As we’ve discussed many times on the show, the way that elite athletes train for the sport of CrossFit can be confusing and often negative for people who aren’t yet at an elite level. Many athletes want to improve their conditioning and be able to do better in longer workouts, but - in many cases - simply doing more longer workouts with a lot of different stuff in them is not sufficient or effective to create improvement. Instead, athletes need to balance building up an appropriate base of support (so they’re not just “compensating” their way through workouts with high power output strategies) while still keeping an appropriate dose of chaos and sport specific work in their training.
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Show Notes:
[00:18] Beginners often get a lot better quickly just by doing “CrossFit.” Similarly, advanced athletes have a large base of support so they need to do less base-building and accumulation and are able to adapt quickly to sport specific training. However, people in the middle can often develop compensatory strategies in their conditioning workouts if they do too much sport specific training without having built the base of support to do high intensity mixed work appropriately.
[09:07] There needs to be a balance between building up a base through appropriate principles of long-term development and having enough chaotic, sport-specific training so that individuals don’t get fit in ways that don’t translate over to their sport. There also needs to be an understanding of the psychology of athletes – while coaches can’t cater to athletes’ every whim, they do need to allow them autonomy and understand that long-term compliance is more important than the perfect program.
[17:49] Intermediate athletes often need more specificity in terms of prescription: split times, weights, fractioning strategies, etc. Advanced athletes will self-organize and do things “correctly,” so they need less specific guidance. However, too much direction from a coach can prevent athletes from learning how to pace workouts and make decisions on the fly based upon how they’re feeling.
[26:24] It’s much more interesting to see what someone has done to make steady improvements year-over-year rather than to see what someone has done who catapults quickly to the top of the sport. Steady progress likely shows an understanding of how to build sustainably and correct weaknesses over time, while extremely rapid progress likely shows more “talent” and gives less generalizable information.