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Sadly this is going to turn more into an angry, pissed off rant than anything really informative.  Some of you might get a little out of this, but more or less, this is going to be a way for me to release some pent-up steam.  This has been brewing for a while watching the atrocities take place in gyms across the country, and it has a name… Crossfit.  Now, some of you might feel the same way, and some of you not, but I can’t stand Crossfit!  This may surprise some of you that share my hatred, but I actually like the concept of Crossfit.  Cross disciplinary fitness regimens for a universal training experience.  Jack-of-all trades so to speak, but master of none.  For the average Joe or Jane, police, firemen, or military this is “conceptually” a good way to train, but we’ll discuss its drawbacks later.  My number one problem with Crossfit is,… and listen closely,…. IT SHOULDN’T BE USED WITH ATHLETES! For some reason, Crossfit seems to think that it is perfect for everyone.  I’ve seen subtitles: Forging Elite Fitness, under Crossfit signs, and this couldn’t be further from the truth with regards to performance.  Now we have high school, college, and club sports programs using Crossfit styles of training with athletes, and for whatever misguided reason people have bought into this.

I don’t want this to turn into a complete negative rant, so I’m going to take a step back and explain what I do like about Crossfit.  For the lay person, who wants to get into general shape and break up the sedentary lifestyle, Crossfit’s universal fitness quality regimen would be advantages to keep people well rounded and experience a lot of different training styles and types of fitness.  In “idea,” I like exposing people to complex multi-joint movements and movement patterns like the clean & jerk or squat.  Developing coordination and control with gymnastics tumbling and rolling movements would be extremely beneficial.  Cardio vascular enhancements through endurance training and GPP “strongman” type circuits.  A mental toughness, built through workouts, to push thru and come out on top.  But, now comes the harsh reality of what is taking place at Crossfit facilities and Crossfit workouts all over the country.  Crossfit is a sub-maximal, poorly performed, sloppy attempt at complex and highly skilled (at times) movements with un-attainable volume schemes performed as fast as possible with no regard for fatigue or potential injury.  Crossfit sessions become a puke session with no real training goal other then to try and finish.

When training for performance, as all athletes should, there has to be a purpose and desired performance goal (other then puking) for the workout session.  Structured performance systems typically take athletes through blocks of time with specific fitness traits as desired qualities for goals.  Each workout therefore is highly specific to that outcome and built off of previous sessions/fitness qualities.  The accumulation of several general fitness qualities can develop into more specific fitness qualities, which are all highly specific to the sport and role you play in your sport.  Anyone worth their salt in a training setting, knows that the CNS is EVERYTHING in regards to training.  You are training to increase inter and intra-muscular coordination that will enhance performance.  So why, is this style of training detrimental to performance you ask? They’re doing explosive movements and working hard!

I happen to know that speed, power, and strength are skills and like any skill they require extremely detailed focus and practice to attain.  Teaching yourself to generate as much tension as possible in the shortest amount of time possible and then relax as fast as possible doesn’t happen by just doing any workout.  The old saying goes, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent!”  Engraining faulty movement patterns only leads to less than optimal performance and injury, particularly in fatigued states.  Regardless of the load intensity, multiple repetitions performed poorly in say a squat, squat to press, clean and press, or deadlift will cause injure.  A man squatting a mere 27k imposes a compressive load on his spine of 7000N or 1,560lbs (McGill, 2006).  Now that is just 27k, lets imagine what 60k of “thrusters” (squat to press) would do to a spine for say 50 total repetitions, intermixed with box jumps, 400 meter run, and pull ups?  All of this would be done against the clock as fast as possible.  Let say also, like most weekend warriors our hero doesn’t have much of a training background and after a layoff of two weeks or so decided to jump back into this WOD (workout of the day).  I’m very curious about the amount of damage his back took from this session?  With the multitude of exercises and training styles undertaken by the Crossfit community just guess how many of the certified “Crossfit Trainers” know everything regarding gymnastics, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, strongman training, kettlebell training?  In Crossfit sessions I’ve seen and heard stories of people getting thrown into these workouts day one with nothing more then a quick explanation and the demonstration of another misguided sole next to him or her.  Good luck with that.  Something as simple as a handstand push up has enough technique and conceptual information regarding tension and rooting for the shoulder health that is harmful to a person who doesn’t know and performs high volumes in a highly fatigued state.  When training for performance there is nothing called slop, as Crossfit has, technique is skill, and skill is strength.  Safety and performance are the same thing not opposite ends of the spectrum.

A little anecdotal story; I routinely see a chiropractor like I see the dentist.  On my last visit, I was talking with one of the new doctors there, who was setting me up on a traction table.  Knowing I work as a performance coach at a local university we started to talk about training.  She asked if I’d heard of Crossfit, and I reluctantly told her I did.  She told me how she went to go through a work out and how they just threw her in a WOD without any real formal instruction on how to do anything.  Learn as you go style of training.  She couldn’t believe the approach and how many people she saw loading there backs and moving incorrectly.  Laughingly, I asked why she had gone, and she replied, “Because we are seeing so many new clients because of it, I wanted to see what the deal was.”  That was all I needed to hear.  Crossfit was sending people to the chiropractor because of poor technique due to instruction, unrealistic loads and volumes, and lack of fatigue management.

I understand how the lay person wants to get in and work hard and, who doesn’t want to keep up with your peer while you’re working out.  Well, if she’s doing 95lbs, I want to do 95lbs type of mentality.  Here in the West, we always have that mentality that we need to work harder and more is better.  We don’t need to train harder, just smarter!  Random exercise selection, load intensities, and work volumes that look as if they were pulled out of a hat and selected based on likely hood of puking doesn’t mean working smarter.  It’s plain stupid; nothing else can describe it.  And now they have Crossfit Football, were football players can do more “football related style of Crossfit,” to enhance your performance!  I don’t know how many other styles or branches of Crossfit there are, but I’m almost certain there is a style for every sport out there.

Ok, time for me to calm down, take a pill, and discuss how this could be fixed.  I don’t want to be the person that complains the whole time with not bringing anything to the table to actually resolve the matter, so here we go.  My attempt to save Crossfit from itself.

1. Set up a system of training based on concentrated blocks of one to two related fitness qualities at a time.

2. Blocks of time should be roughly 4 to 8 weeks in duration.

3. Set up an exercise teaching progression with testing and assessment to progress to the next level.

4. Knowledgeable practitioners in a particular training style should be teaching the exercises and be in charge of establishing the exercise progression.

5. Mobility and stability should be the first block of training any introductory trainee goes through as that is what is most lacking for the general population.

6. Record keeping for trainees on amount of time spent in particular blocks of training to track training age and performance.

7. First several blocks should be organized as follows:

   1. Mobility and Stability education and assessment

   2. Body weight training

   3. Gymnastics training

   4. Power lift training (squat, bench, deadlift)

   5. Olympic lift training (clean & jerk, snatch)

   6. Track and field/ Endurance

Each block should start out extremely elementary and slowly progress toward more challenging and complex lifts and loads.  With assessments and testing to progress to the next level in a particular lift or style, trainees would be forced into training at lower level and focus and achieving better technical mastery, as well as, physical enhancement before moving onward and upward to greater challenges.  Trainees could build off the lower level skills they have and progress at a level on par with them selves.  The puke sessions could be held once or twice a month for a push and challenge, but only utilizing the current level of skill sets and movements the trainee currently possess.  If think this set up would fix a lot the problems I’ve seen and heard out there.  I don’t think there is much left to say other then ATHLETES SHOULD NEVER DO CROSSFIT!

Thanks for listening,

Jeremy

When we talk about relative strength we always take it for granted in terms of performance. Afterall, it’s an easy way to make an idea about how powerful/athletic somebody likely is without even testing him in that field of expertise.

Basically, if you take a guy with a 2x squat (and a decently-low bodyfat level) you would naturally expect that guy to have good sprinting speed (at least good acceleration, if not top speed)and have a high vertical jump (at least standing vertical, if not running vertical) and most often than not you’d be right. There are a myriad of other factors influencing the expression of strength, with the most important being:

1) Body structure;
2) Nervous system capabilities that compose of:
2a) Recruitment ability (influenced by the person’s mood (laid back/nervous) and tension intensity);
2b) Movement efficiency (as in how well the CNS can replicate a movement with as little effort as possible actively using as much power as possible);
3) Inhibitory signals in the eccentric phase (or eccentric strength overload acceptance), such as the GTO threshold;

These are three things off the top of my head, because there are obviously even more that influence the expression of strength.

So what does this have to do with the relative strength component?

Well, here it gets a little tricky.

Say you have two athletes with no training background whatsoever, who never squatted. They have the same height and weight, identical structures, neural efficiency in the standing vertical jump and GTOs threshold. You put them both on training with squats. Athlete A starts a program that calls him to squat 1 time per week. Athlete B starts doing a program of squatting 4 times per week.

After 6 weeks they both have the same squat, say 2x their bodyweight. Whom would you pick to get a higher vertical jump in between the two? Athlete A or Athlete B? At the first glance you would probably say “it doesn’t matter, they have the same stats and the same relative strength, so they obviously jump the same”. And although it’s a bit counter-intuitive, the most probable result is that Athlete A will jump higher.

Why? Well, let’s analyze the situation for a moment:

Athlete A started doing squats 1 time per week. While that’s a good stimulus for increasing the squatting poundages, it’s not nearly as good as a stimulus for learning how to squat and increasing the squat movement efficiency as the 4 times per week squatting routine would do for Athlete B. So Athlete B will be much more squatting efficient after the 6 weeks of training than Athlete A.

Then after those 6 weeks you will compare two guys with the same apparent relative strength and different squatting efficiency. And like we talked about a few articles back, movement efficiency is movement specific. In other words, being good at squatting doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at jumping or other movements (especially of other dynamics).

So you can argue that Athlete A is actually much more stronger if with a worse squatting efficiency is able to be at the level of Athlete B who squats 4 times per week (obviously, here we ignore fatigue accumulation, work capacity and so on, but this example is chosen to make a point). If we were to take these two guys A and B and continue with another 6 weeks of training, with Athlete A doing this time a 4 times per week squatting routine and Athlete B doing a one time per week squatting routine, we’d probably end up with Athlete A being superior in terms of relative strength than Athlete B.

That’s because Athlete A increased his squatting frequency and therefore increased his squatting efficiency. Athlete B, who already had very good squatting efficiency due to his previous 6 weeks of high frequency squatting didn’t gained too much from his 1 time per week squatting (he could’ve gained in supercompensation from all the accumulated fatigue from the previous 6 weeks, but like I said — this is not the object of this article). The only way Athlete B would really gain more strength would be muscle gain.

Again, and I must make these notes — 6 weeks is a totally arbitrary number, don’t expect to be “100%” squat efficient in real life after only 6 weeks of high frequency squatting.

Anyway, since we reached the point of muscle gain: some people just don’t get it (and I know some of them personally) — you can gain only so much by neural efficiency. You can’t go “yo man, I’ll just stay at this bodyweight and reach a 2.5x squat in some time”. That’s just not right.

And it doesn’t even have to be such a serious number like 2.5x. 1.5x, 1.0x, whatever. You need muscle to generate tension. If you squat and don’t gain any muscle and increase your squat from 1.0x to 1.5x, then the gains come from neural efficiency gain in the squatting movement. This can have a transferrable effect into jumps, sprints and other dynamic movements, but only for uncoordinated/untrained people. Once you’re good at your sport and increase your squat without muscle gain you’re most likely not going to see results.

Let’s take a concrete example:

Say you get a guy named Jumpy to train. He’s very good at jumping but sucks at squatting. He jumps 34 inches for the standing vert but only squats 1x his bodyweight. He obviously thinks “man, I’m such a good jumper but I suck at squatting, man… I guess you can jump high without squatting that much”.

You take him and put him into squatting (whatever frequency because that’s not important for this example) and he gets his squat from 1x to 2x but jumps the same 34 inches! You can expect him to say “you got me squatting so much, I doubled my squat and my jump is the same! Obviously squatting doesn’t work and it’s just a wrong approach”.

What is wrong in that quote is the fact that he probably would’ve been able to squat 2x from the moment of him squatting 1x, just that he didn’t know it. All the gains he made in his squat were from improving squatting movement efficiency and closing the gap between his real strength and his squat-displayed strength!

The only chance for Jumpy increasing his vertical jump would be increasing his strength over 2x with gains in muscle, since muscle can generate additional non-squat-specific tension.

What I mean by that is the fact that if you build muscle through squatting, that muscle can be used to generate tension in other movements as well and not only in squatting (as opposed to the scenario where you’d only gain in neural efficiency of that movement only).

And since this post has become quite a mouthful (but trust me, it was necessary), if you start squatting — focus on improving your neural efficiency in squatting first (higher frequency squatting, higher volume, lower intensity), learn the movement properly, then increase the intensity and lower the frequency and start building muscle for athletic gains. The reason people are afraid of gaining muscle is the addition of body fat, but that can be shedded off later.

The true relative strength gain for superior athleticism is through muscle gain and not squatting efficiency!

Part 1 of this series covered exercise mode.  In part 2 I discussed energy systems.  Part 3 is the linchpin to the series covering autoregulation and training splits.  Part 4 examined the two types of work capacity in sports repetitive and peak and looked at how to manipulate the autoregulation process to target your specific sport needs.  Now in Part 5 I am going to discuss block organization.

Block Training in a Nutshell

Block training boils down to a concept called concentrated loading.  While initially it may seem complex, it is a rather simple concept.  Essentially concentrated loading is a model where you concentrate your efforts by training towards a singular goal.  The more “concentrated” the effort the greater the gains made towards that goal.  For example, in part 1 I discussed 3 modes of strength training: quickness, power, and strength.  In a “non concentraed”, also known as concurrent, phase one would incorporate all three training modes into their cycles.  So a workout may look like the following:

Line Hops 3×30 sec — Quickness
Shuffle Run 3×30 sec — Quickness
Altitude Drop x 25 — Power
Vertical Jump x 25 — Power
Squat 5×5 — Strength
Glute Ham Raise — Strength

To the naked eye this may look like a solid plan however its design begs the question: “What is the goal?”  The obvious answer being “Everything.”  Of course we know that the body only has a limited capacity to recover and adapt.  In this program each training goal is going to compete for the same reserves.  This leads to little to no gains towards any of the goals.

You may become a little quicker, a little more powerful, and a little stronger.  Or you may not achieve anything!!

So how do we avoid this dilemma?

Simple.  Concentrated loading.  Utilizing the concentrated loading method you would concentrate your efforts towards one goal.  Considering the three modes of exercise, you would only utilize types of exercise that are similar and discard the type of exercise that is furthest from the goal.  With this in mind we see that power, because of its utilization of quickness and strength, will serve as a bridge.  That is one could incorporate power and quickness exercises into a power cycle and one could incorporate power work into a strength cycle.

One would not incorporate quickness and strength into the same cycle.

Why not?

Because strength and quickness are furthest away from each other on the force-velocity spectrum thus they will compete for results targeting vastly different goals.  Not very concentrated huh?

Maintenance

Now you may be wondering: “If I ignore strength training will I lose all of my gains?”  Simply the answer is: no.
So how do we maintain our strength levels while ignoring strength work (or vice versa for quickness depending on your cycles).  Remember that power work has a strength and quickness component and thus will serve to protect your strength and quickness gains while training in a cycle that excludes one of those components.  In addition to the incorporation of power work into your training cycles, I would also recommend doing a maintenance workout targeting the neglected quality once every two weeks (Option 1) Or doing a maintenance week once every three weeks (Option 2).

Option 1 would look like the following:

Week 1
Monday Quickness
Thursday Power + Quickness

Week 2
Monday Quickness
Thursday Power + Quickness

Week 3
Monday Strength
Thursday Power + Quickness

So you can see that you completed 2 weeks of a quickness block and then added in 1 strength workout.

Option 2 would look like this:

Week 1
Monday Quickness
Thursday Power + Quickness

Week 2
Monday Quickness
Thursday Power + Quickness

Week 3
Monday Quickness
Thursday Power + Quickness

Week 4
Monday Strength
Thursday Power + Strength

Week 5- Begin the cycle over

As you can see Option 2 involves 3 weeks of quickness training and 1 full week of strength training.  Obviously you would flip-flop the cycles if your training focus was strength.

Periodization

Yet another fancy ten dollar word.  Simply this means a training plan.  In general, the simplest way to organize training blocks is utilizing the performance loop which looks like the following:

Hypertrophy->Strength->Power/Quickness->Hypertrophy

In this cycle we see that hypertrophy builds larger muscles laying the foundation for greater strength gains.  Then we capitalize on the increase in contractile protein by making your muscles even stronger.  Finally we teach those muscles how to apply the new found strength very rapidly.  The rapid application of force requires maximal CNS stimulation and recruitment.  This will teach the muscles to be able to recruit some of the more dormant high threshold,  fast twitch muscle fibers.  Which will open the door to the athlete being able to recruit these fibers in their next hypertrophy cycle and open the door to even greater gains!

So the training Templates now look like the following:

***Note the mode before the colon is day 1 and the modes after the colon are day 2 for all of the following template***

Main Goal — Hypertrophy
Strength G : Strength G
Maintenance — Power
Quickness G + Speed-strength PC

For a strong but slow athlete you should use a power template. The following templates are excellent choices:

Main Goal — Power
Quickness G: Speed-strength PC
Quickness G: Speed-Strength PC + Quickness G
Quickness G + Speed-Strength PC : Strength Speed PC
Quickness G + Speed-Strength PC : Strength Speed PC+Quickness G

Maintenance — Strength
Strength PC + Strength G

If you are a quick but weak athlete the following templates may be effective:

Main Goal — Strength
Strength PC : Strength G
Strength PC : Strength-Speed PC+Strength G
Strength PC+Strength G : Strength-Speed PC +Strength G

Maintenance — Power
Quickness G + Speed-strength PC

I hope you enjoyed the fifth installment of this series and have begun incorporating some of the advice.  If you have or have any questions I would love to hear from you.
-Alex

High speed eccentric loading (like what’s found in reactive lifts, plyometrics, sprints, etc.) carries with it a number of positive adaptations that can be found pretty much nowhere else. Plenty of people know that sprints and plyos are useful, but few know the exact physiological changes they bring about. In order to clear things up, we’re going to try to shed a little light on the topic. Training methods focused on high speed/high force eccentric loading bring with them the following benefits:

Strength Specificity:

Neurologically speaking, strength is largely specific to muscle contraction type. Someone with high levels of concentric strength will tend to have high levels of eccentric and isometric strength, but it is possible to develop one or two kinds of strength out of proportion with the others. Eccentric loading trains eccentric and isometric strength to a higher degree than does concentric training. And since most sporting movements are dependent on reactivity (which is dependent on eccentric and isometric strength), this is most certainly a good thing.

Fast Twitch Fiber Hypertrophy:

Eccentric training, especially high speed eccentric training, has been shown to hypertrophy type IIa and type IIb fibers to a greater degree than concentric training. Similarly, some research shows a decrease in type I fibers from this type of training as well.

Sarcomeres in Series:

Traditional hypertrophy is an increase in the number of sarcomeres (basic contractile units within a muscle fiber) running in parallel with one another. This appears as a greater muscle cross sectional area. In addition to basic hypertrophy, eccentric loading also builds more sarcomeres running in series (end to end). This appear as longer muscle fascicles and allows for greater muscle shortening speeds.

Intramuscular Connective Tissues:

Eccentric loading makes muscles more resistant to damage caused by further loading. It accomplishes this through building stronger intramuscular connective tissues. This also decreases the likelihood of injury due to muscular overload.

All in all, eccentric training is slightly difficult to apply (as the high intensity it involves increases chances of injury is misapplied), but it’s more than worth it. Understanding why it’s useful isn’t really necessary, but it’s neat to know anyways.