Most everyone that reads this blog knows that I am not a fan of Crossfit. Now, there are some things that I do find intriguing about Crossfit – high levels of fitness/work capacity, the ability to repeat strength challenges with minimal rest, and some of the overall adaptations that these people get when training in this manner – however, when I look at what takes place on some of the youtube videos it makes me cringe:
- Horrible form
- Olympic lifting for high reps
- Extremely intense/stressfull workouts (workout of the day) multiple days a week without any understanding of how to modulate training intensity
- Did I mention horrible form?
Anyway, that being said, if there were a way to train for the Crossfit Games (the sport of fitness) I think that James Fitzgerald of Optimum Performance Training has nailed it down. James won the first ever Crossfit Games and made a lot of the training mistakes that many still make today. The kicker though is that James is also one of the smartest exercise physiology people I know and saw the error of his ways and decided to figure out how to make training, preparing, and planning for a chaotic, ever changing, moving target environment like the Crossfit Games more sensible (without absolutely killing people). Going along with this process James is constantly developing testing methods and protocols as a means of “talent IDing” individuals to determine what qualities give you the potential to excel in the sport of fitness.
Last week James laid out some of his strength and conditioning principles in THIS article in his blog – scroll down below the picture and start reading where it says A Guide To Good Strength and Conditioning Principles.
If you are a frequent reader of this blog you may find a lot of James’ message very congruent with things that I have discussed in the past regarding aerobic work, what he calls the CP Battery (which I have referred to as alactic-aerobic training), and some basic understanding of how to prepare someone for a bigger work capacity and fitness output.
I think you’ll enjoy the article and what it has to offer with regard to the principles and tenets James operates under. I have had the pleasure of sitting and talking shop with James and his assistant strength coach Max El-Hag on several occasions and find their ideas on training to be top notch and very well thought out. If you train Crossfit or you train people for Crossfit I would certainly pay attention to what they are doing or check out some of the certification courses they offer because for that fitness market I don’t really know if anyone else is doing it better than these guys.