As you get farther along in your fitness journey you might start wanting to test or express your fitness. For some people this comes in the form of doing a competition. For others this might be running a 5k, or doing a triathlon, or possibly picking up a sport. In this article I'm going to show you how you can train for a specific event while still continuing to train at a high level in the gym.
Let's start with a general overview of training for sport. When we are programming for the class we are programming for general physical preparedness. This means that we are trying to have our athletes improve in all 10 of the general physical skills (speed, power, agility, strength, flexibility, accuracy, endurance, stamina, coordination, and balance). We do this by doing constantly varied functional movements performed at relatively high intensity. You can think of this as building the base of a pyramid. The wider that your base is (the better you get at the ten general skills) then the higher the peak of the pyramid can get (your sport specific performance). What this means is that by improving your capacity across all of these skills you are improving your potential in any given sport or pursuit.
The farther away from a competition you are the more general you want your training to be. Think of it as building the foundation of your pyramid. This is the time to lay the biggest foundation that you can. The closer that you get to your competition the more you want to start doing sport specific training. This is the time when you are focusing on the specific things that you need to be good at to perform well. This is when you are adding height to your pyramid, with the goal to reach your peak performance on game day or during the season. So in general you want to spend the offseason getting as well rounded as you can and as you get closer to competition you want to focus more and more on what you will be doing in your competition. Now that we have a general idea of what training for a sport looks like let's look at some application.
By far the most common sport we see people participate in is running, so we will take this as an example. Conventional wisdom is that to get better at running then you need to run. A lot. If you follow our guidelines above, however, you will see that this is a mistake. If all you do for your training is run then you are only working on a few of the physical skills. You will maximize those skills pretty quickly and hit a plateau. How many people do you know who have been running for years but haven't gotten much better? I would say most runners are this way. So how do we bust through that plateau? We need to take a step back and work on our foundation. We need to build up the other physical skills that we have been neglecting. Most runners lack strength, power, and flexibility, among others. If we will take the time to build these weaknesses up (as well as the other skills), then we will increase their maximum power output. They will be producing more force during each step, which will allow them to run faster. You can apply this same principal to any sport or event. If you will spend the time working on the things that you don't do in that sport in the offseason, then you will have more potential when you actually compete.
So what does this look like? How would you train for a race? The biggest mistake that I see people make when they are training for a race is to stop going to the gym completely. Let's keep the running race as an example. If they are training for a 5k or a half marathon then a month or two out they stop coming to the gym. When this happens, however, they will start to lose a lot of the progress that they have made in the other skills. They will only be working the few skills that they work while they are running and the others will start to atrophy. Remember that we want the biggest possible base to maximize our peak. If our base starts to shrink then our peak performance will shrink as well. A much better way to do it would be to still go to the gym, if only to maintain your gains. That way you will be able to maximize your performance in the sport while still maintaining your base.
Let's break it down to what this would actually look like on a training basis. Let's say you are 6 months out from your race. For the first three months I would recommend turning one of your off days into a running day. In our program this would be Wednesday. So you come to the gym Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday (and possibly Saturday depending on where you are in your fitness) and you would run on Wednesday. For the next two months I would drop the training to no more than four days a week and run on Wednesday and Saturday. For the last month I would drop it to three days in the gym and three running days. At this point you are just trying to maintain what you have gotten in the gym and to really start to peak your running. And finally for the week of the competition I would go to the gym Monday and Tuesday, run Wednesday, and then rest until the competition (with some active stretching and light blood flow work). Now what do these running days look like? They would be way less volume then a typical runner would need. Remember that you are already putting in a good deal of volume in the gym. The biggest thing you need to do is to accumulate time on your feet to get your muscles, tendons, and ligaments ready for the volume. For the first 3 months it would be a combination of speed intervals and endurance runs. As the race gets closer you want to slowly ramp up the total running volume while still working on intervals to work speed as well. If you aren't sure then make sure and ask a coach who is familiar with runners who also do CrossFit. Taking a purely running program (which is meant to stand alone) and placing it on top of your regular training is a disaster waiting to happen.
These principals can be applied to any sport or endeavor you want to take on. Just remember that the farther away from your competition you are the more general you want your training to be. As you get closer to your competition you want to start training more specifically, while still training general fitness. Finally, as your competition or season is right around the corner, you switch to maintenance mode with your general fitness and focus to maximize your performance peak. Don't sabotage your performance by giving up all of the hard earned gains that you have made in the gym. You will see incredible results and break through plateaus if you can continue to build your base year around.