CrossFit has found ways to track improvements in functional movements in a meaningful way. We have given functional movements names and determined characteristics of those movements so that we have a uniform way to track those movements. The consistency helps us track improvements in our constantly varied, functional movement. In other words, we can track our fitness very easily.
We can measure the load and implement that is used in each exercise so that we can see scores increasing or decreasing. For example, we can use a barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, medicine ball, or any other implement for deadlifts, and with each of these implements, the maximum weight might be different. We can also perform a Romanian deadlift or a sumo deadlift and still have these numbers differ, even though all of these are essentially training the same movement pattern. By tracking all these different variations, we can easily check back to see if we are getting stronger or not. All these exercises can be scaled back to a bodyweight variation – or gymnastics variation, for which the load would be considered bodyweight. The distance at which a load travels is also easily measurable. Mapping applications and fitness trackers can measure distance for exercises like running and swimming. Knowing how to track and measure distance makes tracking functional movements that much easier. There is a very mathematical way to track power output for squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, and every exercise that has a uniform tracking method, but instead of tracking power output using a formula, we typically count repetitions. If your height and weight are not changing dramatically, tracking reps is equally as accurate. Another way to measure functional movements is time. How long does it take to do a push-up? And can it be done faster with better mechanics? This measures speed or rate. Improvement is measured when we can do a push-up faster than we could 4 weeks ago. Again, this can be put into an equation to determine the power output, but instead of getting all math-y about it, we would just say “how many push-ups can you do now? If you can do more in 4 weeks, you are more fit.” Tracking functional movement allows us to keep hard data that is measurable, repeatable, and observable. These numbers can guide us on what movements produce the most work and power, in other words, these numbers can tell us what athletes are good at. These numbers also hold us accountable with ourselves and give consistent data on how we are performing and, most importantly, find our weaknesses. Send us an email today to get started: info@CrossFitAFK.com
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Training functional movements is efficient and effective. Results are easily seen or felt in everyday life and especially as we see progress in workout scores. Improvement on workouts directly correlates with improvement in health markers. The correlation is strong because of the metabolic effect functional movements have on the body. As a side effect of health markers improving, the body will build muscle and burn fat, which are two of the most common health goals that people set.
Think about common activities that people do during the day… sitting up out of bed, sitting and standing up from a toilet or couch, leaning over to brush teeth, lifting something off the ground, carrying a back pack or groceries and lifting them onto a counter, or putting them away in a cupboard overhead, and even opening a door. We can group similar movement patterns and combine them to train in a gym. Regular movements, such as these functional movements are safe to perform and can be trained by scaling up the intensity. When these movement patterns are trained well and beyond the demands of everyday activity, quality of life increases because basic needs like going up the stairs is no longer a chore. This can be applied to sport as well, by building a good base of good movement, the capacity can be transferred and used in sport performance. Send us an email today to get started: info@CrossFitAFK.com Functional movements are the bulk of exercises that are selected for CrossFit, used for strength and conditioning. They are selected most often for training and many are interchangeable motor patterns. These fundamental actions are useful for fitness from a beginner to advanced performance level. The movements also often complement each other or build from one another. This means that each movement, when combined with other movements, can elicit a great metabolic response, and make for a great workout. Even similar movements vary enough to avoid redundancy and training the skills of one exercise indirectly trains the skills of another exercise because of skill transfer. For example, functional movements like squat, deadlift, and shoulder press will train common movements like sitting to standing, lifting boxes of the ground, and placing storage on a shelf overhead. Those same movements will also transfer to dynamic activity like speed and agility in sport.
Functional movements are great for core training because of their use of midline resistance and powerful flexion and extension of the hip joint. Training functional movements in higher intensity situations makes an everyday interaction with the movement pattern easier. These functional movement patterns are most efficient when the midline is activated first, then the extremities. We call this “core-to-extremity,” or “middle out.” Next time you stand up from the couch notice how your tummy tightens before you start standing. Notice when you throw a ball, your midline activates the throw. Any normal everyday movement, and useful movement in sport is generated this way. By design, functional movements train our core for many different demands. They will inherently be larger movements based on the defining feature of core to extremity. Larger movements use more joints and muscles, demand more neurological endocrine response, hence making them desirable to train. While there are benefits to isolating joints and groups of muscles, these smaller movements will have little to no skill-transfer. Practicing functional movements is the best means to the end. CrossFit workouts are written as a “prescription” (Rx). The workout as prescribed is intended for the fittest person. We can take all of those “prescriptions” and alter them to any given person’s skills and abilities. This is called “scaling” and “modifying.” In CrossFit, coaches and athletes can take the workout as prescribed and adjust the movement, implement, time, and/or distance as needed. The workout is a template that will be adjusted to suit the athlete’s needs. We can scale workouts because a scaled functional movement is still functional, which is ultimately the goal. Send us an email today to get started: info@CrossFitAFK.com Variance practice helps specialized athletes get better at specific skills that is required by their sport. What this means is that a powerlifter will be the best in their sport if they practice more than just powerlifting. Powerlifters will benefit from endurance activities, Olympic lifting, and gymnastics. A basketball player will improve their free throw by practicing the thruster, the clean and jerk, and pull-ups. A lot of times in sport, it feels like you will get better if you continuously practice the skill that the sport requires, but that is not the case.
Athletes who continuously specialize from season to season burn out or become injured. This is because they are not being introduced to new stressors, so no real adaptation can happen for them to grow as an athlete. A quick way to injure yourself is to use the same muscles and joints in the same movement pattern repetitively without rest. In sport, the athletes who are the most versatile will have the longest careers, the best health, and the crossover skills to adapt to competition. In the real world, over-specializing is not helpful. Imagine a mechanic who can only work on trucks, they are not going to get as much business as a mechanic who works on trucks, vans, SUVs, and large machinery. This is the fault of a specialist – and the mechanic who knows how to fix more will have a better quality of life, simply because they have a bigger sea to fish in. A basketball player who can make shots from the 3-point line AND the free throw line is more valuable. A powerlifter who also practices fast lifts has more midline stability AND a better metabolic rate is more valuable. A mechanic who can fix my Equinox AND my F-150 is more valuable, and person who can run a 5k AND deadlift their bodyweight will have a more functionally valuable life. Being well rounded is a compromise for overall performance instead of being an expert with limited range. Ultimately, an athlete who is proficient in more skills than a few will have an easier time adapting to and out-perform their peers. For this reason, many sport coaches when presented with two athletes who are seemingly identical, will choose an athlete who plays multiple sports instead of just one. An athlete with a broad range of athletic experiences will have an easier time adapting to change on the field and in life. Send us an email today to get started: info@CrossFitAFK.com Having many different modalities, or ways to train in a program for fitness, is key to the efficacy and efficiency of a general preparedness training program. It may seem counterproductive to work on so many skills at once or even at all, but science supports the claim that everyday life punishes those who specialize. CrossFit uses learning and memory tactics to curve the difficulty of learning so many skills and makes them easier to be developed at a beginner, intermediate or advanced training level. These concepts work for grade school, for example learning to type on a computer is similar to learning to push press a barbell at the gym.
In psychology there are different ways to learn and remember. Some are more effective than others and such will work better depending on the athlete and type of movement being trained. One variation of this is blocked, or constant learning, which is done when the same material is covered repeatedly in succession. Another version is variance learning, which is small doses of content in short successions. Both types of learning can be applied to fitness training. Studies show that blocked practice is more effective for performance in training environments, which in CrossFit is a daily workout with skill practice. By using blocked learning, newer CrossFit athletes can grow very quickly, but the ability to change tasks and adapt is stunted over time. In general, blocked learning is highly effective for newer athletes and for learning most basic skills like a squat or kip swing. Each day, enough time is spent in a blocked style setting to practice certain movements before the workout. This is generally called “skill” or “build-up” work. These drills and progressions focus on mechanics and consistency before the workout, targeting the key movements for that day’s workout. This is like massed practice where training is done in a continuous and concentrated way. Variance practice or variable practice is more effective when taking tests, in CrossFit this would be a benchmark workout or competition. From day to day there is plenty of variances in the movements, implements, loading, time domains, reps, and distances traveled. This is proved to increase adaptation for the demands. This is like spaced practice where skills are learned in short periods over several sessions. CrossFit uses this version more often because utilize a lot of variance, and this type of practice is better for retention of skill in the long run. We want to adapt when we train and test. Our bodies go through a feedback loop, and if there is enough appropriate training taking place then that feedback loop tells our body to grow in healthy ways. Using all these principles of learning and memory helps decrease skill decay and keeps transfer specificity fresh. The psychological reason that constantly varied programming works for fitness in the long run is because we are more likely to adapt to adversity and changes. In our daily life, this makes us more likely to recover from mishaps and accidents – like a trip and fall. This adaptive training is transferable to sport as well because we are required to figure out new and unique situations both defensively and offensively with many situations that out of our control. Send us an email to get started: info@CrossFitAFK.com There are several ways a strength and conditioning program can be ordered. Traditionally, styles of ordering workouts have been to do muscle or body part splits or to separate lifting days with long aerobic sessions. Although these versions of programming work, they might not be the most effective, especially when looking at sport. Sports often require the body to be strong and bear a high heart rate simultaneously. For this reason, training should also demand this combo of strength and conditioning. In sport, movement is regularly large patterns utilized in high intensity situations. The older training methodologies do not lend themselves well to train and adapt for this level of stress on the body. Of the many sports, we are most interested in the sports where the test is exactly based on the movement the athlete performs. We see this in the best gymnasts, weightlifters, powerlifters, endurance athletes, and more. Someplace between all these well-specialized athletes is a well-rounded athlete. Important movements like squatting, lunging, jumping, and lifting all benefit themselves when trained in the gym and when trained together in combination. Being able to indirectly train upper body strength and lower body power with constantly different movements at a relative intensity to the individual yields significant results in performance. This is important because many of the best athletes in these sports have health and fitness benefits the general population needs. We have found that these sports are the best place to start because the sport is based around moving the body in efficient and functional ways. After looking further at the tasks gymnasts, weightlifters, powerlifters, endurance athletes, and more are doing, we have found these athletes share a common trait. All these athletes have gotten immensely good at one very specific movement: whether that be swinging on a pull-up bar, lifting a heavy barbell from the ground to overhead, bench pressing, or running. These athletes are extreme variations of what a general person needs. By studying the most effective qualities of these extremes, we can derive an effective program (CrossFit) that every person can, and should, partake in. This derived program is intentional and produces the best results from all extremes without lacking skills in any, creating a very well-rounded athlete (see “aims part one”). The ability to be well-rounded can improve quality of life, by having the ability to both lift a grandkid off the ground (powerlifting) and carry them around (endurance). Send us an email to get started: info@CrossFitAFK.com Benefits to following a well-balanced strength and conditioning program include all the regular improvements on health and performance as the parts that make up that program. This means by including all the safe and effective training protocols that CrossFit and even other training methodologies use, the results soon speak for themselves. Participating in regular strength and conditioning improves bone density, balance and coordination, pulmonary and respiratory performance, and even mental health and cognitive ability.
Training in the gym has clear benefits outside the gym, too. These improvements on the quality of life go beyond their common primary focus on burning fat, building muscle, and looking good naked. With all these positive outcomes in mind, they also have tertiary effects like slowing the aging process, one that if unattended, leads to a life of requiring constant assistance with lifting, walking up and down steps, and even bathing and showering. It is important to put distance between you and the rising morbidities that are associated with this lifestyle such as heart diseases, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and more. Even if genetics are in play with current life, living a healthier life will aid in decreasing the negative outcomes involved with chronic diseases. It all comes back to being chased by a bear, bees or a dog - you must be able to get away or you’ll be stung, bit or worse. Life happens, and if you are stronger and more conditioned physically, you worry less when inevitable sickness or accidents do happen. This all comes back to the constantly varied training we do, so that we can be more prepared for the constantly changing world around us than we would be otherwise without it. Resources: British Journal of Sports Medicine ACSM’s Health and Fitness Journal This series is base on "Understanding CrossFit" from CrossFit Journal Issue 56CrossFit’s programming and style appears very randomly put together, which is on purpose. Most programs are built for specific goals and outcomes. Programming to achieve very specific goals means programming to allow specific sets of weaknesses as well. In CrossFit, we don't have that need. CrossFit’s programming is broad enough to train as many weaknesses as possible, ultimately creating an athlete with no specialty, but more importantly, no weakness.
Fitness is important for both performance and every day life. Your general fitness is challenged every time you get out of bed, put on socks, walk up or down stairs or curbs, lift kids, jump, or throw. All of these have common movement patterns, which can be trained in a gym, carry over to basic everyday life, and come in handy in an emergency. The uniqueness of having no weakness allows for room to play. Limits on mobility, access to equipment, and ability level do not negatively affect CrossFit training. Adapting to these differences is encouraged and welcomed, and why CrossFit is so accessible. As long as the athlete is motivated, consistent, and hard-working, the program will work. We can modify and scale this program for any athlete's capabilities, making the program near infinitely scalable and modifiable for all When we understand the reason for the "randomness," it becomes clear that CrossFit programming is about variance: exposure to strength, balance, aerobic capacity, and more. Send us an email today to get started: info@CrossFitAFK.com |
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