For those of you who aren’t aware, I own a 6000-sq-ft CrossFit affiliate in Williamsport, Pennsylvania called Lumber Capital Athletics.
I recorded a podcast in our unfinished space with my business partner and ZOAR Athlete, Stacey Kadenas.
One of my key roles at the facility is writing the programming for our classes.
We publish our programming to our website every week.
The goal of this post is to show the contrast of this programming versus what I prescribe in The Protocol or for my competitive 1-on-1 Coaching Clients.
The demographic (average class-goer) of my gym ranges, but is not unlike most CrossFit affiliates.
I don’t attempt to push a competitive style of programming onto a group that is striving to look & feel good.
Of course they care deeply about improving aspects of their performance, but the lens is different.
While you comb through the pages of the programming from above, there’s four things I want you to recognize I am intentional about…
(1) Patterns
Push. Pull. Squat. Hinge. Lunge. Bound. Core.
As much as possible, I try to vary these patterns day-to-day. As I plan each cycle, I make sure we are touching on all of these patterns on a weekly basis.
However, between strength & conditioning settings, this really isn’t that tough to do. The bigger challenge is making sure athletes aren’t overusing a pattern on back-to-back days where fatigue or overuse opens a door for injury.
(2) Pacing
Everyone can benefit from being more aerobic.
Building fatigue resistant movement can be made into a complicated problem to solve, but for the everyday athlete, encouraging them to pace properly based on volume or time domain is a key step that can easily get skipped if intensity is the only thing being chased.
(3) Progression
Progress is in progression. Literally.
Want to see your athletes stick around for the long-haul?
Keep them healthy and give them opportunities to compound small wins.
Novelty and creativity have their place in program design, but they need to be kept on a leash. The easiest way to that is through a skeleton with clear priorities and running progressions that stay within those constraints.
(4) CrossFit
I’ve been pleasantly surprised -okay shocked- at how quickly our members bought into a program that priorities progressions and long-term progress.
However, I also know what our people want.
I’m very intentional about varying the appearance and feel of a stimulus that appears week over week. Tuesday’s strict pulling work doesn’t have to be boring.
Get creative with how you deal the dose-response and make sure to put a healthy dose of CrossFit into the program because that’s what you’re people signed up for.
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