The picture above is of a Crossfit athlete. While I’ve been critical of Crossfit in the past, I want to make it clear that I am critical of the widespread poor execution of Crossfit principles rather than the concept itself. Briefly, my 2 concerns with the execution of Crossfit are…
1. The Crossfit ‘workouts’ are typically too metabolically hard to accumulate sufficient work to make big gains in strength or endurance... While cranking your blood lactate up to 20 mmol may make you feel like you’re getting some real gains. Real gains in strength and endurance sports come from frequent (as in 2-a-day) consistent solid but not maximal workouts over many years. Complete 14 WOD’s a week for an extended period and I’ll eat my words.
2. Some exercises simply aren’t built to be done fast. Decelerating a barbell loaded with 200lbs beyond the limits of your range of motion is a recipe for disaster. Power moves should be reserved for power ‘tools’ that permit a controlled follow through – medicine balls, tornado balls, exercise bands, jumps etc.
Anyhow, so that’s my beef with Crossfit execution. If I ran a Crossfit style facility, I would reserve the
WOD’s for tests and spend the bulk of time doing ‘intervals’ with appropriate
rest periods to prepare for these WOD’s. I would also be careful in which
exercises are done ‘at speed’ and make sure technique was there before testing.
The Crossfit concept
however, i.e. to develop multi-modal & multi-energy system fitness is a
sound one that leads to some generally ‘ready’ athletes. What are they ready
for? They’re ready to make the most of specific preparation for their
sport.
This is where things get a bit confusing. Anyone who has
picked up an exercise physiology text will be familiar with the principle of
specificity, i.e. that training that uses movements and energy systems specific
to the sport will have the greatest positive carry over to sporting
performance. If this is true, where does general preparation (training in a
wide variety of movements and energy systems) fit in to the preparation of the
serious athlete?
The primary purpose of general preparation is to build an ‘adaptation
reserve’ or, put more simply to build a buffer against (&/or undo some of) the
bad things caused by the narrow focus & imbalance of specific preparation.
In the case of the Ironman athlete – the negative effects of living in
perpetual catabolism, the negative effects of doing millions of repetitions of
three movements over a limited range of motion and in a single plane & the
negative effects that come with training at one speed for a long period of
time. For a strength/power athlete these ‘bad things’ may be the erosion of the
aerobic base and the neural fatigue of high intensity training. In both cases,
the remedy is the same, i.e. a temporary return to balanced training.
General preparation greatly benefits ALL athletes in 3
specific ways…
1. Generally FIT athletes recover faster from all
types of training.
ALL athletes at the high level require a lot of training.
Even for the elite lifter, 1000+hr years of training are the elite norm. In
order to recover quickly from sessions of any type and accommodate such loads,
a good basic level of aerobic capacity is required.
2. Generally STRONG athletes have a better
training response to all types of training.
Muscle is the most adaptable tissue within the human body
and, generally speaking, athletes with more of it respond more quickly to any
training stress. In other words, they get more performance bang for their training buck.
This effect has been witnessed by any coach who’s been in the game for a while
in the difference in training response between untrained and ‘athletic’
individuals. With a similar aerobic/anaerobic quality to the muscle, athletes
with more of it have a better general training response. It is no coincidence
that athletes from all sports from ‘skinny’ distance runners to ‘chubby’ hammer
throwers are still predominantly mesomorphic (http://alancouzens.blogspot.com/2010/01/importance-of-strength-to-endurance.html)
3. Athletes with good general levels of STABILITY & MOBILITY
get injured less frequently than athletes with muscle imbalance.
Any type of high level specific training will, of necessity,
be largely devoted to training in the specific competition mode. For Ironman
athletes, this means countless repetitions in 3 sagittal plane activities over
a limited range of motion. The risks of spending 1000 or so hours in a limited
position(s) will be obvious to any supposedly fit triathlete who decides to
help a friend move house or jump into an ultimate Frisbee game during the
off-season (!)
A good general
preparation program will be devoted to placing the 3 objectives above as
primary and any sport specific training as secondary. In fact, the Eastern Bloc
countries made it a point to consciously and deliberately develop general athletes before any thought was given to
specialization.
To illustrate these points, let’s look at some typical
physiological and morphological parameters of 4 different types of athlete of a
similar frame size.
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For example, elite ironman athletes are VERY aerobically fit &
VERY lean. In order to get very fit and very lean, some muscle mass will invariably
be lost. To account for this and still maintain an appropriate amount of muscle
for the (albeit modest) power demands of the event, it is important that the
athlete begins specific Ironman training from a point of having a little
muscular reserve. This means, for most of the more serious endurance athletes,
keeping volume moderate, eating and lifting a little more than average during
the off-season.
A good general preparation program will be devoted to
placing the 3 objectives above as primary and any sport specific training as
secondary. In fact, the Eastern Bloc countries made it a point to consciously
and deliberately develop general 'all around' athletes before any thought was given to
specialization.
In the over-specialized western world, General Preparation has come to mean dropping
one of your VO2max workouts from your early season routine or spending 2x30min
sessions per week in the gym. In the GDR, general preparation meant spending 4
years in a general sports school (!), training 12-17hrs a week in a multitude
of sports ranging from mobility and agility sports like gymnastics to aerobic
sports like swimming to strength sports like weightlifting, letting natural
selection determine the sport to which you were best suited.
The first goal for the GDR athletes was simply to achieve the
standards to be accepted to one of these schools and at least have the chance
of a better life that came with being an athlete. Ekkart Arbeit has written
extensively on the process of talent identification and development in the
former GDR. Here are the standards that he recounts for admission to one of the
State administered Sports Schools (remember this was a basic level of
athleticism achieved at an age of ~13 by ALL future athletes from marathon
runners to Olympic Lifters)…
· 1500m run: 4:40
· 30m sprint: 4s
· 3x Long Jump: 6m
· 165g Ball Throw: 54m
· 3 Jump Long Jump: 6m
· 3kg Shot: 9m
In other words, all eventual world beaters from skinny marathon runners
to big powerful hammer throwers were once generally balanced, powerful, fit
well rounded athletes.
While it may be a bit of a tough sell to convince you to
forget your chosen sport & go back to general fitness training until you
see what sport/event you are best suited for, I’m hoping I can at least
convince you to spend a period of this year training as a general fitness
athlete as an investment in training to improve your general training capacity
and athleticism.
How do we know when
someone qualifies as “ generally athletic”?
This is a question that has been the source of much bar
chatter through the ages – “who’s the fittest?” In fact, it was this very
question that spawned the first Ironman competition to settle the argument
among swimmers, cyclists and marathon runners. No doubt, if there happened to
be an Olympic lifter in the bar on that day, todays ‘Ironman’ might look
entirely different!
While the GDR tests are certainly a step in the right
direction, they do tend to favor the power athlete. In my opinion, a truly ‘fair’
assessment of fitness, should incorporate tests that lie somewhere in the
middle of the aerobic/anaerobic spectrum, i.e. somewhere in that range where an
endurance athlete’s and a power athlete’s fatigue curves intersect. In other
words, we would want both a power athlete and an endurance athlete to have a
‘fair shot’ at doing well in the early season before a lot of specific training
(designed to alter the fatigue curve) is commenced.
It would have to
include upper and lower body activities over a full range of motion in multiple
planes. It would have to include some activities with a relatively high force
component and others with a relatively high speed component.
Something along the lines of the following ‘fitness
decathlon’ might fit the bill….
* 1 minute Push Ups for reps
* 1 minute Bodyweight deadlifts for reps (Barbell loaded to bodyweight)
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Add up scores for each column (0 points for any scores in
the first column, 2 in the second, 4 in the the third etc) Rankings based on an
athletic sample…
less than 40 = Poor">
40-50 = Fair
50-60 = Good
40-50 = Fair
50-60 = Good
60-70 = Excellent
70+ = Superior
No doubt some of these standards will seem pedestrian. All I
can say is, do the test. What’s ‘pedestrian’ in the context of a 10minute
straight effort is very different to what the athlete can do fresh as a solo 1
minute best. Related to this, the relationship between these 2 things can be
revealing in a talent identification sense, i.e. the difference between a stand
alone 1 min push up test and the push up portion of the decathlon is indicative
of the upper body power of the athlete. A difference of >60% may indicate a
natural power athlete while a difference of less than 30% would tend to indicate an
athlete with better muscular endurance capabilities and may suggest what event
the athlete should devote their specific preparation towards.
-------
Some important notes
for those thinking of doing the above test:
#1 Exercise are on a
1:10 turnaround, i.e. you have 10s to move to the next station and start the
next minute of activity. Place all stations as close as possible to allow for
this. An assistant (e.g. to crank up the treadmill, hand you the row handle, WATCH
FORM etc) is very helpful.
#2: It is essential that you have practiced
good technique for each exercise & that you do each exercise over an
appropriate ROM (for your flexibility) and at an appropriate speed. You don’t
need to do any exercise at 100%. Take the time to use control, especially on
the descent. You don’t need to go at 100% to be at the limit by the end J
A key objective of the training leading into
these tests is to develop the appropriate range of motion to do these exercises
properly and without compensation. The importance of this to both doing the
test safely and reinstating functional mobility at the end of a long season of
specific work cannot be understated.
Drop me a line and let
me know how it goes!
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So how much general
preparation is enough?
A better question
might be, at what point of fitness is an athlete truly competitive in their
event? Certainly, for masters athletes, the impetus for getting involved is
often to get fit/get ‘back in shape’. While there are certain ‘fun’ benefits to
getting ready for different events, I think sometimes middle of the pack
athletes can lose sight of the bigger picture; becoming one sided, ditching
strength work, ditching flexibility work, ditching basic speed work &
becoming less generally fit to spend more time going long and slow. Invariably,
this lack of balance comes back to haunt them, either in the form of not
feeling like they got ‘what they deserved’ out of their training input or
getting injured from the lack of training balance. I would suggest that
athletes specializing in the more extreme events be especially careful of early
specialization.
As a minimum standard, I would suggest that the athlete makes
it a high priority to get a score of 60+ in the above test each season before
really focusing on specific preparation for their event. I would recommend this
standard for ALL youngish male athletes who wish to train competitively for an
event – sprinters, endurance athletes, strength athletes, MMA fighters etc. For
all of these athletes, in my opinion, the 60 number is a good indication that
they’re ready to train competitively for an event to which they’re suited &
thus head off their separate ways.
Again returning to our socialist comrades for a bit of real
world athletic context on how much general preparation is ‘enough’, training towards
a specific event only began in the 4th year of sports school &
at a starting ratio of only 3 months of the year (adapted from Arbeit, 1997)….
What does a “General
Preparation” week look like?
So you’re sold on the idea of developing athleticsm this
winter. What’s the next step? Tractor pulls, depth jumps, overspeed training on
an Alter-G? Sorry to disappoint but the bulk of your week should still be
focused on improving your ‘work capacity’, largely via improving your aerobic
base (remember, those GDR sports school students were training up to 17hrs per
week!). If you’re doing a regular triathlon program, you’re already doing a lot
right when it comes to being athletic! I would simply recommend seeing yourself
as a general athlete during the winter and adding a few basic week tweaks along
those lines…
If you were a young
East German talented schoolboy athlete, you’d be doing something similar to the
above for 45 weeks a year. No wonder their medal haul per capita was so large!
In terms of specific content, it doesn’t take much. Keep
your heart rate primarily aerobic during each of these sessions but Include
regular short exposures within the aerobic work such as a 30s power move
followed by a couple of minutes jog recovery, mobility work at the end of your
warm ups. Simple additions to your usual winter routine can have a very
positive effect on what you’re able to get out of your specific preparation
phase when the time is right.
Train smart this early season,
AC
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