Barbell Shrugged - 41- Strength vs. Endurance in CrossFit

Episode Date: January 2, 2013

http://www.FITR.tv  The Barbell Shrugged Podcast

Hey guys, this is Rich Vroning and you're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to fitter.tv. Are we ready, Chris? We're filming, we're recording. I realized there was so much drama during the last episode. It'd be like if you said, if you're going to lift weights, you might want to eat protein. And you're like... What did I say? Stone cold Bledsoe stare of a thousand ages.

Belts your soul. Sorry, man. I'll try not to do that this week. Try not to, you fucker. Don't do it to David. Yeah, I'd freak out. Alright, guys. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson, Chris Moore, and now David Gross. David is one of our coaches at Faction. We invited him to come join on the discussion. We'll see how he does. I think he'll be okay. Yeah, I think last time I was here, I was out on the back porch for our, was it the pool party?

Yeah, the podcast that never got posted. The unaired episode. Supposedly, CTP was doing it. Our cameraman was drunk. You might have been sober, but we weren't. CTP, yeah. CTP earned some new nicknames that day, so he had to delete that.

I'm going to promote a couple things real quick. First off, we do offer remote coaching uh on our website oh we got a buzz uh we got remote coaching there you go good uh offered by matt baird uh and then also myself we might have some other coaches uh it kind of depends on if it looks like we're doing a lot of work and they probably won't want to do it and what all does that involve uh the remote coaching uh you're gonna get individualized programming so you'll get individualized programming uh some nutrition um consultations uh you'll get monthly phone consultations there are 30 minutes i'm trying to remember everything

that you do but you get a free barbell stroke t-shirt no not yet we're not there yet uh you will get i should have some t-shirts soon though yeah so like on a monthly basis you're going to be given a program every month by the coach you're going to have some interaction uh it's going to be programmed specifically uh to fit your and your goals. You'll get, when someone signs up, they get things like some of our seminars. So the first thing you do is we'll send you maximum mobility. That way you can test yourself, figure out where you might have some mobility restrictions so we don't end up programming badly for you. And then also so we can uh adjust the training as necessary

it's pretty much the same thing i just said it twice different ways it doesn't matter that's fine yeah that's good yeah so you'll get long story short this sounds like a good deal yeah you should probably do it if you have uh goals so only if you have goals only if you have goals yeah most people who end up doing something like this they they uh they have a competition they're preparing for you know they want to go to the games one day or something like that um so if you're kind of beyond blog programming and you don't want to just follow like a random website or you don't have a coach right now yeah then maybe you could look into this yeah go to um check out good point matt matt baird is one

of the guys that's coaching. He does an excellent job. And if you want to see him talk, he's on episode 36, and we'll be bringing him back again hopefully pretty soon so we can talk more about that. He's insane. Yeah, Matt's insane, but he knows what he's talking about. In a good way. Yeah.

If you don't get motivated to train harder by working with that guy, then you have no soul, no heart, no emotion. Yeah, that guy is... You're void. You're a shell of a human being. Yeah. He fires me up. He's a passionate guy, for sure.

If you work with that guy and just talk to him once a week or whatever, you're going to feel much better about life. Yeah. He's a good guy to have around. He always makes me want to train hard, that's for sure. The other thing I want to tell you guys you should do is go to fitter.tv, F-I-T-R dot TV.

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All right. So today's topic is strength versus endurance. We get a lot of questions where people are asking, should I take some time off from my endurance training or cardio and really focus on getting stronger? What's the quickest route there? This is the big CrossFit question, right? The balance between, you know, the major domains of, well, I want to be really strong, but I also want to be able to do all the other stuff.

How do I maintain a balance? That's the fundamental question in CrossFit, isn't it? Yeah, I find a lot of people, they'll be doing CrossFit, they'll be doing CrossFit.com, or they'll be doing some type of uh programming where they're doing uh strength training a couple days a week and then they're doing a lot of conditioning three days a week and then they always hit that point where they're not you know the strength gains like slow down considerably because because why why there's a few different reasons okay you're gonna talk about it yeah trying to do it him we

did you last week no i'm just i'm just like just like your elementary school teacher and two plus two is why show your work for your work i'm just saying how much work to show because these things are competing the demands right that's right you've only fundamentally different yeah i mean they are they are fucking yin and yang let's blow your mind over that yin and yang strength and conditioning and so uh i think a lot of people they just don't spend enough time on strength training uh and then a lot of times people do strength or conditioning and they don't you know you could you could spend what you probably should do is at the beginning of each day is do a little bit of strength training and

then you're conditioning i think people also on the uh on the endurance side of things they probably spend too much of their volume uh training in that in that domain when they could be committing more of that strength we're going to talk more about that as the show goes on about why uh getting stronger is probably a better idea especially for newer athletes you know especially if you have not reached that requisite amount of strength yeah we see that all the time people come to the gym and at first they want to just you know they're not an athlete they just want to kind of get back in shape they they've never done any crossfit type training before and initially they

just want to metcon all the time they just want their heart rate to be up and to feel like they're sweating and whatnot and then they stop winning at Metcons, or they may have never started. They may have never actually won at all. But they stop improving on their Metcons, and they think the answer still is just to Metcon harder and do more Metcons. And then eventually they realize that they're just not strong enough. And until they gain strength, they're not going to improve their Metcon times because the Metconning, even know the heart rate is really high and they can they consider it cardio training

it's really not true endurance training in a lot of cases if you're metconning for a 12 minute am wrap that's not really endurance if you talk to like the endurance community they think of endurance as hours upon hours of running marathon you know marathons and whatnot are terrible or low intensity for a long period of time no reason to ever do that yeah and if you're met conning it's not really true endurance so if you want to improve a short duration met con anything less than 20 minutes then you have to improve your strength first if you're not front squatting body weight in half then you're not going to win a crossfit competition not a real one that's like a bare minimum I had a guy coming to me a couple months ago he was like I went to this competition and I felt like I just need more cardio but I know the guy

doesn't deadlift over 400 pounds yeah like man the weights crushed you I mean it felt like it felt like your your cardio sucked because you weren't the weights were heavy so I think across it man is like the lifting is actually getting really high quality. It is. It's getting heavy. Pretty soon, if you can't deadlift close to 550 or 600, you really won't be able to win those. You used to be able to get away.

I remember, I think it was the 08 Games. They were interviewing some guys. This was when it was still out in the uh on the ranch and this is last year was on the ranch and they had a they had a metcon where it was uh i mean i can't remember exactly what it was but had a 315 deadlift for like 21 reps and they had like farmers carrying it was a it was a really cool event but uh they were interviewing some guys and they were like uh what's your max deadlift you know and they had to rep it out and a lot of the not more than one guy was like oh the most ever

deadlift was 325 and then that day they did 21 reps at 315 you know it doesn't make any sense yeah so i think i think what was happening there is they probably hadn't just challenged themselves on a on a truly heavy deadlift up to that point like that wasn wasn't their real max? That wasn't their real max, yeah. So now it's pretty clear. If you want to be good at CrossFit, you have to be as strong as you can be, really. Yeah, that 315 deadlift was like during a conditioning, or Metcon was like a big surprise at that in the 08 games. And now it's like, you know, you better be able to do that unbroken, no problem,

and be able to go do 10 more things that's what's expected the games only did one true endurance event and the rest of them were regular CrossFit events like they had the one the one kind of little triathlon thing they did last year that took everyone two hours or whatever but after that the other 10 or so events they had were normal, shorter duration type events.

Right. I think a couple reasons that keep them short is one, it's not nearly as entertaining to watch something go on for an hour. And then logistically, you've got to run all those athletes through. I think they're trying to make that pool a little bit smaller. They drop regionals down from 60 individuals to 48 individuals, stuff like that. I think that way they can maybe have a little more freedom there. But, yeah, it's not sexy on ESPN to do like a 60-minute WOD for sure.

And then I'm brain farting now where I was going with that. But, yeah, the long WODs, even in the games this year, the first WOD, I watched like the first 10 minutes and I was like oh this is getting boring yeah i picked it and you love watching it i know that's why it wasn't on espn or um the uh the live feed yeah the crossfit game yeah they put on a live feed but they weren't gonna like show that on yeah espn reminds me that's why i was thinking of the comment about you know it's sad that most of our lifters now, our crossfitters can qualify for the American Open. They can't qualify for local state track meet.

Because, yeah, because that's what's going to entail people on ESPN. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, there's a reason why tracks not. I don't want to show up and watch anybody run around a track 20 times. I just don't really care. Like when you watch the Olympics, like in London, the coolest thing was Bolt running 100 meters. Like it doesn't get any cooler than that. An antithesis of that is watching some asshole running on the track 20

times it's the most boring thing possible i'll come back in 45 minutes when this is halfway so say it's kind of like basketball i just want to tune in the last five minutes yeah when all the action it's all i want to do um and then the other thing too is you know there it does require a lot of endurance to compete in crossfit because you're doing multiple WODs a day. You know, you said there's like that one true endurance event that takes a couple hours to finish. But the rest of the events are, you know, five to 15 minutes long. But it's, you know, one after another. You got to recover.

So there's that. It's almost a different type of endurance that's required for crossfit and the to have the capacity to compete over four days in under a week i mean if if all you did was strength training and focus on you know a lot of short duration stuff you probably would suffer there so there's definitely a place for that that longer duration stuff um but we're going to talk a little bit about that today and why doing a 60-minute WOD to prepare for 10 six-minute WODs may not be the best way to go. And I think just saying it like that probably... Foreshadowing.

Yeah. Make you think. Let's talk about why strength improves endurance. I think a lot of people don't realize that. They feel like, you know, if you get stronger, you get stronger. And if you get more endurance, you get more endurance. But this is something I didn't even think about until I got into school. And it was kind of like, well, I do endurance training for endurance.

And I lift weights to get stronger. And it never really occurred to me that being strong was actually going to help my endurance out and that was a little bit of a paradigm shift for me when i when i was uh in at uh memphis for exercise science and and then um i didn't know exactly why but as time's gone it's become much more obvious i think people listen to this right now think that what you're saying is an opinion rather than like a researched fact right in a lot of cases where i've never seen some some good research while back on on cross-country skiers who uh if you want to wear cross-country skiers have some of the highest vo2 maxes out of almost all athletes um which here we'll talk we'll talk a little bit about vo2 max for a second so uh your vo2 max is how much oxygen you can take in and effectively use. So you breathe in so much oxygen, you breathe out so much oxygen and carbon dioxide.

So far, I got it, Doug. All the oxygen you breathe in isn't necessarily taken into your body and used to create energy. Basically, you combine food and oxygen. That's how you create physical energy in your body. And if you can take in more oxygen then you can burn calories faster and you can you can produce more work quicker and all that and so doing endurance training tends to improve your vo2 max but so does weight training so for cross-country skiers they tend to have the highest values for the vo2 max for almost all athletes but when they take

these high level cross-country skiers and they strength train them, they always improve their performance even independent of improving their endurance or their VO2 max. But basically, they can just move faster even though their cardio didn't improve or change. They just perform better because they're faster and stronger. And usually, if you're going faster, you're winning races.

Yeah, and VO2 max, that used to be kind of like the gold standard for uh endurance athletes you know they're like what's your vo2 max like that really mattered um and now they're looking more at what is your anaerobic threshold and um you know how long can you operate at a percentage of your vo2 max so your VO2 max may be really high, but say you've got two guys with the same VO2 max. The guy that can operate at a higher percentage of his VO2 max is going to win. Their performance is going to be higher. So ways to improve that is not like your typical endurance training

where you go run for a couple hours. A lot of that's going to be improving your anaerobic threshold is where that kind of comes into play. Sounds like a great opportunity to talk about how you do that. He goes, oh, God, yeah. Yeah, I kind of want to get into that. Yeah, strength. Well, let's talk about it.

Do you want to have that discussion? I guess. Why don't you go with the point? You kind of just said it, where your VO2 max is what we just talked about. That's like your potential for how much cardio you can do, which is a very loose word to put that. But your anaerobic threshold is what percentage of your cardio max you can maintain for a long period of time without, you know, kind of tanking or fatiguing. So, you know, if you go for a jog, say you can jog at 8 or 10 miles an hour comfortably for a long period of time. But if you went to like 8.5 or 9 miles an hour, then you would fatigue very quickly and you'd have to stop and walk, right?

There's a speed that you can operate at where you can maintain that speed but if you go just slightly faster then you know you'll you'll eventually fatigue and have to take a break right so if you can raise your your anaerobic threshold then you can you can basically operate at a slightly faster speed without without you know falling off that cliff and having to take a break. It's like the easiest non-scientific way I can explain that for what's happening for a workout like in the real world. And usually what anaerobic threshold training looks like is it's interval training. So what you're doing is you're going for a short period of time, and it kind of depends on the individual too.

The ratios and the amount of time that you can hold a certain power output is going to change from person to person. But yeah, the idea is that you, you're going to push that threshold that you wouldn't be able to hold. Say you do a five minute interval, five minutes on five minutes off, something like that. Uh, that's just an example. You can set them up however you want. But say you do a five minute interval where you, you want to be at the end of the five minutes.

You want to go all out. So at the end of five minutes, you really couldn't have gone on to that sixth minute of training. You know, you put it all out there, and you got to a certain level. And then you rest five minutes, and then you go at it again. And what you do is you're practicing pushing past that point where you wouldn't be able to keep going anymore. And then eventually, I mean, you can use periodization and other things like that, uh, to, to plan out these, you know, like an interval program so that you can, most people are going to be fine if they just do like a linear progression on that. Like today I did five minutes, you know, next week I'll do six minutes, you know, and they'll

get, they'll get pretty far on that. Um, but you also want to like keep it changed up too. You don't want to stick with one type of interval. Uh, you want to do like one minute intervals, three minute intervals, five minute intervals so that you're kind of being training different speeds and, and, uh, you can push it a lot harder for one minute than for five. So you're, so you're doing the intervals for the reason that I just talked about, like, five so you're doing the intervals for the reason that i just talked about like right you're doing the interval intentionally well above your anaerobic threshold right but if you're above your anaerobic threshold then you're going to fatigue and you're going to

have to take a break right so you're doing that on purpose and you're you're training a pace you know if you're training for endurance sports you're training a pace that's well above your race pace on purpose so you can get used to operating at a slightly faster pace than you're going to run in your actual race and then when you actually have a race then you'll be able to just go a little bit faster than you normally did or normally have in the past because you're training always at a faster pace yeah and then you'll win the race you get all the money all the chicks. Do your interval training. The only way to get your body to adapt is just to keep on trying to exceed where you can normally operate at. CTP, is this where you can play push it to the limit? Push it to the limit.

As we have this discussion. The other thing, too. Classic 80s movie song. It's where the intervals. What I like about that is, say you do a a 10 minute uh you do a wad that's 10 minutes long and you do go all out well if you could have split that up into maybe uh maybe you did the same amount of time and you did five two minute intervals instead you're able to high go at a higher rate you put out more total power by the end of the workout um so doing doing five two

minutes can be more beneficial than doing one 10 minute wad or something like that uh there's definitely room for both and there's a time and place for both but uh we like to i like to split it up like that two or three times a week where you're doing intervals for your conditioning versus just straight uh metcons i think there's a great place for metcons too uh the traditional like you know do 20 minutes non-stop this and that i did a i did a case study on myself for my senior project uh in school where uh i had my vo2 max i just want to bring a substance to my vo2 max and crossfitFit. What is your VF2 Max? I haven't checked it in years.

What was it? I've only checked mine like once. I want to say it was like 47. It wasn't great. No, you were in the 50s. No, no, no. Well, I got it up in the 60s. Oh, okay. no well i got it up in the 60s okay so what what what ended up happening is i uh i'd gotten out

of the navy and i i ditched like conditioning altogether i did no no aerobic training no conditioning all weight lifting yeah for like a year and a half so i went in and i did vo2 max i think i was like 45 what's the what's the average for say the average uh average untrained is probably like it's probably like 30s and 40s 35 40 yeah for average like anaerobic athletes like like football players or soccer players uh is usually like in the 50s maybe maybe in the 60s if you're if you're you know like doing a very running dependent sport you knows if you're doing a very running-dependent sport. If you're a midfielder in a soccer game, you're running a lot of sprints for hours. So you might have a slightly higher VO2 max compared to a wide receiver who runs sprints

but then has a decent rest interval and then gets off the field for defense. That person's not running quite as much as the midfielder. So 50s 60s and then i was talking about the the cross-country skiers they get up like in the 80s i think uh there's that one guy 80 84 is like kind of like pretty sick and in the 90s that would be super unusual they're probably talked about a guy they tested in like sweden that was like really 90 at one point i was like i'm not sure what the record is for VO2 max, but 80s or 90s would be super high. I think about endurance athletes, I think about like 60s and 70s, except for cross-country skiers and maybe some cyclists.

That's a short little fat kid playing soccer, playing the glorious position of defender. I wonder what my VO2 max was. 25, 27. I could have practically been just sitting in front of the goalie waiting to defend something, eating like, you know, goldfish crackers just waiting for something to happen. That was probably the definition of my youth sporting experience.

But not all soccer players are fit. Let's say that. Well, I'd go back to VO2 max then get away from the goldfish but uh goldfish crackers by the way excellent refueling source of high quality carbohydrate yeah yeah not true uh i what i did was i i i and i wasn't doing more than maybe five reps on anything uh i want to say i was like maybe 47 was my vo2 max and then i did seven months of crossfit and it just so happened the reason i had this data is because i went in for i was a guinea pig for a study and then i just happened to start doing crossfit like right after that

and then seven months later uh i was doing a senior project and then i had access to being able to do the vo2 max again i did a bunch of different tests actually uh and i also did anaerobic threshold there's some other stuff or it was a windgate test actually uh but anyways uh my vo2 max got up to like 60 like it went it went in in a very short period of time and like a lot of the research will tell you like you're not going to increase your vo2 max more than 20 so and mine mine actually exceeded that in like seven months and i think i really don't know why it made that big of a jump maybe maybe i was doing a little more running too and i wasn't doing any running so quick note on vo2 max is it's very dependent on the activity that you're doing so putting a swimmer on a treadmill and finding their running

vo2 max is not going to be really accurate to find anything out about them you need to get their vo2 max when they're swimming same with cyclists and runners and so yeah we took we took nassau who who's a jiu-jitsu world champion right and has has good cardio can like can fight and wrestle for for days and we put him on the treadmill for his vo2 max and he he was like 37 or something like that. He was out of shape. Yeah. He looked bad. Yeah. But then if he wants to go box and wrestle, he's world class.

He'll wear your ass out. Yeah. Specificity. Yeah. Weird specificity. Crazy. Weird specificity. That's a novel idea.

If you want to get good at something, you should do that thing. That's right. Yeah. Doing one thing doesn't necessarily make get good at something you should do that thing that's right yeah doing one thing doesn't necessarily make you good at the other thing yeah and uh with the in regard to the f2 max is i i wasn't i didn't do any like traditional conditioning it was all it was all metcon stuff i was still lifting to stay strong i was still doing the olympic lifts and then i just threw in conditioning from you know crossfit..com, and I saw really good gains out of that. So I don't know what the takeaway was that, but I just wanted to mention it.

There you go. The point being you can get more fit and more endurance, let me put quotation marks as most people think of it, just by doing these Metacons. You don't have to go out and run on track like some asshole. Yeah, I wasn't doing stuff that was taking me longer than 20 minutes. you are an asshole.

Let me make that perfectly clear. Vaughn. Vaughn. Vaughn's like, wait a minute. He's calling me an asshole. But the short sprints and the short workouts

do improve the long run for you. I think it's, I think it, like, these days, it's easy think it like these days it's um it's easy it caught up in more volume on the on the Metcon see if you want to do like a hour long Metcon hmm you get super fit you can only do that for so

long I think it's I think you'll get benefit out of it for you know a year year and a half depending on who you are and then it'll kind of you'll kind of phase off phase out after a while. But isn't it the most, the easiest, most effective way of making yourself weaker is doing frequently long, brutal workouts. That's probably not the best thing for being fast or powerful or strong in any way. It'll definitely make you slower. That's actually the biggest, like the biggest challenge I have with any endurance athletes. And so I take some of those guys and I test their 400-meter run,

and it's really, really slow. I mean, these guys run. This is what they compete in. And I give them a 400, and they can't move very fast. My opinion is that speed is, like, the sole most primary indicator of your sort of preparedness. Like, like anytime the barbell slows down,

for instance, right. That's like the first, your first canary chirping at you that something is probably less than ideal. You can do that effectively on purpose for short duration, but if you still get slower and slower and slower, like for instance, if I'm doing a lift and I'm pushing it too much,

one of the first things I may notice is that I don't pull the bar or move the weight as fast as I would like. Or maybe I'm not even moving myself as fast as I would like. That kind of goes back to Dr. Fry's old research where he had people purposely overtrain. And one of the first things you see go down is not 1RM. It's not their repetition, strength, whatever. It's that the vertical jump goes goes to shit really quick it's like the first indicator that you're doing something less than ideal maybe maybe a little bit the first indicator of over training or you're overreaching right now yeah maybe not it's okay but as well first things to quickly return

as you get like a compensation effect or something but yeah i mean i my opinion is always that if you want to get back to being really strong, the first thing you focus on is getting quick again. Yeah. For me, when I'm deadlifting better and better, by my standards, it's when I can move the weight fast. If I can pull 400 pounds, like a speed deadlift really quick and make the bar snap at the top,

then I know my fitness is back in that particular lift. So I can make carryover to other things as well. I mean, that could be good for coaches who are coaching athletes. And, you know, if they start moving slower, it might be time to, like, back off the volume a little bit. Yeah, you can do it intentionally. You can make people – I mean, sometimes you obviously want to push people too far. I mean, you know, this idea of always being in an optimal state is obviously hokum.

You're going to have times a year where you feel like shit, and you should because you have to sort of push too far in order to get the rebound you want when you stop pushing too far and you compensate and get better. It's a really interesting idea to monitor how maybe vertical jumps in your guys, your sprint times, or

if you're lucky enough to have a little Fitcherdine unit you can put on a bar and monitor on cleans how fast these guys are moving bars. You can sort of see how well they respond to periods where the training is more intense and less intense. Sounds like a vertical or a 40-yard might be the easiest way to monitor that.

Yeah, it costs you nothing, and you know that if your 40-yard times are going down, down, down, down, down, you're competing in a month. You need to roomie that quickly. Right. Your focus needs to be getting fast. I know guys that test their athletes every day when they walk in on their vertical jump just to see how they're feeling.

If you ask an athlete, how are you feeling? People will be like, your good athletes will always say they feel good and your whiners will always say that, I don't know, I feel kind of meh. And then the people in the middle are the people you need to pay attention to because they'll give you a more honest answer because they're not always whining or always motivated. But instead of subjectively asking your athletes how they're feeling, some guys just have them do a vertical jump every single day when they walk in.

If you're within 5% of what you're normally jumping, then it's a normal day. But if you walk in and you normally jump a 30 and you jump a 25, well, you fatigue that day. Assuming you're jumping as high and as fast as possible. Yeah, you jump as high as you can. Then if you come in and you PR your vertical, well, maybe you should max that day. It was like you're already in a state.

That's an interesting idea of this auto-regulation training. I know of stories of shot putters who show up to the gym, they do a power clean or a vertical jump or something. If they didn't feel good, they weren't moving quickly, they would just go home. There was like an A, B, and C level workout. A was when everything felt great. You would go on,

you would do all your work. If you come in, you feel less than good, you would do some light lifts, maybe some light jumps, and you would shut it down early. And if it was a C level where you came in

and you just felt like shit, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't warm up, you couldn't jump, and you were honestly feeling that way. You weren't like just slacking it. You were trying to do what you wanted to do,

but it was obvious to you that this was not going be optimal day then you just leave i think some discipline to be able to approach train like that because i say if you're not using objective things like measuring a hundred percent effort vertical jump to to know what you should do if you're saying well i feel like shit today i'm not gonna train most people would never train you're how you feel does not matter yeah but if you measure i don't know how many times i've seen people they're like i feel like total shit i hate life all right let's lift anyway and then they pr it's like i can't tell you how many times like when i was powerlifting i'd show up to meet and uh like the bar and 135 and a squat would be like it's like 800 pounds then I'd go into obsessive

like oh shit I'm gonna bomb out my friends and family will judge me accordingly my life will end of course it doesn't but still I mean but those workouts those sessions those meets where you feel like shit can be some of the best things like I experienced that most recently when I did

last year I did all this really frequent squatting when we had the last big push and squat really. And so I got to where I would have three main squatting days and two assistant squatting days. And after a while of that, you get to where you're like, my knees don't really feel like they're working really. I don't really want to put the ball on my back.

I'm feeling pretty depressed. But the funny thing is feeling that way keeps you calm. You warm up by the time you get to three four pound you feel really good and you set a pr yeah you know that being said what still could be going down is bar speed and if you wanted to like do a pouting meet you'd want that to come up before you test this squat because you'd squat more but that's an interesting idea that if you test your speed you can know how well you're responding to all this training because yeah you do have to do the longer stuff occasionally but i'll keep an interesting idea that if you test your speed, you can know how well you're responding to all this training.

Because, yeah, you do have to do the longer stuff occasionally, but I would keep an eye on that. What I find is like a two-to-one ratio of training versus testing too, or maybe training versus practice. A lot of people call some of these workouts testing. I'm not sure it's fair to call every long Metcon. I know OPT kind of started that. This is testing.

This is training. And almost any time any of those OPT guys are doing like a typical WOD, they all call it testing. And I almost see it more. It's not always testing. Sometimes it's just practice, practicing for what you're going to encounter at the open or regionals or something like that.

So feeling the pain, it's still a training session. You're still training, but the, I like the two to one ratio of like working on that speed and really focusing on an aspect, you know, we're either working on anaerobic threshold or we're working on,

on, on getting stronger, faster strength, endurance, something like that uh we're focused on you know an aspect of training or skill or something like that and then and then having that practice like for the for the endurance athletes i'll have them i keep on making their running shorter and shorter because they're they're slow so like they're 400 i put a crossfit on the track and they'll run 400 meters in 60 seconds and i throw a guy out there that runs marathons and it takes him a minute and a half and i'm like this there's something wrong here um and so some of the endurance guys they get they get a little antsy and i actually had one guy email me and he goes can i i can do more endurance training like he doesn't think it's, he thinks that I'm like keeping his endurance training low

for some other reason. But the reality is, is look, he's doing a hundred and you copy his mom on the email. Who's the fucking coach here? Huh? I'm the coach. Well, I think that he thinks I, he doesn't, I think he thinks that he, I think he doesn't have the time, but the reason I'm having him running eight 100s versus running 5Ks has nothing to do with what I think he can do.

It has everything to do with your 100s are still really slow when you get those fast. So I want you to get fast first, then we'll work on the endurance. So the two-to-one ratio, where that comes in, is he's running you know really short intervals uh twice a week and then on the weekend that's when he goes for practice you know how do i how do i put this delicately you run like a fat fifth grader so if you want to not suck terribly we have to fix that yeah and to be told like there we don't have an endurance athlete that I'm happy with their speed yet.

If I haven't run a mile, I'm like, man, that was a really good time. But I haven't run 400. I'm like, man, I don't feel like there's a lot of correlation there. It's like they're almost running slower when they run 400. You want to see someone's base is just embarrassing. Maybe I'm a bad coach. Have an endurance athlete do a vertical jump. It's embarrassing to watch.

That's coming from a guy who has one of the worst vertical jumps around for power athletes. I can't jump with this shit, but when I jump, I can put an endurance athlete

to shame. We had guys in our lab one time testing the vertical jump. We'd take muscle bumps and everything. They're all very slow twitch. We talked about

on a previous episode of Barbell Shrugged. But if you could, these guys would get like three inches off the ground during a vertical jump like they go yeah it looks like they're faking it okay well you kind of practiced it now jump for real they go no that was my that was i think it's a terrible way to train so my anatomy professor was in college just like that six inches max yeah it's like i'm fat and i can jump five times higher than you like that's this is not right yeah you're 300 pounds but you could squat three times body weight if you can squat three times body weight you can my best

virgo jump was that when i was at my fattest when i was like three seven i could like you know jump on top of that table oh yeah i remember yeah like 50 50 inches. I was not bad for being a big fatty. Not a 50-inch vertical, but getting onto a 50-inch box. Yeah, I could do all that kind of stuff. That's when I was speed-benching 500 pounds and doing speed pulls.

The best process I ever did, I did a snatch grip deadlift off a deficit with 600 pounds. I stood on three or four of the proudest things I ever did, I did a snatch grip deadlift off a deficit with 600 pounds. Oh. I stood on three or four of my mats, and I grabbed the bar of snatch grip, and I somehow lifted that. So that was my prime. The only thing is I was just terribly fat. My shake of choice was the maltodextrin mixed with like pureed with banana and heavy cream and, like, grape jelly and peanut butter

and honey, like, the greatest shake ever, like, 3,000 calories. Yeah, if you're out there

looking to gain weight, pay attention. I talk to some... Let me repeat that. Put in your blender. You don't have to do the maltodextrin thing. It's like,

I got it off a beer supply website. That will make you really fat quick. Be careful. That's our disclaimer. It's just sugar but if you have a shake

here's the weight gain shake so you have your blender pour in well half and half of heavy cream fill the rest up you can also do coconut milk

fill the rest up with like vitamin D milk add in like a big squeeze of honey like two bananas like a big honking like third of the container of peanut butter

two or three squeeze of protein powder blend that up and you're gonna have a great time that is a milkshake sounds delicious yeah it's ridiculously good it sounds good but people say well i can't get away i've tried hokum you need to eat more and liquid is the path to your salvation it's only a time for a break by the way you don't decide the breaks here i do who's the goddamn host of this show

yeah we'll take a break all right you screwed it up now and break and and break that break now all right welcome back just want to give a shout out to uh south lake union crossfit or Break. Now. All right. Welcome back. Just want to give a shout out to South Lake Union, CrossFit, or CrossFit South Lake Union. They sent us this sweet t-shirt. Pretty awesome t-shirts. With a cool back on it. Yeah.

The back is the best part. There you go. Give it a turn. Hashtag hella buff. Hella buff. So everyone on Twitter, when you see this show, I want everyone to use that hashtag. We'll just tag Barbell Shrug, at Barbell Shrug, and then hashtag Hella Buff. And then we'll have an interesting discussion about this show.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll drop in there next time I'm back in Washington. We're from Seattle, right? Seattle. Yeah. Very cool. Hey, L Seattle. Yeah. Very cool. Hey, L-Rat.

Super cool. All right, so we talked the first half a lot about a lot of BS, since we're good at that. And we're going to try to get a little bit more focused and talk about how to do some of the things we were talking about. And I want to talk, what do we want to cover first? For the CrossFitter? Yeah, we're going to try and break it down. I feel like on the first half, it was kind of jumbled. We were talking about different goals without really stating the goal we were talking about.

We might have been talking about a strength athlete trying to maintain or maximize strength versus sometimes I was making a reference, but in my head, I was talking about for CrossFitters or in my head, I was talking about for endurance athletes. So we're going to break that down and try to make it a little more specific on the second half and add some how-to for those three different categories of people. So if you're an endurance athlete, what do people classically do when they're training for endurance sports versus what do you think they should be doing and what's a good training program in modern day? What does their conditioning look like? What does their strength training look like? So for you, you program for endurance athletes,

someone who's trying to run a marathon or trying to improve their marathon time. How do you structure their conditioning and how do you structure their strength training? And what should they not be doing? For the endurance athletes, it's real interesting, especially if they've been an endurance athlete before they come in.

A lot of times they're pretty weak and slow and the thing that we can improve for them the most is their strength and speed uh and strength and speed go hand in hand uh their their strength training is probably probably i mean and if this is an ideal situation i'm going to have them lifting four or five days a week you know they'll be squatting two or three days of the week they'll be uh working on power cleans and stuff like that so they'll be working on some speed strength as well um for their so for the for the strength training it's not going to be uh i don't do a lot of like anaerobic threshold type training in the gym, like CrossFit normally does. I hold off on their endurance training, mostly for running. They do a lot of strength training,

and they do a lot of muscular endurance and strength endurance uh in the gym and then most of their aerobic uh capacity in their anaerobic threshold training is going to be uh sport specific which is running uh so you don't metcon them a whole lot you do mostly strength work and then all of their conditioning for the most part is is running and speed work they do 400s and stuff i wouldn't say they don't do met cons the met cons they do are high school uh what does that mean the the limiter is going to be uh their muscular endurance not their uh like systemic uh you know uh acidosis or anything like that they're not going to be like on the floor i can't breathe you know there's two

different types of metcons almost like the one you're like i just can't do any more pull-ups anymore i can't do any more squats you know my i've got a big burn in these muscles and i just can't fire anymore and then there's like fran where you have like fran long afterwards you can get up and you just can't hardly breathe that's horrible so so for the endurance guys actually don't have them do as much of that stuff. They're doing more muscular endurance stuff. So they do strength and muscular endurance and strength endurance stuff in the gym.

And they're doing Metcons, and they're breathing hard, but they're not getting pushed to the limit. I want to see them push to the limit on the track normally. So twice a week, relatively short intervals where they're really working on speed. And the reason it's twofold there is we can really working on speed. Uh, and, and the reason the, you know, it's, it's twofold. There's like, we can really work on their, their sports specific conditioning there where they are pushing their anaerobic threshold on the track running twice a

week. They're pushing their anaerobic threshold. Um, and in addition to that, they're, they're getting positive adaptations for running because they're're they're running as fast as they possibly can so um a lot of a lot of the uh that way they're not they do a lot more endurance training a lot of slow stuff yeah they could be eating into their speed a little bit and then the third training session so they only run three days a week their third training session for running that's when they're going to practice so i was talking about earlier uh you know you have training sessions versus practice, and I like a two-to-one ratio, especially for the endurance guys. And so they train twice a week on running, which is kind of like practice,

but then they actually go, you know, if they're training for a 50-mile race, they may go run 20. Their practice is running 20 miles on the trails that weekend or something like that. And how often is that? Is that like once a week? Like the long run? Just once a week.

Just once a week. And sometimes their long run is not long. So I kind of schedule those in a way where once a month they'll have like the long run, something that's like 15 miles or longer. A lot of times their long run is like 5 miles, 10 miles, 5K. And every once in a while, if we're having like an unloading week, then I'll just have them run like a mile. But I tell them, you know, go balls out and run as hard as you possibly can.

So for the endurance athlete that's been training long, slow distance for a decade or more and has had a lot of success for it, if that person is listening right now, we're not suggesting that only running long distances doesn't work at all. Because a lot of people have had a lot of success with that type of training. And we're not saying it doesn't work. But what we are saying is that we think this model of training strength and training intervals and training speed can get you a very similar benefit, if not a better one. And your training volume is down, so your injury rate will probably go down, too. Yeah, wear and tear on the running joints is probably going to be decreased. Yeah, there's two of those things. One is volume.

Too much volume in one specific thing is going to create injuries or potential for injuries. And then the other thing there, too, is we focus a lot on movement efficiency. So we try to teach people to run more efficiently. Another thing, too, if you're doing some of this other stuff, then you're going to be training muscles that support that more efficient movement. So a lot of times people, they may be, they run a certain way or say they have a weak,

like glute medius or something like that, and their knees are doing something funny when they run. So they go buy a shoe to try and fix the problem instead of actually getting stronger, fixing the way they move and changing their gait. So there's two ways you can do that. One is get certain muscle groups stronger. And then the other thing is to just do some drills to improve efficiency. Yeah, it's common that endurance guys come in and they have huge mobility limitations and huge strength and balances. And then they'll come in to say something like I'm an over pronator,

which basically means, you know, like when you squat, your feet point out and your knees dive in. People do that when they run too. And in the running world, they call that being an over pronator because when your foot flattens out like that, that's pronation. And so it's like a term that a lot of runners are familiar with. And if you're an over pronator, usually that means that you probably have ankle mobility

issues or like you were saying, your glute medius, one of the muscles on kind of the side of your hip that helps externally rotate your leg. And when you externally rotate your leg, it's kind of pushing your knees out when you squat and that brings the arch back in your foot, which takes you out of pronation. So if you can make that muscle stronger by doing single leg work and some stability type drills that we're gonna do technique wads on very soon if you can do those things then you're less likely to over pronate and if you're not over pronating then you're less likely to get acl and medial meniscus problems

in your knees you're less likely to get patellofemoral pain you're just less likely to have achy knees overall you're welcome running world but just yeah but just just running yeah but just running and trying to improve your running technique isn't going to fix that you have to improve your mobility and those strength and balances and then it'll kind of resolve on its own man i get so angry sometimes people are like i bought this shoe because they told me to fix my problem like man it's just gonna make it worse it's like you you have atrophy of a muscle and it could be even just the muscles in your foot and ankle and stuff like that.

And now you're going to make it even worse. You're just going to wear some stupid shoe that's going to destroy your alignment. They just progressively get worse and worse. I have to get crazier and crazier insoles and crazier and crazier running shoes. It's great for the insoles industry, dummy. There's a lot of running shoe stores that make a lot of money off of people who just don't train properly. Yeah. That's the norm, really.

Great business model. Yeah, if you don't have the mobility for it, there's no orthotic or accessory thing that you can buy that's going to fix it. The example that I've been using lately that I think has been helping people is if I say to put your foot behind your head and you just don't have the mobility for it, there's nothing you can do to improve your movement efficiency or your technique because you just don't have the mobility for it there's nothing you can do to to improve your movement efficiency or your technique because you just can't do it you know verbal cue or drill or yeah i can't i can't tell you to you know uh pull harder elbows up there's nothing you can do about because you just don't have the range of motion to do it correctly and that's the exact same thing if you don't have the ankle mobility to to push your knee over your

toe without having your knee dive in, then there's no running cue or squatting cue or pushing knees out or whatever that I can tell you to do to fix your mechanics and to make you less likely to get injured. You just have to improve your mobility. So buying an orthotic is oftentimes for people a huge waste of money. You just got to improve your technique by making it possible to go through that range of motion before you expect to do it a lot. The worst part is they think that's the answer to the problem. Like, oh, I fixed my problem.

I'm like, no, you didn't fix it. And so they think they fixed the problem, so they don't pursue the solution any further. Like, oh, this is the solution, period. And then it gets worse. So, yeah. It's frustrating as a coach sometimes yeah so i mean i've walked into some crossfit gyms and talked to some coaches and they're like oh we don't really you know bother with telling them to change their shoe you know if they want to do that eventually

i'm like man it's like day two i'm like you know getting some innovates or or something that's minimal you know like let's let's try to promote natural movement here. That's the best thing people can do. Let's switch gears for a minute. We were talking about primarily endurance athletes. Let's go 180 and talk about strength athletes. I mentioned earlier about the cross-country skiers and how lifting weights and doing an eight-week program improved their performance.

It's the total opposite for high-level powerlifters. If I took a high-level powerlifter and I gave him an endurance program for eight weeks, he wouldn't improve his performance. It would probably fall off significantly. I have a study to show that one. Especially in the powerlifting community, that's common knowledge.

For those guys, what kind of endurance training should they do, if any at all? I think there was always a big school of thought, especially in the old school. One of the greatest stories I ever heard was Mike Stone talking about a weightlifter who the venue for the meet was across from his hotel. He refused to walk across the street to the venue. He wanted to be carried over there because the walking would potentially interfere with his training. So there's an extreme attitude of like any endurance training at all will sacrifice the squatting, will sacrifice my ability to perform on platform.

So I'm not going to do anything like that. And I actually was always of the opinion that even though I'm going to be big and I was always kind of aware that I was not very fit, but I did put a pretty big importance on like three to four sessions a week of sort of paddling specific or paddling relevant conditioning activities. Like one thing I did religiously

during my best years of paddling was do a lot of sled dragging. So that's not terribly challenging for a lot of crossfitters. But you'd load up a couple hundred pounds of sled and drag it for 20, 30, 45 minutes. You just walk across the field or down the street, turn around, walk back. And, you know, you get a lot of sort of deadlift or squat specific conditioning. My opinion was always that if I can be fit enough, like if I can get better at pulling a sled,

then I'm probably going to be able to do more sets on deadlifts or squats. My opinion was always that if I can be fit enough, like if I can get better at pulling the sled, then I'm probably going to be able to do more sets on deadlifts or squats with better form without getting as fatigued. When I put the work in there, I will get more efficient work when I'm doing my strength training. That's always how I viewed it. So people say, why would you worry about doing like tricep extensions with a band for 100 reps? That's not going to make you stronger.

Why would you do five sets of 10 glute hand raises when you could just deadlift more well yeah i mean that's on its own that doesn't necessarily make you stronger but those things prepare the parts of your body and make those joints and those range of motion more fit so when you do a lot of heavy deadlift training squat training push training uh you're more prepared to do more high quality work. Make you more robust. There's a lot of paddlers who they'll do like a pull, a deadlift,

with some max 70%. Get a lot of breath and sit down for five minutes and do another set. I never saw the point of being that guy. Or a weightlifter who does a snatch, they sit down and then classic Pocket Hercules, Naeem Sudomalu style, take a shot of whiskey and

smoke a cigarette, then do another set of squats. It's cool, it's great, but you want to be more well-rounded. I think a lot of leaders get more out of having this baseline of fitness, so you're prepared. That's one thing Louis always said correctly, is that you have to be prepared to train. You can just like expect to go into the gym and and and squat and

press and you know and deadlift heavy and if you're not prepared for that activity if those muscles aren't fit like if you can try to deadlift all you want but if you can't do five straight ham raises you know that's probably evidence that some parts of your body aren't really as fit as they could be. I do think people take it too far. Like you were saying, they don't do any endurance training at all because they're worried about losing strength. That's a great lesson of CrossFit is that you can do a hell of a lot of stuff actually

and never have your strength really affected. Yeah, because they're doing anaerobic type endurance training. They're not doing long, slow duration five, six days a week. If you run 20 miles six days a week, that probably is going to affect your strength. If you do a 20-minute mat con three times a week just because you're trying to maintain some fitness while you get as strong as possible, you're not going to lose strength. There's no excuse for being a lazy shit. If you're just pushing the prow at the end of your training, you're going to maintain all your strength. The great thing about the prowler is every day of the week you can push the prowler

and never get sore and never get unduly tired from doing that and you can keep a really great base level of fitness because that thing will beat you to shit as far as endurance goes but the next day you can squat and deadlift fine because there's no big muscle

I especially like the prowler especially like the prowler for powerlifters and weightlifters because oftentimes that's the only single leg work they get. They don't do much in the way of lunging and step-ups and whatnot, but pushing the prowler is pretty much single leg work. And the same with dragging a sled. So you're only contracting, so you're not lengthening under a load. You take a step, you move the weight, and you take another step.

So you're getting a different kind of stimulus on one leg at a time you're training a lot of muscles that you probably otherwise wouldn't train that way it's not gonna take anything away from your squatting and deadlifting and everything else uh and you get better at powerlifting because of it i think also uh one of the things i i benefited great from when i started crossfitting and then uh playing around with training since then is my concern when I started, started, when I went from weightlifting to CrossFit, I thought my strength would,

would go down. I really, I really did. Who thinks if I focused on strength, my endurance would go down. It's that central question that we started off the show. What was interesting is, is I think I lacked a lot of speed training when I was weightlifting.

I did a lot of high force stuff and not a lot of like I didn't do a lot of box jumps and stuff like that. And I think doing CrossFit for a while and then actually I ended up getting stronger and I was kind of confused because I saw CrossFit as endurance training. And it is kind of the in-between. It's not long, slow distance. It is a lot of it's interval training. And I've noticed, too, is if I do two-minute intervals, as a weightlifter, if I'm doing two-minute intervals, and I actually see a really big benefit out of that. And I think there's a few reasons why.

And one is getting that high-speed training that you're not going to get when you're holding a barbell, probably. Unless you're specifically focusing on, you know on really fast motion with a barbell. Right. You're intentionally keeping the weight down and trying every rep. Your hips are moving faster when you're doing a box jump than when you're snatching anything, even if it's just a little bit faster. And then I think there's just – I think people –

I know a lot of weightlifting coaches are like, yeah, do some conditioning, but don't – no squats in your conditioning. And I think that, I think that they're afraid that you're going to cause some like muscular damage there. And all your focus should be on squatting heavier weights and, and doing 50 air squats for time is going to be not beneficial. I actually find the opposite to be true. What I i what i've found personally with uh conditioning is if you keep it light then you're okay but if you start if you if you try to do 50 reps at you know 70 of your one rep max then you might be training to be slow i would say if you're any kind of athlete and if you do a little wad where you do 50 by weight squats as quick as possible and that destroys you for your workout the next day, you're out of shape terribly.

I'm not in good particular shape. I can do 100 squats and five minutes later, I don't feel like I've done anything. Are you talking about air squats? Anybody should be able to do that. That's what I'm talking about. If you're long and slow, crossfitter, or you're super short duration, high power weightlifter, if

you can't do 50 to 100 bodyweight squats and and be completely recovered the next day or an hour later if that affects you that pronounced you have to up your sort of baseline preparedness for for lifting there's something to be said for just general physical preparedness and that's the great thing about crossfit is that it's a good idea to to have this sort of holistic baseline ability. Like, yeah, there's a host of very fundamental things like dips or maybe a handstand or the ability to jump, the ability to do sprints and runs.

Maybe like the best weightlifters of all time always made time for like this play component, go out and run a little bit, go, you know, do a little hiking. That always has to be, you have to have this foundation because if you just do one thing intensely, it's like the, so you get on that road and you will go towards an end that is not optimal. You can't just focus on one thing. It has to be some level of balance in all things you do.

If you're a power out there who can't walk across the street without getting tired, you, there's no way you're training as hard as you could be. How do you do eight sets of three deadlifts with 70% of your max and pull as fast as possible each time? You're leaving so much potential on the platform by just being out of shape and fucking lazy. Now, for the powerlifters, do you avoid the long metcons and avoid the long training so you don't lose mass? So I think the understanding, the common understanding that I see is, oh, as I was bigger, I could deadlift, you know, 400 pounds. Now that I lost some weight, I can only get 315. Is that?

I don't think it has so much to do with, like, losing weight. We were talking earlier about, like, speed. And if you're doing conditioning long enough, if you're doing a Metcon that lasts 20 minutes, the reps you're doing 20 minutes into it are a lot slower than the ones you're doing at the beginning. And for strength athletes, I like them to be able to keep moving quickly. So if they start getting into movements where they're grinding, it's no bueno.

You know, if they're a strength athlete, because why would you want to train that muscle to move slowly? And so there's a nervous system thing going on there, too. If you're a lifter, everything, every movement that's pretty close to what you train and compete in. If you're a paddler doing tons and tons of reps in a deadlift for conditioning, it may be disastrous, but lots and lots of reps with a kettlebell swing

should not affect you that much. If you're lower back and hips and legs and arms have a baseline fitness, you should be able to do that no problem, but to do five sets of 20 in a deadlift would probably be able to do that no problem but to do five sets of 20 the deadlift would probably be the stupidest thing you can decide to do and i think because that that's going to make your deadlift form shitty that's going to make you slow it's going to irritate the hell out of your lower back but swinging a 50 pound kettlebell

for a lot of reps is more probably it's like if you're a weightlifter doing you know doing grace three times a week or whatever it's probably not the smartest thing if you're trying to refine your snatch technique. Your snatch will get really shitty. It's made appropriate for a crossfitter who will be tested in that thing. But if you're competing in a pure lift, then you need to keep that space a little bit sacred. Then your endurance training can be things that are supplemental, that look quasi-like it, but aren't going to interfere with those, those lifts.

The other thing too is, is I don't think anyone who's pursuing fitness for the sake of health, uh, doing like a Metcon longer than 10 minutes is probably not necessary. Uh, and so if you're a strength athlete, you fall into that, like doing conditioning for health and for general physical preparedness.

And, you know, doing more than a 10-minute session is probably counterproductive. The people who do belong in the category of doing conditioning longer than 10 minutes in a day are people who are competing in CrossFit or are endurance athletes. Have you talked about the optimal approach for CrossFit now? You talked about long and slow and short and quick. But the Crossfit is an interesting different approach interesting animal so still learning all the time things that are cardinal sins and palatine and weightlifting and maybe even strongman are essential yeah i had a i had a struggle for a while because i understood weightlifting to you know this really large degree

and uh compared to CrossFit training and a lot of this muscular endurance type training and all this work capacity stuff. And I approached it from a weightlifting coach's perspective, and that's definitely had to change. What comes down to assumptions, right? Yeah, like I came into it thinking we always have to – if you're moving slow, you should stop, you know, and that's just not the

case with CrossFit. You're training CrossFitters, man. There's going to be a lot of times where you're grinding. There's going to be some ugly reps. There's gonna be ugly reps. There's gonna be times you're grinding. You shouldn't do that year round. There should definitely be period of time where you don't have slow reps and you are focusing on speed and all that kind of stuff. Uh, and then other parts of the year, you're gonna be doing more volume and, uh, you know, it's going to be, you're going to be really, really sore and beat up a whole lot. Um, I like to run in short cycles, four weeks at a time. Uh, at the beginning of the cycle, everyone's moving really fast. You know, first, second week, they're moving really fast. Uh, uh the the rep schemes are shorter we get into the third week

they get pretty long people are like feeling beat up they hate life and then you know we go into the fourth week we cut volume in half and they start feeling fast again and we roll into the next cycle crazy how that happens yeah so you know we kind of keep going up trying to overreach a little bit. Third week of training, most about halfway through the third week of training, most of the athletes are going, I feel like shit. I'm like, OK, good. And they're like, you're crazy. You're like, that's an essential part of the thing. Sometimes you have to feel. And then and then it's like the middle of the next week of the unloading week. They're like, I feel amazing. Yeah. And that's when you perform.

That's when you do well. You can't have the one one without the other you're not going to feel great all year long if you're pursuing just fitness that's fine but if you're really pushing endurance or piloting or crossfit try to be as best as possible sometimes you're going to feel terrible you're going to wake up it's going to take you 45 minutes to actually be able to bend your knees and ankles sometimes when the training gets really tough but other times you're focusing on speed and recovery, and the world is going to be a glorious, warm, inviting place. I'm coaching this new athlete. She text messaged me yesterday and goes,

everything but my belly button. It hurts. It hurts, yeah. I was like, good. I'll have to find some way to train that. No, leave the belly button alone. Now, Mike, how does strength, how does building strength improve your CrossFit abilities, improve your Metcon abilities? I think Doug has like, he states it really well, you know. I'll let you go.

Doug, that's your cue. Well, I continue to cite that same study where they were showing that until something's below, I think it was 40% of your max, training for muscular endurance with something that's not less than 40% of your max doesn't really help you improve your endurance at that activity. So the example that I usually use with that is the high school bench press example where if you go to any high school in america there's always the the kid the football team and they're trying to see who can who can rep out 135 the most times this i've seen that a bunch of times growing up and the kids that always win are the kids that are the strongest the kids that have the best endurance with 135 pounds are the kids that can bench 300 pounds and and the guy that benches 155 he's you know pushing around 85 percent

of his max and doesn't matter how much endurance he has with 135 pounds he's just not strong enough to do 30 reps with that weight he can only do three because it's so it's such a high percentage of his max so so getting stronger for crossfit is important because, you know, oftentimes you're going to have, you know, 345 for reps on a deadlift. And if you only deadlift 345, you're going to do it for a single. And if you deadlift 550, like Chris was saying, then you can do it for 30 reps and then go on to the next thing. You shift your baseline so far over that now things that used to be hard are no longer that difficult. Yeah. things that used to be hard are no longer that difficult. And there's always that balance. There is probably a point where you're strong enough.

I mean, if you get to where you're deadlifting 550 for CrossFit and you can clean, now I guess the standard is you better be able to clean 315. Yeah, minimal. Yeah, that's actually the more impressive part of modern CrossFit. But should you spend time being able to deadlift 600? Well, that would be cool if it didn't take a lot of extra work. But if you put so much focus on the deadlift where you did one or two less Metcons here and there, then pretty soon now the balance is going to shift and now you're putting too much focus on strength.

But yeah, you've got to be at a certain level to do things efficiently. If you can clean and jerk 100 kilos, you're not going to win any of these CrossFit competitions. Do you have to be able to clean and jerk 200 kilos? No. That'd be really cool. But now you're a weightlifter. You're not going to be able to do that triathlon.

You probably focus too much on one aspect of training. So it's common sense. You have to prioritize what you need to improve. And then once you hit that goal you've that's sort of enough and david you were talking earlier about uh is it you've gotten stronger more recently and you feel like it's really improved your conditioning and uh it kind of reverts back to a point that i heard you make one time um i just recently did a garage games competition, and I feel that I was more efficient, a lot faster because I was stronger. And in my past, say, past three years of CrossFit, I was lifting maybe once, twice a week, but I was stuck on these volume high,

like load the board up with, with a bunch of, you know, a bunch of workout and, um, and Metcon for two hours and we're strong, you know? And now that, now that I've really, really focused on weightlifting, I think that the, uh, the cardio just comes second nature. You've come, you came to faction when this spring? You started coaching, and then you kind of jumped on more strength training shortly thereafter. How recent is that, the strength training? Strength training probably about the past year. Something like that.

So your strength training, you notice a big difference. Oh, yeah, definitely. I think it has even less to do with the fact that you're actually – let's forget about physiology or anything. Let's think about the way we perceive a workout or a competition. If you take your deadlift from 350 to 450 and you're at a competition and you've got to swing a kettlebell a hundred times, where it makes a difference is you walk up to the kettlebell,

you grab it, pick it up, and in that instant you know you're going to crush the workout versus picking it up and going, oh, Jesus Christ, this is heavy. Having the confidence of being strong automatically puts you ahead of people who are approaching a heavy object knowing that they're not strong enough to do it and this is going to be terrible.

But having that solid baseline fitness, when you pick up the 60 the the 60 kilo snatch reps when you know you can snatch you know 100 or whatever you have immediate confidence to do well at that competition right you know versus knowing that you're not as strong picking up and everybody's had that feeling when you pick up the bar it's like oh this is a little heavier than I thought. You're already lost. You're already going to lose. In that moment, the confidence is gone. You don't stand a chance. Being strong already gets you off the gate faster.

Nice. I definitely agree. Good way to end the episode. Awesome. We got to run. Doug, quick. We're running out of time. What are you going to promote? Talk about having mobility issues earlier and if you just we gotta we gotta run so doug quick we're running out of time we're gonna promote talk about uh having mobility issues earlier and if you just don't have the mobility to go through a certain

movement then there's no chance of you having good technique on that movement so if you want to find find out where you have restrictions uh for your mobility and your you know your head your ankles your hips your your shoulders your upper back and uh maximum maximum mobility excuse me in the fitter shop um has the has the tools there to show you exactly where you have those limitations and it shows you exactly how to fix them so if you want to check that out it's in the fitter shop chris yeah well i have a blog what's it called no uh check out the chris more blog.com there's some fun stuff there also i gotta put more effort on my twitter follow me on the

twitters at the at chris moore xl because i'm big i get it more but not so many that are this big uh yeah i want some more fog we can start a conversation there and then the doug's point if you go on fitter.tv you'll see my little seminar on building strength simply. Simple Strengths to name. I think the purpose of that, in an environment where there's lots of information, there's all these things you could be doing, I set out to sort of explain why it is you should pursue certain things and when you should do that.

So I think if you have questions about your strength training and how to get the most out of your body in a simple, straightforward way and you want to really feel comfortable in your training and you want to have an understanding of that, I think that's the product for you. Got anything to plug, David? Yeah. New Year's resolutions.

If you want to get in shape, our Faction Fundamentals starts the 7th of this month or this next month. We still got the early bird special going on. So I think you've got, what, a day or two to do that? It'll be too late by the time this posts. Oh, really? Sorry, guys. That's why I won't post for a few days. Damn it.

You can still come, though. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We'll get you in shape. Yep, go to factionsc.com if you're in Memphis and you want to check out the fundamentals course. We have two weeks for free for everybody. David coaches in the mornings.

And I'll point out to everybody, it's already January, right? May, June, right around the corner. If you want to look sexy in trim, get in the gym now. I'm working on my bikini body already. All right, what do you got, Mike? Last thing, check out our remote coaching. Both Matt Baird and myself offer remote coaching.

Maybe I'll be able to convince Chris and Doug to jump on it. If you have any questions about it, feel free. Just click the Contact Us button on the website at fitter.tv and send us a message. Also, go to fitter.tv and sign up for our newsletter. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Cheers.