Barbell Shrugged - 92- The 15 Movements You Need To Focus On To Dominate This Year's CrossFit Open Competition

Episode Date: November 27, 2013

Dominating the CrossFit Open this year.

This week on Barbell Shrug, we talk about why to compete and how to prepare for this year's CrossFit Open. Boom! Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrug. For the video version, go to barbellshrug.com. All right, welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson and Christopher Moore. And of course, behind the camera is the magnificent CTP. You going by Christopher now?

No. Does that make me sound smarter? Am I more author? Well, you're writing books now, so I have to, you know, it's more of a distinguished name. I got to work on my pretentiousness. Yeah. Where is your book? Downstairs your book downstairs you should bring that you should not bring it in the studio all right when we take a break I'll come back up we'll get it we'll get a copy we'll show it to the fans all right so

today we will be talking about the other oh wait no you know we we gotta do the hook Then the promo We have an opening They already saw the opening Remember how this works We don't do it every week I'm so confused Is your beard on too tight today? My beard is on way too tight

That makes you guys go to barbellstruck.com Sign up for the newsletter If you do that you will get the 8 snatch mistakes You might be making that could keep you from hitting big PRs. Rich Froning with his abs there. You'd be so excited to lift. Yeah, we get to hang out with Rich Froning and learn how to do snatches better. No, Rich, not like that. Do it like this. You coached him up. I was like, come on, Rich, stop screwing this up.

Quit moving so bad, Rich. Come on. Yeah, so today we're going to be talking about prepping for the Open, right? Or just competition in general, really. Why are we talking about this, Doug? Why are competitions important? Doug was so adamant about bringing this topic up. I'm just kidding. I think everyone should compete in the Open.

There's no reason not to. It's the easiest competition to sign up for. It's in your gym. You don't have to travel. What's the 20 bucks? How much is it? $20. It's like $20.

And I know plenty of people are out there going, yeah, but 20 bucks. I have so many things. I got to go to that thing and I got to, that thing is due. I don't know if I really can spend $20 on this. $20 is easily justified just in the fact that you can compare your results to like 100,000 other people. The data. That's cool shit. The coolest part of that whole,

this whole event is it's a huge brand new kind of experiment with such a huge sample size where if you get involved, you'll be able to automatically get so much data to make yourself better. You don't get that from power of the meat or weight of the meat. And by the way, for those meats you pay, for one shitty meat that maybe you don't even compete

against anybody at and doesn't really make you better, just as a fun thing to do, you might pay $100 to do that. How much is a good weight-up-the-meat? A pile-up-the-meat's about $100 entry fee always. It varies with weight-up-the-meat. It's $20 to $100. It kind of depends on how small it is.

Yeah, membership dues, you probably have to pay to get in the thing and you got to travel. This is a really awesome idea and concept I've never seen before in my sporting career. I've heard people complain about the $20 thing. Like, what are they doing with that money? They're just so greedy. I'm like, $20?

It's an event on a massive scale. I bet that website costs like $100K to build and maintain. Like, it's expensive. Have you ever built a website like that before? And you got to pay a guy to do that. 200,000 registrants? You've got to pay the media team to keep track of all the results and post that every day and have the mechanism to filter the results and show you the data.

For $20, it's laughably an important thing. You must do this. If you're interested at all in CrossFit, do it. Anyone who complains about that, I can guarantee you spent $20. If you complain about that, you also complain. 5K shitty t-shirt. Yeah, and you and you complain about what you complain about life's not fair And you can't do what you want to do and what was me and my boss doesn't know shit You're that kind of guy and you're cunt

Shut the fuck up Something fun to do for five weeks in a row Five weeks in a row that language is whistle language is hard so my dollars for five we revise that revised that comment. You have to bleep that out. Yeah, bleep it. You don't have to travel. You're going to do it in your home gym. Hell, you can do it in your garage and video it if you want. Talk about low barrier to entry for sure.

I spent $100 on a grappling tournament. Got there. Had one match that was like five minutes long. Lost. Traveled back home. It was like $100. $20 is well we're worth. Terrible.

So just competing in general, I say this all the time, you should always balance learning, practicing, and doing. So learning, reading books, listening to podcasts, whatever, practicing, going, and training, and actually experiencing what it's like

and trying to get results off of actual practice. That's a good point, man. And then signing up for a competition is the doing part. You have to do that to see if everything you've learned and everything you've practiced actually works. You see, if you never test yourself, if you never test yourself, then you don't know

if what you're doing is really working as well as you think it's working. Yeah, you can hit a PR in the gym and yeah, you obviously got stronger, but doing it in competition where you're being judged and you're competing against other people is really the best way to like see if everything you've put your heart and soul into is actually coming it's really different about that format is that usually if you're doing a competition

in CrossFit you're at one place and your results are all relative to whoever shows up to that event in that area who's interested in that sport there so if you do well or bad it it doesn't really mean anything. But if you're in an event with 300,000 people, you know exactly with a large amount of confidence where you are. There's no way. It's so powerful. There's a lot of people who are the best in their gym. I'm the best.

I'm the best. And then they go and they sign up and they're the 502nd best in their region Yeah Or you have a really good Fran time because for whatever reason you're kind of built to do those those short Workouts like Fran is and you never do any of these other types of workouts So you always do the workouts you're really good at and you kind of avoid this other stuff I know that's in your shadow boy outtie signing up for competition where you have no idea What what's gonna be throwing at you really is an easy way to expose your weaknesses.

So if you want to be truly well-rounded, like CrossFit is supposed to be promoting, they're supposed to be super well-rounded athletes, you have to sign up for competition. That way you can get something thrown at you that you didn't expect and then you can kind of rise to that new expectation and see what happens. If you don't ever do that, then you're going to have those weaknesses forever. Yeah, I think a lot of people pick and choose workouts. They jump from like blog to blog or they program for themselves. And they program the stuff they like, the stuff they're good at.

And there's no direction. There's no continuity between ideas. You're not linking things together in a progressive way. Yeah, I've been there myself, like programming for myself. And then you go to a competition and you get smashed. And you're like, like oh I was not looking over there and I would say it's one more thing about this whole venue is that what's really cool like most things across fit it's easy to talk shit about

it upfront like fuck that sport these guys are always doing stupid shit they're not periodizing they're not getting strong meanwhile that was true now it's not true now guy runs a marathon a fucking cleaning jerks almost 400 pounds he's stronger than you I'll don't give a shit. So you're wrong. But people talk shit about the format of this competition. Like crazy. Did they not like, how are you going to have a video submission for a, people are going to say whatever they want. They can lie. They can cheat. They can steal. That hasn't happened. People have tried the cheat. You'll see one guy crush a wide and like number one in the world, for a week. And then because it's a huge sample,

because you can't be cheating forever, because you will get discovered, that gets washed out. I haven't seen any of that, really. I do know one person that was highly, it was one of those things where it was, I wouldn't say that she was cheating, but the reps were not. You want to name names?

No, I'm not going to name names. People were pointing out that this score was just not humanly possible. And what happened? They pointed it out. Well, yeah. And then she got banned from the whole year. Yeah, you can't hide it. It's really unfortunate because I think she was a really good athlete.

And someone made a mistake somewhere, but it didn't get by. So that was the important part. That's where the open source format really works. You can't pull that off. You can't just tell people, oh, I snatched that. Oh, totally. Because you're going to have to back it up. And people know, like if you did better than Rich Froning in a WOD, people are going to say, is that real?

Nick Ranker last year, I think it was, he had done one of the WODs. I think he was, I want to say it was the one with the muscle-ups. And somebody saw the video and goes, oh, you know, two of those muscle-ups you didn't, you know, extend all the way at the top or something like that the video and goes oh you know two of those muscle ups you didn't you know extend all the way at the top or something like that and he goes okay so he went and shot another video did it all over again i think he scored i think he may have even scored better and nick's a fantastic athlete now what so like people yeah people who maybe like talk it and they're like oh you know you're not really finding the best athletes yeah i mean the the cream is gonna rise to the top and over a five-week period and it's actually i know it seems so cutting edge and different there's a lot of change involved it's so different

than what people are used to but think of the shenanigans shenanigans gotta go on in any other kind of competition for piloting or weightlifting or uh maybe even like even sports like think of all the shit that people get away with like like bad lifts pass, like that exists already. This is a better, this is a very interesting, better step forward. This open source, huge group of people all participating in one thing. You're finding the actual best person. I love it. Yeah. And the open is actually a really new idea. I mean, CrossFit is a, is technically in its infancy as a sport and as a business and all that type of stuff. Uh, but the Open itself is only, we've done it for three years now,

11, 12, and 13. And so it's, you know, the first year, I think it was a little shaky. They had to re, ended up being six WODs when it was supposed to be five because something, I can't remember off the top of my head, something got screwed up somewhere in the scoring

or something happened. The website. Yeah, the website. People are so quick to criticize. The website screwed up. Oh, yeah. up yeah and then they had like and so that was the first year yeah and people were like oh my god i paid 20 see why it's bad it's like people like just because there's a initial hiccup doesn't mean it's a bad idea don't be so critical people yeah but it's been three years so we have uh you know the first year you didn't know what to expect and then like every week you were going oh is it going to be another AMRAP?

You know, it's like, oh, first week's an AMRAP. What will next week be? Now Doug can tell you. It's another AMRAP. Anybody can tell you. What's the next week? I feel like for our new people, we should explain that this is how you get to the games. Do we do that?

We're getting there. Shut up. Most people probably already know that. But, yeah, you do the Open. Then if you qualify, you go to regionals. And then eventually, if you're good enough, you go to the games. So that's why this is such a big deal hopefully most people knew that but there might be like 10 people out there i got your back it's very some people might not know that so i nailed

this and then what happens oh yeah oh yeah okay cool yeah so like the first year it was like oh they can do nothing but amraps like and that we're like oh it's a little disappointing because one of the things that crossfitters love is variety. And when you get hit with like the same, what would that be called? Time domain. It's not so mixed modal domain. Let's not get too far into those weeds. Same style of workout. Yeah.

But we now know it's probably due to scoring. I'm 99% sure that it's easier to score AMRAPs than it is to mix it up from wad to wad. So we've got three years knowing that we're doing AMRAPs. And we know, Doug, you ran the numbers. What are we dealing with? What type of time domains are we dealing with? Doug put on glasses with a little tape on them. He got out a calculator.

He sat down with all the coffee. And he ran the fucking numbers Crunching ship spreadsheet over here, right? Yeah, nothing complicated about this. But yeah over the last three years. They've all been an wraps That's historical data doesn't really mean that all the all the open wads in future going to be am wraps They could be whatever the hell cross what wants them to be so But we do know that that historically is what what has happened. And I think the range has been between five and 20 minutes. They usually average around 11 or 10 or 11 minutes long. So, you know, prepping for the Open, you know,

you got to think about doing workouts that are right around that time domain. You don't need to do a whole lot of really long wads. Doing some shorter wads is probably a good thing. You know, people that compete in the mile and two mile, they run lots of 400-meter spr 200 meter sprints 800 meter sprints so you can work on that pace but knowing that you're right around that that 10 minute amrap is something really good to know growing going into one of these type of competitions yeah if you look at athletes that are doing like the really really long stuff to prep for uh the crossfit season a

lot of times they're people who are looking towards regionals or the games. And so their overall training volume and the volume of individual workouts are going to be a lot higher. But yeah, as Doug was saying, you're training for a 10-minute workout or an event. So doing hour and a half long runs and stuff like that may not be the most appropriate things for your training. Yeah, or even running at all as something that you're practicing for the Open isn't maybe the best use of your time. There's never been any running in any of the Open workouts.

If you're trying to design a workout that hundreds of thousands of people can do all throughout the world, and they're doing video submissions, and they're being judged by people that aren't really experienced in a lot of cases. Being able to accurately measure a distance for a guy that's in Washington State and a guy that's in Kenya and a guy that's in China and then have that distance be the exact same. Uphill, downhill, sea level, weather is fucking impossible. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, sea level. What? I mean, unfortunately, what? Well, if I live in fucking, you know, in Tibet and you live in Florida and we're running, it's not fair, is it?

I'm crossfitting in Tibet. My monk outfit. That would be any exercise. That's why I was like, what? That's why I never crossfit in Tibet. It's easier. I'm pretty sure, though, like if you do like a fucking five deadlifts it's just a different thing it's not as great whatever crossfitters

are gonna start you know living at altitude that's what I wanna know I mean they are some already are but does that give them an edge I don't know

I worked out in the altitude that one time remember that was pretty sweet Colorado walked into a Walmart and I thought the lights were turning on oh yeah

you were you had like a psychedelic psychedelic trip from exercise. Yeah. That's out the door. Where was this? I don't know what the hell you guys are talking about. Was that in Colorado? Oh, yeah.

He was in Colorado and he went and did a WOD. Why? And then he came back and he was like completely out of breath and exhausted. And then we were at Walmart doing some grocery shopping. He was like, I feel really funny. And all of a sudden, like the lights flickered in the building. He's like, was that me or did that really happen? Oh, wow.

The timing was impeccable. Luckily, altitude sickness strikes a little higher elevation than the Walmart in Denver. Probably 10 times that height. So we know the workouts are 10, 11 minutes long on average. What are the big movements that we have to look out for Doug since you did ran all the data or actually I don't have that list in front of me but but it's all the basics like it's it's thrusters and cleans or clean jerk snatches as far as the barbell movements go with the other few barbell movements with the barbell push presses

was one of them there were 7 or 8 barbell movements and 7 or 8 regular movements a lot of times they'll just list it as shoulder overhead so you can jerk it if you want core fundamental shit yeah the core barbell movements and then they also have burpees muscle ups, double unders

wall ball shots, pull ups chest to bar pull ups specifically I don't think they've ever programmed anything other than chest-to-bar pull-ups. So for me personally, I program pull-ups occasionally, but we work a lot on chest-to-bar pull-ups for that reason. They're drilling the fundamentals of movement and CrossFit staples as deep as possible. Let's find out who this is fundamentally as sound as can be

and then go up in difficulty from there. I think they do the chest of our pull-ups just because it's easy to judge. Yeah, you got there. When you get a regionals, they'll have like workouts with just pull-ups. So I don't know. But they do all the basics. There's never been any kettlebell movements, likely because of the hundreds of thousands of people all over the world,

maybe they don't have access to RX kettlebells in most cases. And I would imagine CrossFit wants the most amount of people possibly to be involved in the Open. The more people, the better for the most part. It helps grow the sport and helps grow awareness about the sport. So there's never been any kettlebell movements. There's never been any heavy yoke walks or prowler pushes. Odd lifts and stuff.

Yeah, no odd lifts, no learning, nothing novel, nothing new. They save all that stuff for regionals and especially the games. There's a lot of novel stuff in the games. If you learn it at a level one seminar, that's probably the stuff you've got to know. Yeah, pretty much. And again, no running just because it's so hard to confirm that everyone is doing the exact same distance. No rowing because, again, a lot of people probably don't have access to a $700, $800 piece of equipment like a rower.

It's basically just all the core fundamental barbell movements and body weight-ish movements. I'd say double-enders, you need a jump rope obviously, wall balls, you need a wall ball, and box jumps, you need a box to jump onto. For the most part, it's bare minimum as far as equipment. Yeah, and there's no one rep maxes. There's never been a program like find your one rep max snatch or clean and jerk or anything like that uh so working on that one rep max strength uh preparing for that for the open is probably not a great idea uh you know it's good to find your to improve your one rep max strength over you know i think that's really important during the off season but as you get closer uh you know what you can do with a pretty heavy weight for multiple reps is probably

a little more along the lines you need to be going yeah you're not gonna be tested on that specifically in the open so if you're if you're working on your conditioning your muscular endurance and kind of your your uh your anaerobic endurance your short interval type endurance speed endurance then you don't need to worry if your max drops 10 15 pounds as long as as long as your your strength goes down maybe just a tiny bit at most maybe you just maintain but your fitness goes way high prior to the open that's really what you want to focus on not strengthening your strength right before the open is not a necessity not strength for strength's sake strength for for building efficiency and quality of motion yeah i've

actually made that mistake in the past you know the weightlifting mentality is like oh we got to have like peak no speed power and force output right before hands like well that is not a piece of the pie in the open you gotta get the base of your pyramid aligned with the height of you thank you thank you wise one I pulled up the eight the eight how tall is pyramid this. How tall is Pyramid, Mike? How tall is Pyramid? It's as wide as its face. As wide as its base, of course, Chris.

Oh, God. How did you not know that? Every asshole knows this. I was so confused. The quiz master. So here are the eight non-barbell movements, where double unders, push-ups, box jumps, burpees, toes to bar, pull-ups, muscle-ups, and wall balls.

And then, as Mike said, that was chest-to-bar pull-ups. The seven barbell movements were snatches, cleans, pull-ups, muscle-ups, and wall balls. And then as Mike said, that was chest to bar pull-ups. The seven barbell movements were snatches, cleans, jerks, push presses, overhead squats, thrusters, and deadlifts. So bare bones basics as far as CrossFit's concerned. Yeah, the other thing I find interesting is the chest to bar pull-ups. I find that people spend year-round doing pull-ups, and they'll throw in chest to bar pull-ups sometimes. It should probably be the other way around and a lot of times the ability to string if you can't string together like five chest bar pull-ups

It's probably more of like an absolute strength issue than it is Like your ability just just doing more pull-ups probably isn't gonna be beneficial There's you probably need a fill of deficiency So I can do like a bunch of bodyweight squats like four hundreds of reps, but yet you don't squat your body weight It's like well, you should probably just get stronger. Then work some more reps. Exactly. It's interesting that chest-to-bar pull-ups aren't the standard.

Usually the full range of motion thing, like the longest range of motion possible, especially in CrossFit, tends to be the standard. You go ass to ankles on squats, assuming you have good technique. You don't just hit parallel or do quarter squats as the standard. Parallel isn't the standard. And then you get to a competition and they're like oh no all the way down in this competition ass to grass is always the standard and then in CrossFit they never do just parallels standard but for pull-ups chest of arms

should be the standard and then if you do a competition and it's just a regular pull-up you should be like oh yeah this is awesome easy yeah it's interesting that it's switched for pull-ups for some reason yeah probably just because a lot of people can't do them but that's their problem and they don't man they and they open so it seems like is at the beginning of the open the movements are more simple heart you know as the as it goes on that's where you're gonna find the muscle-ups chest of our pull-ups it seems like one of the keys to your success in this competition all made women's pal that doesn't know what the he's talking about but let me let me air this idea out would you uh it seems like it's a time for honesty and humility and reality checking like

look if i'm gonna do well i may be good at lots of things but i gotta go back and make sure that i carefully look at things that i may not think are so like maybe you think it's a little bit beneath you to go back and drill your just basic pull-up technique or really analyze your muscle ups. If you think you're good at them to really step back and go, am I really, are my fundamentals as sounds they could be? Cause they're going to drill this shit. Like they're going to really test you. If you're scared of facing your goat, but if you know that that part of that thing is not what you want to do and you're going to try to make a run at this, you really have to gut check and say, look, I need to really scrape into these things

I know I'm not that good at or I think. I need data to tell me if I'm just making a big assumption that my chest-to-bar pull-up is just fine or my,

I can do five muscle-ups, not a problem. Maybe it's a huge fucking problem. Maybe you just don't want to face it. At one time, I thought seven unbroken muscle-ups was good. Yeah.

And now, I think you need to be doing at least 15 if you're going to score as decent in the open. There's going to be a lot of people every year who go, you know what, I think I'm broken muscle ups was good. Yeah. And now like, you know, I think you need to be doing at least 15 if you're going to score as decent. There's going to be a lot of people every year who go, you know what? I think I'm really ready. And because they aren't really looking for the data, they just don't know how far off

they are. They know how they are. And they get really disappointed and beat themselves up for not being good enough when they finish like a thousandth out of a thousand and one. They go, fuck, I guess I'm terrible. Well, no, I mean, you have a really shitty attitude. Yeah, it depends on your goal, I guess. Feeling like you're in the best shape of your life, I find that to be very important for me now.

Well, I feel great now, right now. So you talk about this in your book, being happy with the progress you're making and not getting wrapped up in what other people are accomplishing. And so I think the Open's a good opportunity to kind of see where you really are and what's really possible, maybe raising your standards. But I also wouldn't get too wrapped up in, oh, I didn't qualify for regionals.

You know, I think... Yeah, that's the outcome. I want to talk about that a little bit. It's like, you know, if you don't qualify for regionals, you know, but you're in the best shape of your life, there's no reason to get down on yourself because you can't control what's happening elsewhere.

But the standard's now been raised for you, your expectations, and now that's somewhere you can go in the future. And I guess you use the urgency and the lure and the drive of the goal because that's what we want to compete. We want to try our best to get there. It's just that you don't beat yourself up if you don't get there. And use that impetus, that drive, to make you take the close look at everything you're ignoring. All the things that are below your radar now that you really need to scratch into. Like, yeah, I haven't really taken the time to consider whether this fundamental thing is on point. Now I should.

That's a great reason to compete right there because you dig up all these little skeletons you're hiding. I do like the open for beginners because it's a competition that you don't have to go into it after doing a super high volume of training leading up to it. I mean, if you want to go to regionals and games, you definitely need to be prepared for that, but that's after the Open. For a beginner, you go to a competition, most regular competitions even are two or three WODs in one day. If you have been doing higher volume training, you'll be able to handle two or three or more WODs in one day, especially two or three WODs in a day and then two or three WODs the next day. But the open isn't like that at all. It's one single wad, and then you have a whole week to recover, and then another single wad.

So if you haven't been doing super high-volume training, you can still tolerate the volume of the open just fine. Yeah. All right, guys, let's take a break real quick, and then we're going to talk about things you should think about and how you might want to approach the open when it comes up this year. And what sort of steroids you should be using to crush the Open. We'll put out a list.

That'd be the technique quad. Asterix. How to inject steroids in the technique quad. Into your face. Shing queer. And we're back. Barbell shrugged. He's here.

Oh, it's so good to be here and be alive. Drastic change in tone. Chris Moore and Doug Larson. CTP behind the camera. Brothers hanging out, talking strength and fitness. We're looking at Chris Moore's new book. The cover's not final. The cover's not final.

They fucked up the print job, but the content is really delicious. Tell your story again. Tell your story. Chris has been through quite the ordeal in the last week. My life's not fair for an author. It's fucking stupid to write books, but here's what happened. So I ordered 20 of these just to give a test, hand out to people, get some feedback,

because it's going to launch in about a month. I went ahead and ordered a big batch to follow up so I could have it in process, but I didn't click. To make a proper book on this website, you've got to click certain things, and old Chris didn't click certain things cuz Chris assumed wrongly that they would just sort of just fix it because my wife put in the orders before and they just kind of fixed it and I didn't realize that they fix it then you buy you don't buy it then they fix it so I put in my order for 150 books and it

turns out that really all I selected was just ream after ream at the ream of printed off paper one side black and white fucking copy paper I've got coming 150 books. And it turns out that really all I selected was just ream after ream after ream of printed off paper. One side, black and white fucking copy paper. I've got, coming to me, 15 boxes. 15 boxes? 15 boxes of paper. They haven't arrived.

150 copies of this book. This book is 270 pages. So it's really good stuff. I'll tell you about it in a minute. So if you take this book and don't print it right, what you get is 8x11 sheets of copy paper, 300 pages thick, times 150. Loose, unbound paper I can't do anything with.

I knew that that would happen, but as you're describing it, I'm realizing how much paper is being delivered to you. How much did you spend? Go to Office Max and be like, how much paper I could get for $2,300 fucking dollars right now? It'd be a lot of paper.

So I don't know where I'm at. So what we're going to do is, CTP and I have really the only idea that's serviceable in this situation. We're just going to go out in the field. We'll bring you guys along. Bring every gun and ammunition item you have. And we're just going to fucking blow it all up, I think. And make a music video for Barbell Shrugged, I guess.

I think we should use nothing but assault rifles. I want to light shit on fire. I'm going cigars with them we'll blow it up we'll assault rifle the boxes there's nothing more manly looking if we get instagrams of us with guns and cigars in our mouths shooting nothing more manly than that can you grow some guns if you're training for the open so let me let me wrap up this thing real quick so what this this book is the coming regardless of my. So this book is coming. Regardless of my fuck-up, the book is coming December 15th or so. I'm not going to commit to anything right now.

I've got to make sure this second batch of orders comes out the right way. But it's four sections. Section one on establishing a personal philosophy for training in life. Section two is on vice. Incorporating excess into your life in a wise way to keep better balance and to get more productivity out of your life, actually. There's a section that's just some cool pictures. The third proper section is all set and setting. Because as we all know, what you do is not nearly

as important as who you do it with and where you are when you fucking do it. That's important consideration, especially for training. And section four is on mindfulness. So how do you practically apply ideas of meditation and peace of mind to get more out of your training and more out your life? So it's a mix of philosophy and like me going into the weeds and getting all artsy fartsy in the writing about it. And then there's supply bits that tell you exactly what to do to take that and then use it. Right on, man. And it'll

come with a strength seminar video. I did a two hour video that kind of brings 10 of these ideas out and flushes them out in a seminar talk. So it's going to come bundled with it. If you get it from a website, it's going to be pretty cool for this one too. Fuck no. I might do it next year, but dude, here's the thing about audio,

but it takes a long time to sit down by yourself and act out everything you wrote and get it recorded and pack. It's a whole other project. It takes a long time. I did it for progress. I might do it again for this, but that's not going to happen right now for that passionate. No, you just gave me, you just said, Oh yeah, I might do it for this. I might do it again for this, but that's not going to happen right now. After that passionate no you just gave me,

you just said, oh yeah, I might do it for this. I end up always trying to do everything. Fuck it. But I got- Chris always is like, oh, I'm going to take a break

and then next thing I know, he's slaving away at one o'clock in the morning. I've got 7,000 more words for the next book, so I don't know why I'm doing this. He's going to be competing in the open. He won't have any time. Competing in- Chris is doing a good job

getting us back on track over there. Oh, not enough. Great job, CTP. I I don't know he's doing a good job but he's definitely trying hinting at it I'll give him that yeah knock knock alright who's there the open is the open by the way you asked me about the book I know it's true so I'm not on track so we're gonna go through a variety of questions about the open and just competing in general. But you do the Open.

You look so confused. I can't remember when we left off before the break. All right, I'm taking over now. That's my problem. Start with the Open, maybe. All right, the Open's a great competition to do as your very first competition. But if you have time before the Open, should you do a competition before the Open just as practice? Or how often should you compete throughout the year?

That is a good question. I know, that's why we wrote it down on the notes. It's very practical. I have no idea. We'll research that and come back to you audience. I kind of like the idea of doing a competition once a quarter, so once every three or four months doing something that allows you to fully prep for something and also fully recover and get ready for the next

thing I think if you're doing a competition and you're and you're going real hard in the paint for that that particular competition doing it more frequently in that can lead to burnout and and I think that three or four times a year is pretty much the ideal amount of practice I think that allows people build this skill of competing because the part of the thing you've got to get over is just showing up to a competition and taking it way too seriously. Like, my life's going to end if I don't do well at this CrossFit meet. No, it won't. Nobody actually cares.

Yeah. Get used to it. Have fun. And then after you do it, like these times, like just, I don't know what the minimal time for you will be, but three, four, five, six, seven times. And you're going to go into the proper ones where you actually got to perform focused and not worked up about it. Yeah, if you don't compete semi-frequently, it's hard to relax in competition, which is especially important in CrossFit

because you'll gas early. Can't freak out, man. If you can't just go at a fast but steady, relaxed pace, especially for the longer Metcons. Do you think it's like Jiu-Jitsu where beginners in Jiu-Jitsu freak out and exhaust themselves rolling

and the master is so relaxed like yeah this would chill yeah it's hard to do that when you're in first if you're doing fucking thrusters and you're uptight and stressed out you're gonna get really tired really quick yeah I saw one of the the open launch videos or the the road regionals launch videos I talked about the 8080 rule and actually kind of modified that from something I heard BJ Penn say while back was he fights at 80% not a hundred percent he fights at 80 not 100 he fights at 80 where where he's fast and explosive and and but relaxed so he doesn't gas too quickly which bj

penn back in the day had he was so talented but he wasn't always in really really good shape as as he got later in his career he got in better shape but so that was the thing for him he didn't want to gas if he couldn't knock the guy out or choke him out like early in the fight so he always fought at 80 so i think that's a good good advice for crossfers as well 80 basically means you're going as fast as possible but you're doing it in a relaxed not overstimulated state you gotta sustain this yeah yeah yeah and then i think you went into and then after 80 of the wad maybe you spend the last 20% going balls deep. Yeah, that was the 80-80 rule. 80% effort for the first 80% of the workout. So if you're doing a 20-minute

AMRAP, you go 80% full speed for the first 16 minutes, and then the last four minutes, then you can really put it on. You shouldn't redline and dig deep and go hard into the paint. As you just said, until the last couple minutes of the workout, that way, right as the buzzer hits, you're totally spent. That's right there why a typical weightlifter power that doesn't do

good at crossfit type movements with barbells right because they're used to full go one rep boom yeah which you got to train that way but you got to feel what it's like to take that strength you develop by being explosive and backing it down and sustaining it and being smooth with it yeah i think that's a skill that's wholly utilizing that strength in a controlled way not getting so stimulated one way to develop that skill and we were kind of talking about kind of alluding to it already which was practicing to compete I think one way to kind of practice that during a competition is to not take the competition that seriously so I find that people may choose three or four competitions a year.

It might be a two day meet or something like that. And then, but they taper for it. You know, they, they want to take it seriously. They, they want to go through, they want to treat it like it was the CrossFit games or something. No, you just fucking do it. And what it is, is they, they have this big taper and then they have this big recovery afterwards. And what they should probably do is just you know maybe take a day or two off beforehand treat it like training treat it like it's a practice yeah the next week you're gonna have to lower your training volume and stuff to recover from it because the volume of that weekend is probably higher than

what you train at intuitive adjustments so it's no you're not drilling down into science or right sort of convoluted idea to prepare yourself or something that you don't need to be doing that yeah so, so I say pick one competition a year. And for a lot of people, it's going to be the Open. And really, that's the competition where two months out, you start making changes to your training to make it more like that. And you're really prepping for that specific competition. But the rest of the year when you compete, just have low expectations of yourself, really.

Don't worry about getting on a podium. And relax and have a good time. And this is a good time to practice how you fuel and all that kind of stuff, how you eat, how you rest the night before, things like that. And if you do, if you go in with low expectations, I think that you'll be more relaxed during the practice competitions. So in the end, you'll be more relaxed every time you compete. So you're saying not to change your training program leading up to these not so important competitions so if the open is seven months away and and strength specifically is your goat in the off season months and months and months away you should be working on strength and then if you sign for a competition and that competition is coming up in four to six weeks you shouldn't derail all your

strength training and be like man i really need to like improve my my metcon fitness for this competition and totally derail your long-term goals for this short-term competition. Yeah, actually. Just keep doing what you're doing and go compete just wherever you happen to be. That's actually one of the toughest things I have as a coach is having that conversation with the athletes. You know, I encourage them to do competitions. And when they do, they're like, okay, it's a month out.

What do I need to do to prep? I'm like nothing we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna keep the progression moving to get you better by the open We're not worried about this thing in October You're gonna go compete treat it like practice and you're not gonna be at your best except that you're not gonna be your best and treat it like practice and That's so hard because people have egos. This whole idea is like really where all your best performance comes from is these little pockets of wisdom and practical intuitive things you just struggle with.

Like I myself when it came to strength, the best thing I ever learned was that when I started lifting heavy basically all the time, like every time I touch a barbell, I lift it as much as I can lift. It's nothing special about that. What it did for me was teach me how to not take each lifting session so seriously. So instead of like I was a pilot, I'd run around snorting ammonia, thinking about death metal all day,

getting really amped up, yelling and screaming, lifting a max weight. It's totally unnecessary. It breeds in you this uptightness. You take it too seriously. It adds to the fatigue and stress. If you de-emphasize it, then you can really cultivate the skill. So after a while it becomes like, oh yeah, I compete, or I lift a heavy weight, I just do it. And it takes nothing out of you to do it.

Then when you actually, it is time to turn it on and be focused, then you really have this reserve. You're recovered, you're wise, you're not getting too uptight, you're putting your focus and your arousal right where it needs to be. That's where it starts coming together in my view. That's where the wisdom is.

Regarding the tapering, we're kind of saying don't do a big taper. You might want to spend a week lowering the volume and the week after keeping the volume low after one of these weekend competitions. But for something like the Open, I don't know if I would call it a taper, but there's a i wouldn't i don't know if i would call it a taper but there's a there's a phase of training that happens like two months before that where the movements start looking a lot like what you know we know the movements look like historically and we really start training the time that we know that you know we may have a higher volume uh training and our training volume time might be really high this time of year but come January that's it's gonna start shrinking the volumes gonna get lower

and the intensity is gonna go up this time of year is November if you're watching this in the future thank you Doug yes ruin the evergreenness the open is yeah the opens in March, normally. They can move it whenever they want. It's all up to Dave Castro, is what I hear. It is November now, so we're like five months out right now. It's time to start getting to work, I think. I think a lot of people don't talk about the coffee taper, though.

You want to taper your coffee. That's because you shouldn't taper your coffee. You don't want to shit your pants. What kind of madness? Your first competition. Oh, yeah. That's a good because you shouldn't taper your coffee. You don't want to shit your pants at your first competition. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good point. Don't shit your pants.

Yeah, but that's another thing. If you decide, I never take anything. Maybe before my first workout, I should take a bunch of stimulants. Drink five cups of coffee, a Vente. Whatever that Vente shit is,

you drink every morning. I've seen this mistake so many times. You start going, ha, ha, ha, ha, and you freak out. You're tweaking out before you're supposed to compete. Yeah, it's one of those,

do not change things on game day. No. What will this pill do for me today? A dozen times. Yeah. I've seen this happen, I don't know how many times. Like, oh my God,

I've been prepping for this. I've been doing everything right. I gotta be really good. My glute feels sore. I might want a foam roll for an hour before I lift. And then their friend's like, all right, what I like is NO Explode. And then their friend's like, all right,

what I like is N.O. Explode and their other friend likes Jack 3D and their other friend likes this. Not tape your face. And he's like, I'll just do all of them. I want to do the best.

It happens all the time. We saw a guy almost fucking die in Columbus, Ohio from doing that, that way with him. Yeah. Oh yeah. There's like 30 seconds

under the wand and they're like, and they're freaking out and none of those stimulants help at all. That guy thought, oh, I'm lifting today. Might as well take this red line. The guy fucking had a heart attack. He had and none of those stimulants help at all. That guy thought oh I'm lifting today might as well take this red line.

The guy fucking had a heart attack. He had a couple of them. He had like three. We saw the guy just collapse after he lifted like this guy's gonna fucking die. Collapse and go into seizure. Yeah.

So don't change things on game day. That's not us calling out red line. That was the doctors that came backstage. Yeah don't sue us. They were telling us that this whole story. That's what happened.

We can go get the evidence of this. That's not our words. No. That's the medical doctors. I will say this. There is a dosage on the can, and this guy took more than the prescribed dose. Three times that. Yeah, the prescribed dose.

Why would anyone ever do that? Not Redline's fault. His mistake. And that guy was like 55 or 60 years old. Again. He wasn't like a 20-year-old dude. Not just what you take. Let's try not to get sued.

It's not just what you take. Don't warm up differently. Don't freak out and think you're tight and start foam rolling obsessively the night before. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. One thing Louie always said that's right is that before a meet the hay is in the barn. You're not going to get stronger this last week but you can get weaker by doing

silly shit. Don't get weaker. Don't get worse right before the show. Just hold your ground. Everything's going to be fine. Don't get weaker. Don't get worse right before the show. Just hold your ground. Everything's going to be fine. Don't freak out. So what should your taper look like for the important competitions like the Open? Two, three weeks out. How are you ratcheting down your volume that way when the Open comes around

you're at your best and you're not getting weaker the week before like Chris was saying about overdoing it. Yeah, it kind of depends. Anytime we talk about anything, it's, you know, the caveat is. No, I want to defend the answer. I came to you as a content expert.

Tell me what to do. That's right. That doesn't get mentioned enough. The answer's always it depends. It depends. It's hard, man. What I like to do is, the volume is going to be higher three weeks out.

That's probably, like two to three weeks out, that's when things are going to be probably the most painful. That's when's when things are gonna be probably the most painful uh that's when the intensity is gonna be high that's when that's when the volume is gonna be crossing over with some intensity and you're gonna hit something some moments where they chris you are messing up the microphones that wasn't me it was you i'm gonna get my hands off everything the intensity and the volume kind of cross over around two to three weeks out. And so you're going to

have a week or two where the volume and intensity are kind of relatively high and kind of high for both of them to exist at the same time. That doesn't happen very often. But in your competition it does. That's when you need to take recovery most seriously because that's when people tend to get injured.

You know, they're prepping for it and they people tend to get injured you know they're they're prepping for it and they want to do really good so they're they're doing everything uh 110 instead of 95 or whatever and that's kind of i know this from personal experience like you know timing that intensity and volume crossover you know poorly or hitting it too hard or trying to do extra work during that time not a good idea do what your coach says and uh but yeah what's gonna happen is the intensity's getting high what that means is your workouts are gonna get shorter which means that you can push harder and so a lot of times what i do is uh maybe this time a year or uh further sorry i'll try to stop

saying this time of year jerk if it happens to be'll try to stop saying this time of year. Jerk. If it happens to be like November. If it happens to be November. Yeah, this time of the year, if you're months out from the competition, you'll be doing things that a lot of your conditioning will be 85 to 90% effort. And then as you get closer to the open, that's when you're starting to go more all out. Two weeks out, you should be really crushing it. Then the week leading up to a competition, you kind of pull everything back.

You pull the volume and intensity back. Let your body adapt. Let your hormones all kind of come back to higher levels. Then you can come in and kill it. For the open specifically, it being five weeks long, it's more like a season than it is a single competition. So the taper for the Open is actually a little more conservative. And from week to week, you've got to take into consideration

what the Open WOD was. You've got to look at the athletes. One of the questions we had written down that people might have is like, how should I train in between open wads? And that's going to depend on the athlete because when the athletes start doing the open wads, if you get completely, if you're not used to the volume or a specific movement, you're not used to the volume for that specific movement and you get totally destroyed, you might need to do some other things.

You might need to lower the volume a little extra than the average person. Or maybe the volume of the workout was just cake, maybe kind of sore. And you can actually ramp up the volume pretty high again on Monday if you're going to compete on Saturday. You've got to be careful with that, though, because maybe how you feel is not the greatest indicator. Right. Have a buddy help you measure some things to be sure that you're not that beat up. Yeah, you can look. Well, that's why you have a coach.

You know, you look at the historical data. is what i'm used to this is the type of volume i do well with and then um you know but if someone's really low volume training and then and then going how you feel may not be so good like you're saying and then you start throwing volume at them again it could just totally send them the simplest thing i always think about is like i just think every acute event is standalone and must be accounted for. I think of it like credit card charges.

If I'm making small charges, I pay it off. Small charge, pay it off like my normal training. I know I'm doing fine. I'll recover in time for the next thing

but a huge event where I got to get with my buddies and crushed it and we really hit way harder than normal. I went X percent above the normal demand.

I go, I got to pay this back before I do it again yeah i'm always thinking in terms of that it's always helped me just in my own mind like i know that it may not be a perfect calculation of how much i scale down or up i know i've got to do something above and beyond to recover from that special event it means the recovery is a little extra the the eating is a little more focused on that for a few days after right buffers your back and get you back to that was definitely a time that was definitely a time to get hypercaloric.

Eat more than you think you need. And it helps you also, like, when you go, look, my training sucks. Like, I didn't do good on this week's Open. What was wrong with my training? What else happened? Like, oh, well, my dog died or my girlfriend told me to fuck off. Other stresses that contribute to that debt. You got to keep those main things in mind, how things are jumping on top of you.

And if it hits at the same time that big workout did, then even more work on their cover. Just keep those common sense ideas in mind. It helps a lot. Or I ordered $2,300 worth of paper. Fuck. Dude, I was, Thursday I could have jumped off my roof. I was like, fuck. That was really bad, but I'm smiling about it now.

Doing the open on that day would have been a poor choice. Well, I'm never going to do the open because I'm fat. So let's get that out of the way first. But I can do a handstand. So it may have sounded like I danced around the issue a little bit. You know, how do you prep? Because I didn't give anything very, very concrete. But it depends.

It depends on the training history of the individual. But the average person should probably do movements that were not in the open. Do movements that week that you can anticipate might show up. You go, oh, we already did power cleans and pull-ups. Maybe I should be ready for wall balls and thrusters and muscle-ups this week. So you can kind of try to game it a little bit

on the movement side of things. Just to add some numbers to that abstraction. If you're an expert, abstraction works great. If you're a total beginner, then abstraction is just confusing. So as an oversimplification, say three weeks out, you normally do five-by-five back squats on Mondays,

and then you do three-by-five back squats the next week, and then you just do one-by-five back squats the last week, and then you compete on Saturday. So just ratcheting it down for the three weeks out that's oversimplified in a million different ways but you can see how going from five by five to three by five to one by five and then competing on that saturday you won't be as beat up on that saturday as you would have on any other normal week and it's but it's enough work to keep you as strong as you were when you did the five by five yeah and you certainly yeah you certainly won't get weaker in that situation.

So don't freak out. Don't go like, I'm doing less. I'm going to show up. I'm going to shit my pants and embarrass myself in front of everybody and God and everybody else. No, that won't happen. Yeah, the last two weeks leading up to a big competition, really your only goal is to not feel like shit, not be too beat up, and not get injured. Stay loose. Stay happy.

So actually, especially in my situation, like prepping for an MMA fight, two weeks after an MMA fight, you feel like shit. You get your ass kicked. You got a black eye. All your joints hurt. You're beef jerky. You've been getting your ass kicked. And so leading up to the competition, you just want to not hurt going into a competition. You want your nose to not feel broken.

So the first time you get punched, you don't feel like you broke your nose again. Ah! Ah! My nose! Yeah, you just want to stay healed up. You want that broken nose feeling to only show up like in the last round, not the very first punch, right? So, same thing across it. You don't want to be all beat up all the time.

No, no. So, the last couple weeks, it's okay if you have access to things like prowlers and most people have access to a rower. Things that aren't going to beat up your joints. You can get an awesome metabolic effect without beating up your joints, without getting overly sore. And those things, the things that you normally use for active recovery, like rowing and airdynes, you can do a lot of that leading up to competition without really beating yourself up too much.

Again, don't do anything new then. Don't let go. You know, I'll try this Swedish contrast ice bath therapy a week before. No, I don't. Fucking try that after, man. Ease into that stuff. Just do what you normally do. I like I like the idea of using air dine and row things that aren't gonna tear your muscles up prowler

sprints things like that you know practice the movements you can anticipate and then you kind of get the metabolic demand through things like that because you know during during a competition season is gonna be the time you probably get hurt because that's just when you're pushing it the hardest. That's when the intensity is the highest and you know, you get breakdowns in form when you're really pushing hard. So when the open starts again, it's one workout every week for five weeks. How do you manage the training time in between each open wad?

So between you do the first wad on Saturday and next Saturday you got wad two, what do you do that week? How do you manage training hard enough to stay in as good a shape as possible, maybe even get in a tiny bit better shape, but not, again, overdoing it where when you show up for WOD 2, you're beat up and you're tired and you're not as ready as you could be. Actually, one thing I like to do is chicken sacrifice to Joe Boo, then what? After the chicken sacrifice. Joe Boo bless bats bats then i train uh actually like right after right after especially if you're only doing one workout in a day like the open uh what i would do is do like maybe a 10 minute amrap of some like recovery movements do some things just get blood flowing again uh you don't

want to end on uh i don't i don't like lending ending on a high lactic uh threshold type workout so when you finish and you're like on the ground and rolling around and everything hurts and everything burns like a salmon wait 10 20 minutes and then go to a 10 minute amrap of like kettlebell swings like movements that aren't gonna tear you up kind of do get on the airdyne you know work on some double unders uh that's probably a good time to work on some movements that you might not be good at that you might anticipate the next week you know you're fatigued and now you're practicing double unders you suck at double unders maybe it's time to practice that and so i kind of like practicing the skills you might suck at that you can anticipate a week from now

while you're like completely destroyed. I had a conversation years ago with a guy, you reminded me of it, we were talking about what you finish with with a workout.

We were graduates at the time and we took things a little too seriously so we're getting into genetics research and thinking about this. But we talked about research

so I'll zoom up to a practical level for this but I think you want to end the workout with the kind of adaptation or the kind of feeling you want to be left with. Like you don't want to get off the floor and mosey out of the gym. Like you feel like shit. Cause everything else,

the rest of that day is kind of like that. And the adaptation that you're kind of left with is a sticky one where you got to do a lot of recovery to get good again. But if you leave the gym getting over it and feeling good and bouncy again, that's a much better way to end any training session. Psychologically, I think. Psychologically,

molecularly, everything. It's like if you watch a comedian and if at the very end of the show it's like not that exciting. Or you end with a flop. Which we experienced last week.

Oh, shit. It's like, yeah, we went and saw a comedian and you know, like the high point was in the middle and then it just kind of went down from there

and then at the end we were like, oh, that shows. And it doesn't matter how funny he was it doesn't matter how funny that show sucked because it didn't end on a high note and so you know not only practicing your guts but it's probably a great time to do some things you're really good at also so you can end on a high note from a psychological perspective you can you know flush out everything it's really meaningful too if you want to learn more about that you can watch daniel kahneman's ted talk he talks a lot about finishing on a high note and people's memory of something especially like you know, flush out everything. It's really meaningful to do. If you want to learn more about that, you can watch Daniel Kahneman's Ted talk. He talks a lot about finishing on a high note and people's memory of something, especially like something really painful.

If you, if you give somebody like an intense amount of pain, like during or after surgery and then you go, okay, it's done. And they had like a big spike of pain right before he said it was done. They'll remember it as having been way more painful than if you give them that big spike of pain. And then you say, it's not done. It's not done. It's not done.

And then they're, they're kind of like coming down off of it. And then you say it's done after they're you give them that big spike of pain and then you say, it's not done, it's not done, it's not done. And then they're kind of like coming down off of it. And then you say it's done after they're well off of that big spike. They remembered as having been way less painful, even if the total quantifiable amount of pain was more. So if you're doing five weeks of open wads, and I know that for myself and for some of the athletes we've had, it's psychologically demanding every week to push all the way to the edge you know if you don't end on that maybe maybe then you know you'll be able to approach the next week with a little bit fresher mind uh you know the coming say you do the the open workout on monday or on a saturday you know and then you you do something nice and easy work

on some goats practice some thingsush everything out that afternoon. And then on Monday, the training again, I like to lift something heavy. And kind of get, I don't want to go like anything. That's when you want to do stuff that's as far from what you're going to see at the open as possible probably. You know, what you might anticipate that week. Maybe do something long and easy. And then as the week progresses again, get the intensity high. high so it's gonna be like mini tapers within the open so you might do like a five by five back squat that might be a little high for most people on monday and then you do

uh maybe a 20 minute am rap but you don't you go like 90 and then on tuesday you might keep it short and intense wednesday long and thursday short and intense again and And then you crush the wad again on Saturday for the next week. Yeah, it's actually a very similar situation to what starters in baseball have, the starting pitchers in baseball. Major League Baseball, they have a five-day cycle. They pitch every five days. They open the game. In colleges, every seven days.

So they're on a cycle and a routine where they know that they're going to throw again every five days. There's five pitchers, and they just go on rotation. One pitcher, and then the next, and the next, and the next. And then when they're back up five days later, they go again. And so if you're watching a Major League Baseball game, the star goes out there, he throws. And then oftentimes, right when he gets done, he goes inside and trains. He goes in and squats. That's right.

That's exactly what he does. He goes in and does his heavy lower body day right after he throws. His arm's tired, so he doesn't train his arm that much. He might do a little bit of cuff exercise, nothing too crazy. But he'll go in and he'll tax his legs. That way he has maximum time to recover the joints and the muscles that weren't already taxed from throwing. Grant, I don't want to get into a big debate about you use your legs when you're throwing and all that. That's not the point.

But the point is that he wants to tax his legs. That way when he goes to throw the next time, he's as recovered as possible. Because the point is that squatting taxes the arm. You can't just expect the training, that heavy training system to have no effect on that arm, too. So if you went ahead and fucking did that the next day, you're prolonging the fatigue. They've looked at hormone studies, too. If you do heavy squats on one day, for days after that, your testosterone is going to be a little bit higher. Five days before is probably pretty ideal.

And you're holding that weight with that fucking arm. And it's tired. It's going to be even more fatigue, just practically. So that's another practical question. Pitching's easy. What are you talking about, man? That's a weird position. That's a fascinating position. It is.

Those guys, it's a very huge skill, huge, like, isolated. The forces at that shoulder and what your body does and the way it's kind of imbalanced. Like, it's just so different, a case study and training an athlete that's a fun exercise to do when as you guys know i was a strength coach for the car ride rockies in 2006 and being able to like just play catch with some of those guys is a freaky experience different world you can hear the ball sizzling as it comes to you it's like fuck fuck fuck you stick your hand up with a glove oh god just don't hit me well i had the experience when that experience when I used to, I played college football and everything.

I would throw, play catch with the starting quarterback. We had a couple of really good quarterbacks. Not that we don't do now. I'm saying this is my experience. But to get 20 yards away from that guy and have him, you just see him look right at you and throw the ball right there, like release his finger pointing right between your eyes and then you just see a ball go like an eraser right towards your face and you just go and it's gonna sticks to your hands oh thank god i caught that all right so

from a practical point of view how do you know when to take a day off you got five weeks where you have to be at your best how do you know when you need to take a day off it's a big it depends question that's tough you know what i do Having no experience in this, just talking out of my ass. I test my vertical jump this whole time. And when it goes down, I know I'm not quite ready to do it. That's actually, a lot of coaches do use that. That's not a bad way of going about it. It depends on how experienced the athlete is. If an athlete's been doing this thing for five, six, seven years,

they probably know. If they go, hey, I'm feeling beat up. This is actually some, I coach one really advanced athlete. She's like, I feel really bad, I think I need to take tomorrow off. I'm like, do it. I also have some other athletes that aren't as advanced, that I can feel them really beat up.

I'm like, okay. I'm looking at the numbers. I'm looking at the numbers, I'm looking at the numbers, and it's a little bit like that so i think using a vertical jump test for somebody who may not be as experienced could be really good what he's talking about is did you explain it no i'll let you explain it well i mean we've known a lot of research and stuff that we're even participating in that one of the first things that go one of the early canaries in your cold mind will be your ability to produce force like fast. Sprinting, if your sprints and runs and jumps

and bounds and maybe Olympic lifts feel a little sticky, it's not nothing you don't freak out about, but you know it's probably an early sign that fatigue's accumulating, things are getting a little down. And if you can take a little break and you feel zippy again, then that's... Because the strength thing, the ability to crush a wide is probably going to be the last

thing to go. You can still pump out good strength work, but this whole time you're getting slower and slower and slower. You just can't quite tell. I always use that like my power thing. When I wanted to squat really at maximum weights, I know the faster I was going to be, the better shot I had at doing that. Strength alone wasn't the mark I needed to measure fatigue by. Right. So what happens if HQ just decides none of these barbell movements, none of these bodyweight movements,

it's all kettlebells and running and no AMRAPs. Fuck. Where are we going to be at then? Well, you'll be in better shape. You'll be a better person. Yeah, that's one of those things where I will be completely honest that most of our predictions,

most of my predictions most of my predictions are based off historical data and and if they change they probably will they change the competition drastically it's gonna be tough it's unlikely scenario the likely scenario is most of it is just what we've seen and that might be a curveball or two in which case you're prepared probably for the career yeah we definitely I definitely spend some time picking out those movements that you might see in regionals. And I like to throw those in for people who are prepping for the Open for two reasons. One is, yeah, the potential curveball.

More than likely, they're going to throw in. If they do throw a curveball in the Open, it'll probably be something that was done at regionals, I think. And then the other thing is, hey, you make it to regionals. At least you're practicing those movements that were historically at regionals i think uh and then the other thing is is hey you make it a regionals at least you're practicing those movements that were historically at regionals as well so because you're doing the things that are you're going back and work on foundation anyway which is going to help you do the things in the future it's not like it's a bad thing oh i fucked up the strategy no it's still a great strategy no matter what you worked on fundamentals you got stronger you're better right universally better if you're pretty strong at all the basic barbell movements and you can do all of the gymnastics

movements, muscle ups, chest bar pull ups, handstand push ups, pistols, if you can do all those movements unbroken, then you're probably okay for the open. Yeah. Regardless of what happens. I've seen weight lifters, a lot of weight lifters, one of the things that they do really well is they move really well. You see the same thing with gymnasts. They are masters of movement. You throw them into CrossFit a lot of times, they pick up on the skills unusually fast.

You're like, man, I can't believe that weightlifter was able to learn how to do kipping pull-ups so well. You take that gymnast, he's like, man, they move really well with the bar on that snatch. It's like, well, they have the fundamentals down. They understand how things work and so yeah and it's easy to add on the metabolic adaptation to that with just a couple years of committing to it and developing it to get competitive they wanted to do it yeah i mean if you take kendrick now and try to make him do a while somebody's out there i saw kendrick do that why he didn't do so good he wasn't trying that's an important thing to know it wasn't trying didn't

give a shit about it he's just showing his motion if he trained and worked on it he would certainly get a lot better because what you mean by trying is but you mean prepping prepping because he was trying making it important enough to change your training to get better at that thing which he wasn't not going to do he doesn't care about that no he just was having fun yeah yeah it's a year of conditioning he would be completely different yeah he's a for the crossword stuff he'd be a monster anything he's he's a he's the same goes for a lot of good wlifters, man. They're moving really well.

I've learned that so much in my own life this year. Really, the first thing that needs to happen is you move really excellent, as excellent as possible, and you always work on that. Then you add load back to that. That's been my greatest lesson coming out of powerlifting was to drop that shit. I think that's one thing that Open will point out, especially if you have people judging you or you're videoing. Gotta move well, man. Yeah, all of a sudden those half-ass thrusters

and the chest bar pull-ups you counted in your workout, but the judge isn't counting now. You're gonna feel really naked out there. Yeah, so as Chris said, master the movement. Don't worry about the load or the volume

and just do that and then start adding in slowly try to check that ego the return on your investment from that is so fucking huge if you do shitty reps you're going to have a bad time it's like a steroid effect if you move better get used to it then add load back in you're really shocked

at how well you can lift and move and do these motions it's so crazy alright guys speaking of ending on high notes. Yay! We're taking off. And we will see you next week. Make sure to go to barbellstroke.com, sign up for the newsletter. If you enjoyed this podcast,

head over to iTunes, leave a positive comment, five stars. If you leave me less than five stars, don't do anything. Everyone tell us how good we look. And go buy Chris's book. Keep your eyes peeled for that one. Way past wrong.

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