Unbreakable Fitness

Here is what we have covered so far.  CrossFit can produce amazing transformations in people.  I have been doing this for 5 years and gone from a skinny runner, to a Level 2 CrossFit Trainer who has coached hundreds or thousands of people and program for one of the most successful CF gyms around, all while making enormous improvements in my own fitness.  How we get there is different for everybody, but if your programming is decent, you eat and sleep right, and you practice what you want to improve (even a little) you can keep getting better for a long time with no special programs or coaching.  That is my advice to the 99% of people who ask me about breaking through plateaus. 

For those who have been doing CrossFit for years, eat right, sleep right, have learned intensity, and practice skills in their warm-ups, a time may still come when you hit a plateau.  This post is for you.

Having experimented myself with some more radical interventions and having watched many others do the same, I tend to be a minimalist.  I will start with something that keeps you as close to our traditional programming as possible and slowly move you away as you become more and more advanced.

Me in November After a Radical Intervention: 220lbs With PR's on Every Power Lift.

Me in May After Trimming Back Down from my Radical Intervention: 200lbs with a PR in Muscle-Ups.

 Phase 1

Structured Warm-ups: Many people just need to raise body temp, mobilize joints, and warm-up to the RX’d weight before they do a workout.  That’s fine, but you can accomplish those goals while improving on weaknesses as well.  Your warm-up will no longer be random, I will give you what to do and it will likely be periodized and structured to allow you do a great deal of volume while making improvements.

Example 1: You have bad overhead strength that appears when you try to overhead squat and snatch.  While your squat and clean have gone up consistently for two years, your OHS and snatch have stalled for the last 6 months.  This is probably a result of poor shoulder mobility and stability, and lack of integrated whole body strength (a phrase I just made up and which Dan John once referred to as “Dad Strength).  Here is your program which is done in place of the warm-up of the day and in conjunction with the workout of the day.

Mobility Work Can Solve Some Strength Problems

1. Shoulder mobility drills every day: foam roll upper back, LAX balls in the upper thoracic, shoulder pass throughs, OHS with PVC against the wall.
2. Snatch Drills two days a week: from 45-95lbs depending on the drill and your strength, Burgener warm-up, snatch balance, hang squat snatch.
3. OHS/Shoulder Stability two days a week: hand stand holds working toward a press to handstand and 3 sets of 4-8 reps at a moderate weight of slow tempo OHS (5 sec down, 2 sec pause, 1 second up).

Moderate to light weight will ensure that you are fine to do the regular WOD.  These movements will simultaneously warm you up and improve your skills without taking a lot of time.  High volume combined with better mobility will fix a lot of problems and the moderate weight OHS will provide just enough intensity (when done at tempo) to produce adaptation but won’t be so heavy it wears you out.

Phase 2

A new progression: People can advance for years adding 3-5lbs to the bar almost every time they train.  Eventually they cannot support that kind of progression and stall.  For these people we begin a slower periodized progression.  Mark Rippetoe has a couple of intermediate programs he recommends including the Texas Method to achieve this.  We have had some success with Jim Wendler’s 5-3-1.  A number of these will work for most people, the point is that you are no longer a beginner who can just throw weight on the bar, do your work and improve.  You need to plan, oscillate the weights up and down, de-load at certain times, and progress in steady but smaller increments.

Many of our Female Clients Find they Need to Embrace Strength Training to Overcome Years of Endurance Work ... I hate Spinning.

Example 1: At Potomac CrossFit we squat once a week.  At the very beginning people just throw weight on the bar and set 50lb PR’s.  A few months in progress slows down but they can add 5-10 lbs a week.  When we notice this slow down or stop (and we check to make sure you are eating and sleeping right) we might switch you to Wendler.  You will still squat with the class every week, you will just be doing a very specific program based on certain percentages of your max.

Phase 3:

Prefer your weakness over your strength: If you have a long training history with a specific method of exercise or are just naturally talented in some areas but not others, you can probably afford to prefer or replace days that focus on your strengths with days that focus on your weakness.  Again, I will start by keeping you as close as possible to original programming and slowly move you away.

Example 1: If you have a strong squat but a weak overhead squat and Example 1 did not work, I may have you warm-up to your back squat work with heavy overhead squats.  This will hurt your back squat number, but that is a strength and you are trading that training stimulus for work on OHS.  If that results in over training the squat, I would replace the back squat with the OHS until it comes up to par.  I would also consider replacing every other deadlift workout with an OHS workout as I find you don’t need to DL as much as you might think to improve.

Example 2: You used to be a runner.  However, you suck at rowing.  Replace running with rowing in WODs.

Example 3: It will not always be as clean as replacing one kind of squat with another kind of squat or changing running out for rowing.  If you are a strong runner but weak, it may be best to replace running days with heavy lifting or oly practice.  Similarly, if you are a former power lifter, you can probably afford to switch out some deadlifts with power cleans, or even bodyweight work. 

Depending on the individual, the specific manner in which each of these examples are implemented would look different.

Phase 4:

DEFCON 1: You have to pass a specific physical fitness test, you are about to run a race, you are competing in a weightlifting competition, or you are so painfully bad that all of your training on your weaknesses is undone with the smallest amount of additional work.  THIS IS RARE!  I have tried this twice and in both cases I think I would have been much smarter if I had tried one of the above options.  But it happens.  Understand that we usually are reducing your overall fitness for the sake of passing a test or winning a sport.

Jon PCF Runs an Oly Class for People Looking to Specialize a Little or Bring up there Weakness

Example 1: You want to compete in an oly competition.  With years of conditioning under your belt and a solid CrossFit foundation, you are in good shape but have stalled on your lifts.  A few months out we will cut your CF training by probably 80% and replace it with an oly progression designed to peak at competition time (or more than a few months depending on schedule and your competencies).

Example 2: You have to pass a PT test.  While you are very strong, the military has made the oh-so brilliant decision that being strong isn’t as important as being able to do 100 push-ups and run 1.5 miles in shorts and tennis shoes.  In order to spend sufficient time to make you competent at these movements we will need to sacrifice some of your training and put you on a few running and push-up progressions.  In the long run you would have done better by just doing CrossFit, but if you only have a month, you only have a month.  We work with what we have.

Nice Tat

Example 3:

You have been skinny your whole life.  Really skinny.  Maybe you are a recovering cyclist.  Your strength levels are so low you can’t practice many of the movements in CrossFit and scaling dramatically doesn’t seem to produce the stimulus or intensity that we need.  We have increased your food intake, but you shed weight so efficiently that small amounts of conditioning strips the muscle right off of you.  Radical intervention is required.  We might reduce your training volume and put you on a dedicated strength program and a LOT of food.

As I stated in Part II, 99% of you don’t need ANY of these interventions.  Of the remaining 1%, 99% of you don’t need to reach DEFCON 1.  Yet somehow I see people rush to this rather quickly.  This is a long journey and people need to be patient with results.  Don’t believe me?  Tell me your problems I will help prescribe a solution.  I’ll bet it rarely involves more than small tweaks to your programming.  Hit me with your best shot.

Part I of this post was supposed to be an entire article about how to break through plateaus and some of my recent attempts at benchmarks.  Instead you were all treated to a walk down memory lane, some embarrassing pictures, and a reminder of how old I am.  So Part II will be a bit more substantive.

Read Part 1 of this series.

We are pretty lucky that CrossFit allows people to train and improve almost continuously for years before they start to hit really difficult barriers.  Nevertheless, we hit those barriers and eventually need to find a way past them.  If someone comes to me and says they have plateaued or hit a barrier to progress, I will run through a checklist.

Step 1: STFU

You: I have been here for 6 months and I still can’t do a pull-up.

Me: You started out on a black band that could sling shot a bowling ball to Mars, moved to a green band that could only sling it to the moon, started using smaller bands for higher reps, and now can support your weight above the bar and slowly lower yourself through negatives.  STFU.

Step 2: Address the Obvious

You: I have been stuck using the thin red band for pull-ups for three months.

Me: You were on vacation for two weeks, started a new job that gives you four hours of sleep a night, and eat at McDonalds for lunch.  You really want me to “put you on a pull-up program?”  Sleep right, eat right, and tell me if you don’t improve.

Step 3: That’s what the Warm-up is for

You: I finally got a pull-up after I improved my eating, but I really want to get good enough to do them in a workout.

Me: Well how often do you work on them?  Only during WODs?  During your warm-up do a couple of pull-ups, do 3 sets of negatives, or do 5 minutes of kipping practice.  Do that for a month and come back to me.

Up to this point I have not changed your programming, added significant time to your workouts, or even greatly increased the amount of coaching you need.  In spite of this, I often have people in one of these three stages want to quit CrossFitting and start a gymnastics program just so they can do Fran RX’d.  This tendency is even worse amongst guys who come to me with barbell numbers that are lower than they would like them.  The words are different for those guys, but the sentiments are the same.  I want to stop CrossFitting and do a barbell program because my CrossFit Total is too low.  STFU, start eating and sleeping, and I usually don’t need Step 3 because at Potomac CrossFit we squat, press, and pull once a week.

However, here is a real life version of Step 3 that occurred in our gym with an advanced athlete.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

S. Assassin: My deadlift just isn’t very good.  I think I need to start doing some dedicated work.

Awesome Coach: Ummmmm, we regularly deadlift on Thursdays and usually have a conditioning workout with deadlifts in it when we don’t.

S. Assassin: Thursday is my day off because I have to travel for work.

Awesome Coach: You are just now figuring this out?

Point is, the solution to this problem was, “maybe you should deadlift.”

Once again, I have run long.  But you know what, I’m ok with that.  Why?  Because 99% of you are in stages 1, 2, or 3 and can address your problems appropriately without special programs and intensive coaching.  So STFU, get to sleep, eat right, and get to work.  I’ll be back soon to sabotage my coaching career by writing an article for the remaining 1% of you that uses me and a few of our other athletes as examples.

(Editor’s Note: When I upgraded my blogging program I lost the personalized banner art.  There is, as far as I know, no connection between anything I say and the banners with bi-planes and old Japanese flags.  I am working to fix this).

I have told this story before:

Five years ago I was in Iraq.  I thought I was in pretty good shape.  I had been training for and competing in triathlons and lost a bunch of weight in the previous year as I started to take my running more seriously.  I had been a competitive runner in high school.

Skinny but I thought I was in shape.

But I was weak.  I was soft.  I had little noticeable muscle tone. 

When I got to Iraq my running was limited to the treadmill and the occasional run up hill by our house that required me to suffer through dusty air and the need to carry a pistol with me the whole time.  Not surprisingly, I started running less.  I didn’t have a bike or a pool, so there wasn’t a great deal of other Tri training to do. 

One of the guys in the House showed me a website.  In 2005 there were fewer than 20 affiliates.  There were very few videos on the website and a few of the demos were a series of pictures rather than the high quality streaming HD stuff we see today.  Clearly, everyone on the website was crazy.  I mean, cheating pull-ups, using your legs to lift weights up over your head, rep schemes in the hundreds?  That’s insanity!  And I should know.  I have read the Internets before and EVERYONE agrees that is no way to work out.

But, in my boredom and competitive zeal, I finally agreed to do a workout.  I looked up what was on tap for that day and got to work.  Here is the link to my very first WOD.   You read that right.  My first WOD was Fran.  Looked easy.  I put 95lbs on the bar, placed a bench right behind me (I didn’t have a medball to lower myself to, so I replaced it with a bench that left me a good 3 inches above parallel) and got to work.

I didn’t know how to rack the bar on my shoulders.

I didn’t know how to move fast with a barbell.

I had never done a thruster.

I didn’t know how to kip.

I thought going fast meant not taking 3 minutes between sets.

It took me 18 minutes.

Remember, I had never been to a CrossFit gym.  I hadn’t watched hours of workouts.  I hadn’t read the comments.  I didn’t know what “fast” meant.  I hadn’t seen other people push.  I was impressed with my partner … who completed it in 12 minutes.

I started doing more workouts.  I kept up my running (I was training for a marathon) within a month my body started changing.  I was a skinny runner but now I had abs.  You started seeing muscles in my arms.  What the hell was happening to me?  I had exercised my whole life in a million different ways and this had never happened!  It had only been a month!  I was hooked.

Shoulders Fuller, muscles somewhat visible.

That was Phase I of my CrossFit career.  Phase II was me changing the way I thought about CrossFit.  I started learning.  After returning from Iraq, I did run that marathon.  I kept CrossFitting and continued to see changes in my body, but I worked out at regular gyms, only paid a little attention to what I was eating, didn’t workout with a group, and never had a chance to compete.  I looked like an in shape but skinny distance runner.

20080531 Park WOD from Potomac Crossfit on Vimeo.

I eventually got certified and started training people.  I wanted to open my own gym.  Luckily, I ran across a few other folks trying to open their own gym in Arlington, and I decided I would try to join in.  The process of training hundreds (thousands?) of clients changed the way I thought about my own training.  By myself I tended to stick to what I was good at.  I was always first in a group of one, so I didn’t know how much I harder I needed to work.  I am not even sure I knew how much harder I COULD work.

That realization brought me to the end of Phase of II of my training.  Potomac CrossFit had started and grown to 50-100 athletes.  We had a few plates, half a wall of pull-up bars, and the fastest Fran time at the gym was 3:59 (that was my time, by the way, 14 minutes faster than I had done it 3 years prior).

Little Equipment, Few Clients

Phase III, I realized, meant I had to start taking this shit seriously.  The gym grew.  I was no longer first of 1, I was in a group of ever improving athletes.  In programming for them I started realizing how many holes I had.  I realized where my weaknesses were and figured out I had to do more than just practice once or twice a month to get better.  I became much more serious about how I ate (read my food blog from last month) and I started competing against international competition.  There was nowhere to hide.

Competition Spurs Improvements

I began to take my weaknesses seriously.  I started periodizing and taking seminars in a desperate attempt to solve them.  My body started changing again as my diet improved and I tailored it to my specific goals.  I am constantly searching and experimenting, not only for my own fitness but for my clients.

Me after a mass gaining phase. Go back and compare this picture to the first picture in the post.

I am still in Phase III.  I don’t know what Phase IV looks like but I will let you know in another 5 years if I have reached it yet.  Potomac CrossFit has hundreds of clients.  We are packed with equipment.  When I started CrossFit I had an 18 minute Fran.  I just retested at 3 minutes flat.  I had a 115lb power clean.  I now have a 235lb power clean.  It took me two years to learn to overhead squat and snatch.  It took me two years to get a muscle-up.  Every once in a while a client comes to me discouraged.  A few people are way ahead of them in the gym and it doesn’t seem like they will ever catch up.  I have to remind them of where I started.  How many years it takes to become competent, much less good at this.  But look at the progress you’ve made DURING your journey and remember you have a lifetime left ahead of you.

This is going to have to become a two piece post.  I got a little long winded in what was supposed to just be an intro.  More to come on plataeus and progress.

I sound like a broken record when I tell people they need to work on their weaknesses.  It’s true.  Your biggest bang for the buck in terms of fitness and performance is almost always a result of becoming competent at what you are bad at rather than improving what you are already good at.

I don’t always practice what I preach.  I set two personal records in the last week, both in workouts I was already quite good at.

3 Rounds: 400m run, 21 kettle bell swings, 12 pull-ups in 8:06.

5 Rounds: 400m run, 15 overhead squats with 95lbs in 12:12.

Great news, right?  Yes.  However, running, moderate-weight lifting, and limited body weight movements is right in my wheel house.  But this is more than a confession.  I am not a complete sinner because my training leading up to this has been balanced and biased toward my weaknesses.  The body weight work I have been doing helped efficiency in my pull-ups for Helen.  Some higher rep air squat exercises combined with the high rep Wendler sets got me through the Nancy overhead squats.  In the same week I PR’d my one rep overhead squat with 225lbs (that is so-so, but I can’t get more over my head … yes, that’s bad).

None of these movements are hard for me, but improving efficiencies allowed me to maintain a higher intensity across the length of the workout.  This is how people improve.

Stay tuned as in the next few weeks I deal with workouts that do not play to my strengths.  Also forthcoming are some thoughts on nutrition on the heels of Robb Wolf’s seminar.

This is less exciting then it sounds.  I haven’t done the benchmarks yet, but will be over the next couple of weeks.  There is a ton of stress that goes along with benchmark WODs because it is hard to handle the idea that you have been working your ass off for months.  If you fail to set a PR you question whether that time was entirely wasted. 

In truth, it may very well be that you got bad sleep, were stressed out, or just had a bad day.  One workout does not make or break a training plan.

Despite this, I REALLY want to beat all of my PR’s.  I already set an Angie PR (100 pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, squats).  I will also be testing

5k

Fran (21-15-9 pull-ups and thrusters)

Helen (3 rounds 400m run, 21 KB Swings, 12 Pull-ups)

Grace (30 clean and jerks 135lbs)

Jackie (1000m Row, 50 thrusters, 30 pull-ups)

Elizabeth (21-15-9 squat cleans and ring dips)

Max Efforts on Press, Bench, Squat, Deadlift

So I will have a busy couple of weeks.  I don’t like overtesting.  The test is often a poor workout and I would rather workout than test.  However, I am at the beginning of the off season and I am changing up my training and body comp a little, so I need a baseline.  I often test these things in isolation, but what that means is that I train for the test, do well, and neglect to see whether the cost of testing well was a poor performance in other workouts.  This should fix that.

I have been doing the Wendler program so hopefulyl I test well in strength.  I won’t set PRs because I weigh 20lbs less and I actually practice other things, but I want to be well on my way to matching those PRs.  I have been adding a little running for my 5k.  I can run a 20 minute 5k with NO running, so we’ll see how I do with once or twice a week running.  Finally, I have the traditional CF bench marks.  My hope is that getting back to more traditional CF style training with an emphasis on my bodyweight work will have helped me here.  My Angie improved, so that is a good sign.  We’ll see if that translates to the rest of the workouts.  Some of these I haven’t tested in over a year, so it will be interesting.  Wish me luck.

I’ll send back reports as I try these.

I think I will wrap up this little public food log after today.  It encompassed what is fairly typical for me in terms of eating other than the lack of ice cream on the weekends (which I intend to rectify this weekend).  People ask me what I eat all the time and I try to explain.  Now I can just point them to these few blog posts.  I think the key takeaways are

1. I have bad days but they really aren’t that bad.
2. I have few to no perfect days.
3. There are very few excuses to not eat 80% (working, eating out, not cooking, etc)

I have written previous blog posts on general eating habits (meats and veggies, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar) but these were an attempt to show people how that is implemented in my little world.  I will let people know if there are any big changes.

My final day looked like this.

Eggs with squash blossoms and sausage with coffee for breakfast; leftover Thai food for lunch; post WOD shake; salad with lettuce, chicken, feta, yogurt sauce, olive oil and vinegar for dinner.  I did eat an unfortunately large piece of bread with that salad, but at least I managed to leave half the bread in the bag and not eat it.

I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that almost all the eggs I ate, other than the ones I bought from work, were farm fresh eggs from the Humble Gourmand.  That also goes for the sausage, the ground pork, and the pork chops.  The zucchini, blackberries, and the squash blossoms were from a CSA with a local farm.  The rest was commercial.

The best way to eat healthy is to prepare all of your own food.  You know what is in it and where it came from and tend to cook with healthier ingredients than mass produced food.  But sometimes that can’t happen.  Don’t use this as an excuse to eat pizza because it is around.  Take my day.

Omelette with spinach, tomato, and cheese along with coffee for breakfast; pulled pork with greens and asparagus for lunch; recovery shake post WOD; Thai food for dinner.  The Thai food was chicken dishes with veggies, we just skipped the rice. 

Now, this is not the best in the world.  I am sure the eggs were bland and commercially produced.  There was surely some sugar in the BBQ sauce and I have no idea what the greens were cooked in.  The Thai food may very well have been soaked in hydrogenated oils and MSG.  But the macro-nutrients were about right and if you ate out but ate poor food you get the same crap, it would just be covering dense over-processed carbohydrates.

People always ask me, as if it is some great mystery, how to eat well when eating out.  It is really easy.  Everyone serves meat and veggies and you don’t have to eat everything that is put in front of you.  If you remember that, you will do ok.  Not perfect, but good enough.

Big win for the softball team last night, which meant a little celebration.  As a result, not exactly a perfect day.

Ground pork, zucchini, and coffee for breakfast; some chicken, ham, veggie thing in sauce for lunch; and steak fajita, guacamole, and onion for dinner.

Doesn’t sound bad, right?  Well, one of my favorite things in the world is chocolate cake.  There was some sitting in the office all day.  I eventually had a BITE.  Not a piece, a bite.  I also had a couple of beers at softball … and a celebratory tequila when we won … and a couple more beers with dinner.  The chicken thing I ate was cafeteria food so I cannot vouch for lack of sugar or hydrogenated oils or anything like that.  But it’s not like it was sweet and I didn’t put it over rice or bread, so I made the best with what I had.

The good news is I didn’t have a piece of cake nor did I have chips and salsa at the mexican place.  This is also a good lesson for how to eat well at a mexican restaurant.  Order the fajitas but avoid the tortillas, rice, and beans.  Avoid chips and especially watch out for margaritas made with syrup.  Tons of sugar in those.  I will have some of the higher quality margaritas with lemon and lime juice in place of margarita mix and Rose’s lime.

Generally, my weekend food is not as good as my weekday eating.  This is mostly due to the ease of being in a routine and being able bring my food to work most days.  At any rate, this weekend was no exception, but I can’t say it was a disaster.  Remember, bad eating for us is better than most people ever eat, so this is all relative.

I would also like to take this opportunity to admit that I am probably eating a little better than I usualy do because I know I am recording it.  I skipped a cookie at work last Friday and didn’t get a biscuit with my breakfast on Sunday, but otherwise this is about right.  I would probably have had a drink a little more often, but I am making a concerted effort be a little stricter

Friday: 4 eggs, some blackberries, and coffee for breakfast; salad with lettuce, chicken, oil vinegar and sunflower seeds for lunch; olives, almonds, hamburger (no bun), sweet potato fries, and sunbutter for dinner.  I also had a beer and two vodkas with dinner.

I ate a little more food and starch than usual, but it was Friday and I had a race the next day.

Saturday: 4 eggs, squash blossoms, 2 apples and coffe for breakfast; 2 bananas post race and a recovery shake a little later; a bag of almonds and some sunbutter for snacks later.  I also had a bunch of Coke Zero while I watched a movie.

This was sort of a disaster day.  Schedule and body was all messed up from the race, in which Potomac CrossFit took 2nd, 4th, and 6th (me) in the individual competition.  Notice no carb loading before the race (hint, hint).

Sunday: omlette with chicken, veggies, salsa, starwberries on the side and coffee for breakfast (post WOD so about 1pm); ground pork and zucchini for dinner.

Born of Having No Other Food in the House and Being Too Lazy to Go to the Store

A little bit of a change.  Yesterday was a rest day for me and I was too tired the other night to prepare breakfast or lunch.  I decided to take that opportunity to skip a meal.  What did that means?

Breakfast: Fast.

Lunch: Salad with lettuce, chicken, sunflower seeds, olive oil and vinegar.

Beer (Mmmmmmm, beer).

Dinner: chopped pork BBQ, BBQ sauce, cole slaw.

For dinner I think the pork itself was pretty  clean.  I don’t know what they put in the BBQ sauce, but it wasn’t overly think and sweet, so hopefully not too much sugar.  The coleslaw was not oil and viengar based, but it wasn’t a really thick sauce either.  Sort of a thin white sauce.  Very good.  The beer was because I stopped by a friend’s house.  Just one.  I don’t worry about that too much.

I still took my fishoil, creatine and ZMA.

This was well below my normal caloric intake.  It’s not bad every once in while have a big reduction and some periods of no food.  If you are experienced with your food you can toy around with this.  Everyone else just eat good food.

Since I post the day AFTER I eat, I have no pictures for today.  I did take pictures of this mornings breakfast, so hopefully you will get those tomorrow.