A new era in programming.

Hello everyone, we are halfway done with our current cycle.  We are currently working on the CrossFit Total in December.  Its a great test of overall strength and will be a good benchmark to reassess, or if your new, gauge your strength levels.  We tested Front squat 3rm and deadlift 5rm.  I throw these in as checkpoints to make sure we are on track.  Going forward, we will be doing more pulling, less back squats, and more front squats.  The focus has been, and will continue to be on building foundational strength, and using the olympic lifts by way of complexes. For the average person, people tend to see more progress by working on the basics, (squat, press, deadlift), along with technique work for the olympic lifts.  

One of the things we talk about all the time in our meetings, are the 3 things that we must do to be successful.  Those are:

1. Create a community

2. Coach technique

3. Program to ensure long term progress

As coach Paul mentioned in his last post, there is huge value in using pauses to develop our strength movements throughout full range of motion.  Someone that constantly bounces out of the bottom on squats will not train the posterior chain as effectively.  Not only that, a deadlift is all about the first pull off the ground.  Bouncing and TNG are great in metcons, but we need to spend more time under tension during our strength training.  You may see this written as a tempo such 32×1.  For squats this means 3 sec down, 2 sec pause, explode up, 1 sec between reps or just pause 2ct at bottom.   Will this decrease your percentages on the lifts, of course it will.  However, in the decade I’ve done this, I have never seen someone get worse from pause squats or lifting on a tempo.  

For the next half of the cycle, we will focusing on creating structural balance.   Along with tempo training, his means DB/KB, and single limb modalities.  An example of this is how we did front squats with a pause followed by bulgarian split squats.  The front squats are the meat, the split squats are the potatoes with the intent on creating balance.

Over our lives, we are prone to become imbalanced left to right, and anterior to posterior.  By addressing this in the metcons, we can hope to prevent injuries, improve movement, and provide greater progress by creating a structurally balanced body.  One of the biggest imbalances we see is the anterior>posterior, or quad dominance.  This results in the squat morning.  When the knee extends before the hip, this puts much more demand on the low back.  We address this by putting people in positions where their glutes must fire.  Single limb such as lunges force this to happen because the hip must be stabilized by the glutes or the knee will dive in causing a loss of balance.  For the upper body, you’ll see more DB,KB and single arm activities such as single arm OHS.  I love these because they challenge our stability at end range.  It is not enough to be mobile, nor is it enough to be strong.  We must develop both throughout the range of motion.