we will determine whether we want to work on building muscular endurance and size (offseason) or try to peak our 1 rep maxes, whether we want to work on longer or shorter endurance work (5k row vs 1 mile run), or whether we want to work on strict gymnastics, kipping endurance, or high volume endurance. There are many aspects that go into determining when and what we are doing. The most important thing is getting a plan and sticking to it. The training that we do two weeks after the Open will look completely different than the training that we do two weeks before the Open. This also applies to the programs that people are doing with no intention for competing. The programs are designed to go alongside the class so it is important to make sure that everything works together correctly, allows our athletes to recover, and keeps their bodies adapting by constantly changing the stimuluses.
One last aspect of programing is enjoyability. It is important for us to make it fun for our athletes to do the work. We do this by letting them see progress (test and re-test), letting them compete (intervals are done for calories or meters as opposed to just for time with no score) and by keeping it varied (doing the same progression week in and week out for 12 weeks can lead to progress, sure, but man does it get boring). We know that if our athletes are having fun then they are going to keep pushing themselves, keep making progress, and will stick with it much longer.
I hope that these articles have shed some light on our programming process. There are a million and one things that go into a program and it should never be taken lightly. Learning how to program takes years and years and hours and hours of trial and error and learning from your mistakes. It is not haphazardly throwing something up on the board with a million reps to run people into the ground, nor is it taking different programs from different places and putting them together and hoping it works. There is science to a program and there is art to a program and only the best programs have both.