Dutch Lowy

So here is 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 lacrosse 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 15-20 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. And as Dan John says, “If it’s important, do it every day.” So for full disclosure, we do it almost every day. Typically, we lift heavy 4-5 days a week, and at least one day each week we work on a gymnastic skill – handstands, pull-ups, muscle-ups (or just muscle-up transitions for those who don’t have muscle-ups yet), 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, I think there is a more efficient and better way to develop strength. Our program contemplates strength through three main movement patterns – hip dominant, knee dominant, and pressing movements (horizontal and vertical), either in a power or a dynamic lift. We know there are other movement patterns out there, but we get a ton of midline stabilization and vertical pulling in other aspects of our training, so we focus our strength efforts on these three. 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. For example, here is what a week’s worth of strength programming might look like for us:
+ Monday – Power Clean (3-3-3-3) = Dynamic Hip Dominant
+ Tuesday – Shoulder Press (3-2-1-1-1) = Power Vertical Press
+ Wednesday – Back Squat (5-5-5) = Power Knee Dominant
+ Thursday – Warm up to one set of max reps pull-ups = Vertical Pull
+ Friday – Deadlift w/o postural deviation (3-3-3-3) = Power Hip Dominant
+ Saturday – Split Jerk (3-2-1-1-1) = Dynamic Vertical Press
o In the following week, vertical presses would probably be performed for 5 rep max, hip dominant would move to 1 rep max, and knee dominant would move to 3 rep max. The exercises themselves would probably be entirely different, something like: Front Squat, Single-Leg Deadlift, Bench Press, Split Squats, Handstand Holds, Snatch,
+ Monday – Front Squat
+ Tuesday – Single-Leg Deadlift
+ Wednesday – Bench Press
+ Thursday – Split Squats (or Bulgarian Split Squats for advanced athletes)
+ Friday – Handstand Holds
+ Saturday – Snatch
* Third 15-20 minutes – Metabolic Conditioning
o This is our hopper . . . kind of. I like to throw all sorts of things in here, but I weigh the volume of every week and month to ensure there is balance amongst the movement patterns. I 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. Maybe I am overly cautious, but I cringe when I see a week of programming that includes a total of 500 knee dominant reps and 45 hip dominant reps. You might laugh, but I bet it wouldn’t take me looking at more than three websites before I found this pattern repeat itself more than once in a given month. The typical justification is – “Dude, you have to prepare for the unknown and unknowable. You might have to do the same thing several days in a row.” Fair enough, but I am not sure it’s the best way to increase my athletes’ work capacity over broad time and modal domains. 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 I really prefer couplets and triplets, and dislike chippers. If there are more than 3 movements in a workout, I think you lose some of the focus and intensity. If you want more movements executed, go for it, but consider breaking them into two or three separate couplets and provide a mandatory rest period between them to allow for transition.
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 a week.
* Remaining 5-15 minutes – Stretching
o I am not going to spend a lot of time breaking down what we do, I’ll just note that we follow everything Kelly Starrett of San Francisco CrossFit puts out regarding mobility and maintenance. 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). So far things are going well. We ran Fran for the third time on August 24 and we had PRs out of 25 of the 28 athletes who had done it 90 days earlier. Here is the summary of the results – http://www.crossfitinvictus.com/blog/2009/08/thursday-august-27-2009/#comments.

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. We had a great response to them, so now we print them for other affiliates as well.

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. Which, of course, is why I am looking forward to your future posts looking at the programming from some of my favorite affiliates. You’re the man Dutch!

I just wanted to share some pictures from my first olympic weightlifting meet. There is also a video here of my lifts. I am going to put together a video of some of the other lifters at the meet just to give you a sense of the different styles out there.

The Van Alstyn Fine Arts Center, Van Alstyn, TX

Inside the Fine Arts Center Van Alstyn, TX

I was told go to the building closest to the windmill...

First Place in the 69kg class (also the only lifter).

Crossfit Invictus is run by CJ Martin, a good friend of mine and someone that has made a huge impact on me as a trainer. I picked his affiliate as the only one i am going to review, first because he did this huge write up which keeps me from having to work too much secondly, he does something simple everyday: Offers excellence in everything he does. You will see how he does it with his training but until you have spent time at Invictus you won’t get how else he provides excellence.
Something that i haven’t seen anyone else make a point to do is, do something new to the gym every week. This seems little but i guarantee if your clients see you investing in them and their facility they will feel much better about investing in you long term.

In the beginning (jan 2009), Invictus was mainly beginning crossfitters and athletes for that matter. Many of the clients had little exposure to anything athletic so CJ viewed his programming as something very simple and easy to understand. I think this was a great idea and is still working very well for him as it would for more advanced athletes. The beautiful thing about his programming is that once his clients get used to it they come to expect the strength work as part of Crossfit. The biggest deficiency i see in crossfit is strength training so if you can get beginners to see the value, you have made your job much easier.

As a program, I love it. As a gym, I love it. If you get the chance to go check it out, please do.
Now, enjoy CJ’s review of his own program.

Goals and Objectives:
I 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, Paleo/Zone meal delivery (through Mmmm Good Meals), and a network of professionals who help keep our athletes feeling their best (we have a massage therapist, ART practitioner, Rolfing/Tui Na practitioner and an acupuncturist that service our members for a discounted rate). 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 CrossFit Invictus.

How We Achieve Our Objective:
If you asked me, I would say that we just do CrossFit. But there seems to be a lot of varied perspectives about what CrossFit is, so I 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 a lot of mobility work. I think 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. I also read the CrossFit foundational documents to contemplate some strength or skill-specific work before a short couplet of functional movements, so when folks refer to our programming as a “strength-bias” program, I just say “sure.” But I guess that’s what we’re calling it now.

To be Continued…