Crossfit, training methodology

We keep breaking down the concepts of the “Crossfit” training system little by little. In this article, I want to share my take on this activity, hoping it brings you closer to this “world” and, while we’re at it, to the box nearest to your home 🙂

What do you train in Crossfit?

Crossfit aims to boost a person’s athletic abilities overall, without specializing in just one area, resulting in a functional, versatile athlete ready to face any physical challenge.

To reach this goal, it’s necessary—although it might not seem so—to keep a “pseudo” training plan. Given the huge versatility in this sport, it’s super important to improve your records, cut down exercise times… in other words, train somewhat randomly but following a script, or “pseudo” script. Sounds complicated, but in practice, it’s easier than it seems.

If you want to be a person—or better said, an athlete—able to overcome any obstacle (test, challenge, event, or WOD…), Crossfit gets you ready for that, focusing on one of the most important aspects, in my opinion and that of most coaches: increasing strength.

This quality would be the reference point for your capacity, and everything else will be directly proportional to it.

All without resting! At first glance, a test like this might seem “easy,” and if that’s what you thought, I encourage you to try it. When you’re halfway through the 2nd round, you’ll probably be feeling one of the worst sensations of your life…

Still, the experience will be worth it, and I promise you’ll get hooked!

As we see, if the weight you’re handling, 40 kg, is close to your RM (max weight for one rep), you’ll be at a disadvantage compared to another “rival” whose RM in thrusters is, say, 80 kg… with these premises, the person with the higher RM is stronger and, therefore, won’t struggle as much as the one whose RM is near 40 kg…

Skills you boost in Crossfit

The previous explanation about strength is just the tip of the pyramid, and underneath it, there’s a sequence of various skills, all designed as necessary and optimal to boost the athlete:

As they say, “you’ll be fitter the more you boost all these skills,” and then you’ll prove it through the corresponding WOD. In fact, the term Crossfit uses to name the winner of its competition is:

“The fittest man/woman on Earth”

A quick explanation about metabolic conditioning…

If I started talking about strength and left a note about comparing two people, one with a higher RM than the other on a specific exercise, you might think the one with the higher RM will win. But here comes another very important factor, and why, in some cases, someone “less strong” could beat a stronger person, as long as the first one is better metabolically conditioned…

Metabolic conditioning refers to the athlete’s ability to “hang in there” during potentially unsustainable activity, meaning anaerobic in nature, and to achieve this, they must have trained that anaerobic capacity. This makes the concept clearer when comparing the person with higher RM against the one with lower RM, and the type of exercise involved.

This is Crossfit, and there’s no small rival!!!

Among the energy substrates (phosphate, glycolytic, and oxidative), the body always relies on one depending on the effort’s intensity, although all (or almost all) are present, one will be used mostly.

From highest to lowest intensity demand, they rank as:

Phosphate > Glycolytic > Oxidative

Crossfit teaches you how to train your capacity to endure longer efforts based on the phosphate substrate and, therefore, raise your metabolic threshold, resulting in a very powerful and resilient athlete.

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