November & December Programming Focus
Our Focus for the Next 8 Weeks: Squats
With the holidays rolling around and colder weather upon us many of us will be consuming more calories. Our plan is to help you take advantage of this caloric surplus to help you build strength and add muscle to your body. You’ll need to intake an adequate amount of calories and especially protein in order to get stronger and promote muscle growth. You can do this by focusing on protein at every meal, especially larger communal meals and during holiday events where it can be easy to overdo it on starchy or sugary foods.
There’s no doubt that the squat is the “mother” of all exercises. If you have a stronger squat, chances are, all of your lifts will be higher, you’ll be faster and more explosive. There’s much to be gained functionally and aesthetically from incorporating heavier lifts into your weekly regiment. Asides from giving you the quads of the gods, heavier squats with sound technique will help develop a resilient and defined core to withstand life's demands. More on that shortly…
Here’s what you can expect:
A squatting movement every fourth day beginning on Mon. Nov. 7th for 8 weeks. This will include a variety of movements below parallel including back squats, front squats, overhead squats, wall balls, thrusters and the like.
Accessory work to focus on hip and knee health to give you the best chance for success.
A complimentary focus on midline strength and stability.
Work meant to increase range of motion at the bottom of the squat.
All of this squatting will give us a higher strength baseline with the CrossFit Open around the corner. We can’t wait to tell you what we have in store to prepare you for that in Jan and Feb, so stay tuned!
Now, About Endurance…
We’re going to focus on workouts with 30+ minutes of continuous movement with minimal rest, keeping your heart rate in “Zone 2” to adapt to longer bouts of aerobic activity. Remember the Bergeron Beep test we did in Endurance a few weeks ago? It was a huge hit and a great measuring stick so we’re going to do it again on Saturday 12/10 in the 9am class so block your calendar and make sure to come! But why the focus on 30+ minutes of exercise and how will that help improve your fitness? Grab a seat and a notebook…
Here’s a quick primer on energy systems: Through varied CrossFit programming we use all 3 of our energy systems. For efforts less than 10 seconds, like a max height box jump or max squat, we obtain most of our energy from our phosphagen system. When our workout is between 10 and 90 seconds, a second energy pathway, the glycolytic system, provides most of our energy. Anything longer and most of our energy comes from our aerobic energy system. However, these systems do not work in isolated silos, passing the work off, but in sophisticated harmony, like 3 engines in a car all revving to different degrees at different times.
Here’s the kicker, we always need energy and the most efficient energy generator is the aerobic system, we’re always breathing. So an increase in our AEROBIC system capacity, our engine, can translate into efficiencies and improvements in all types of WODs; not just a 5k run. And how do we develop that adaptation? By challenging our engine with appropriate doses of Zone 2 aerobic work meant to transfer to all workouts whether they be short, medium or long in duration.