Our Methodology

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Jason

Inspired and Borrowed from Posts written at CrossFit Invictus

Albany CrossFit Programming Methodology

In the beginning (September 20097), Albany CrossFit was largely beginning CrossFitters and athletes for that matter. Many of our clients had little exposure to anything athletic so we viewed our programming as something very simple and easy to understand. Due to this our programming didn't need much thought, everyone was advancing from basic CrossFit workouts.  This was a great and is still works very well for many affiliates.

Two years later, we have many more athletes and many different levels.  We have tweaked our programming quite a bit, and have added much more strength programming.  The beautiful thing about this programming is that once our athletes get used to it they come to expect the strength work as part of Crossfit. The biggest deficiency we see in CrossFit is strength training so if you can get beginners to see the value, you have made your job much easier.

Goals and Objectives:
We don’t mean to sound like a smart ass, but the objective of our program is to increase our athletes’ work capacity over broad time and modal domains. We might go about doing that a bit differently than the main site or some of the other CrossFit affiliates, but we believe whole-heartedly that fitness should be defined by that standard.

Beyond that, our goal as a fitness facility is to provide a comprehensive approach to health and wellness. We are uniquely situated to be able to affect our athletes’ lives through more than just workouts, and we try to take advantage of that opportunity by providing nutrition counseling, and a network of professionals who help keep our athletes feeling their best. We understand that achieving optimal performance means MUCH more than learning the nine foundational movements of CrossFit, and as professional coaches we have a duty to learn how to address dysfunction so that our athletes can be as biomechanically efficient as possible and so they are not in danger of missing training days due to injury. That belief and commitment to continuous education informs much of what we do at Albany CrossFit.

How We Achieve Our Objective:
If you asked us, we would say that we just do CrossFit. But there seems to be a lot of varied perspectives about what CrossFit is, so we often default to saying that CrossFit is the meat of our sandwich. It provides the substance for what we do day in and day out, but we bookend each of our 60 minute sessions with supplemental skill and strength work, as well as mobility work.

The perspective that CrossFit is simply the “Met-Con” workout that has a stopwatch attached to it is crazy, but we hear that misconception often. CrossFit’s foundational principles are centered around well-executed functional movement (think consistency before intensity and striving for virtuosity), so we try to put some focus there and provide athletes with tools to move better.

So here is ideally how our 60 minute sessions breakdown, and you might see why we say CrossFit is the meat of our sandwich:

* Before we start – Self-Myofascial Release
o Our protocol for athletes who arrive prior to the beginning of our session is that they head straight to the back of the gym and grab a foam roller or a tenis ball (or both) and start digging in to areas that they know are problems for them. Most of our athletes understand that muscles with poor elasticity are going to be weaker and less tolerant of fatigue than muscles that are healthy and pliable.
* First 5-10 minutes – Dynamic Warm-Up and Range of Motion
o We spend a lot of time here because we get a lot of bang for our buck. This is an opportunity for our coaches to assess athletes’ movement patterns. We go through a battery of mobility drills that help prepare our athletes to move in the motor pathways that we will prioritize in the workout. If we see impediments to efficient movement, we know to keep an eye on them and talk with the athlete about specific ways to address them. If we can head off poor recruitment patterns from the start, we think we have a much better chance of getting the athlete moving well down the road.
o We also do our best to prime our athletes’ central nervous systems and metabolic pathways. This typically means ramping up the intensity of the warm-up and movements performed, sometimes to the point that beginners are stopping for water breaks and looking at the clock to figure out how much longer this will go on. But we want our athletes really warm and ready to move before we start loading them.
* Second 15-20 minutes – Strength or Skill Work
o CrossFitters have amazing capacity, but too often their limiting factor is their pure strength. I am in the camp that believes athletes can increase their work capacity most efficiently by developing more strength. So for full disclosure, we do it almost every day. Typically, we lift heavy 3-4 days a week, and at least one day each week we work on a gymnastic skill – handstands, pull-ups, muscle-ups, etc….
o How do we organize our strength work? Well, it’s not just a random selection of whatever we feel like doing that day. I am not saying that doesn’t work, because if you spend time ACTUALLY DOING functional movement every day, you will get stronger, faster and generally better, even if there is no specific rhyme or reason to the way you organize these movements. That said, there is a more efficient and better way to develop strength. We vary our programming a bit, but I generally like rep schemes of 5, 3 and 1, and we will put different movement patterns on different cycles.
* Third 15-20 minutes – Metabolic Conditioning
o This is our hopper . . . kind of. We like to throw all sorts of things in here, but we weigh the volume of every week and month to ensure there is balance amongst the movement patterns. We look at how many hip dominant, knee dominant, vertical press and pull, horizontal press and pull movements we have programmed for each week, as well as the reps performed for each of these movement patterns.  At the end of a week and a month, I want to see that there is a general balance amongst the movement patterns, and if anything, I prefer to see slightly more hip dominant and pulling movements in the program to offset the most common dysfunctions we see.
o Oh, and just because it says 15-20 minutes in the subheading doesn’t mean we are moving for that long, we have to build in time to set-up. Most of our workouts are between 6-12 minutes, a few a week stray to 15 or so, and normally we will go more than 15 once, maybe twice a week.
* Remaining 5-10 minutes – Stretching
o I think all of us that ignore or fail to prioritize flexibility/mobility (and I fall into this trap sometimes) are doing our clients an enormous disservice. If I was a better coach, I would mandate that nobody left until they did at least 10 minutes of effective stretching. Unfortunately, some of our athletes have to get to work or find another excuse to slip out when it’s time to stretch.

Tracking Progress – Strategic Use of Benchmark Workouts:
I have a lot to learn. One of the ways I can facilitate that process for myself is to track the progress of our athletes and figure out what is and is not working. For that reason, I start the calendar year by selecting dates on which we will perform certain benchmark workouts throughout the year. I have a handful of WODs that I run every 90 days, a handful that I run every 120 days, and a few that I run twice a year. If we don’t see improvements and new PRs, I am not doing my job as a coach (assuming, of course, that my athletes are showing up consistently – and they do for the most part).

We also created some really cool Performance Logs to help our athletes track their own development. The Performance Logs have a list of the classic Benchmark WODs on the first couple of pages, pages for PR lifts, charts with Strength Standards, nutrition information, and 120 pages to log daily workouts. They are really convenient and serve as great motivators and diagnostic tools.

Conclusion:
I have no idea if this programming is the most effective way to train athletes. I don’t claim to be an expert or an innovator of anything, but what we are doing so far has been working well. Will it change over the next couple of months and over the next year? Hell yes! I am committed to nothing more than constantly learning new and better ways to help our athletes. So our program will constantly evolve as our coaches and I learn new strategies for improving performance. 

"Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it." – Bill Cosby