CrossFit 101: The Fundamentals – How do you know if it’s a great program? (10 min read)

CrossFit 101: The Fundamentals – How do you know if it’s a great program? 

CrossFit is the sport of averages.

It’s not about who can lift the heaviest, run the furthest or do the most burpees. 

It’s about who averages the highest score across them all. 

That’s how we define fitness in CrossFit. 

It’s real world, open ended, fitness testing. 

Excluding specific sports people, who are training for a very specific role.

It’s what we all want. isn’t it? 

We want to be stronger, we want to be able to carry heavier things, do more pushups, run faster, go for longer, walk on our hands and anything else we find fun, exciting and challenging. 

Fitness is based on where you are now and what you want to achieve. If you want to beat someone else at something, then your fitness is relative to them. If you want to beat yourself in something, then your fitness is relative to your previous best score. 

“Fitness is relative, to the individuals current state & goals”. 

That means, how you measure your fitness relates only to the goal/s you are chasing and where you are now in relation to those goals.

If you’re chasing a faster 5km run, then you’re fitter every time you run that 5km faster. 

What makes CrossFit so difficult to be great at, is the variability. 

When the test and goals are open ended and have no real boundaries, how do you get better? How do you know you’re getting better? and, how do you make sure you’re improving across all aspects of CrossFit?

To help, I have detailed below the principles and methods that we use to create an amazing program that for nearly 10 years has allowed hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals to become the fittest they have ever been and to do things they never thought they could do.

Principles & methods to creating an amazing CrossFit program for a regular, everyday person.

  1. It must be SAFE – A very common and easy mistake to make when it comes to fitness programming (most definitely in CrossFit), is that people are always trying to push boundaries and make things exciting, challenging and “different”. The problem with that, is that too often people cross the safety line in search of something bigger, better and more challenging. And that’s totally fine, if you’re competing. But training is about “creating a stimulus on the body, that forces an adaptation to achieve a desired outcome”. By pushing yourself to failure every time you train, you are drastically increasing your risk of injury. More is not better. Better is better.
  2. It must have PROGRESSION – We train for many reasons. But the main reason is because we want to get better at shit. We want to become stronger, fitter, faster & we want to be able to do new things and learn new skills. It’s in our nature to want to grow. And as we progress, new doors open that allow us to reach for bigger and better things. But none of that can be achieved if we don’t have a solid base of movement, awareness and strength. So a great program, needs to have linear progression on all of the basic movements and on the little details. Which means you need to do the boring stuff the most. This doesn’t just make it safer, it also makes you progress at a better rate. 
  3. It must be FUN – We’re not all athletes trying to make it to the big leagues. Most of us train for stress relief, health, social interaction and because we enjoy it (in a weird and sadistic way). So a great program needs variety. It needs to be challenging, it needs to be fun and exciting. Otherwise, no-one would do it. Because what’s the point??? Why progress at something that you don’t actually enjoy? (unless it serves a greater purpose for you).

That’s it!

They are the foundational rules of how we create our CrossFit program, so that everyone that joins in has the ability to become the best and fittest versions of themselves.

As long as the program is SAFE, has PROGRESSION designed into it & is FUN. Then everything else becomes a hell of a lot easier.

And I say “everything else”, because there is still a lot more that goes into creating & delivering a great, well rounded, Safe, Progressive & Fun CrossFit program.

For example:

COACHING – If you create the best program ever written and then ask a terrible coach to execute it. The results will be sub-optimal. The coaching is so important (if not the most important part) when it comes to a great program. It is the coaches job to understand & modify the program to suit each individual in that class. To see, understand and modify movements, weights & intensities for each person so that the above 3 rules are always adhered to. “Fitness is relative to the individuals current state and goals”. So a coaches job is to make sure every individual is progressing based on their current state and goals.  

CULTURE – When you walk into a gym, the culture is what attracts or repels you. Most of the time you don’t know what it is about a place that pulls you in or pushes you away, there’s just a feeling. Here’s a few things to look for. 1 – Does everyone interact in a positive manner? If yes, then you know that the culture is positive. 2 – Do people ask lots of questions (not just clients, but coaches as well)? This means that there is a culture of understanding and problem solving. And not just about pushing you to breaking point 3 – Are people focussed on the details or do they only care about “winning”? A focus on “winning” in training opposed to a focus on the details can be detrimental to progress, and can turn a great program into something that is unsafe. 

FOCUS – What is the focus in each session/workout? A great training program is designed in a way that “creates a stimulus, that forces an adaptation, that achieves a desired outcome”. Which means that having a focus in each workout & training cycle is imperative to achieving the above. For example, (Intensity, Cardio, Weight, Quality). We use these three cues to help the coaches and anyone doing the program understand how they should approach each workout. Which ensures progress across a broad range of fitness.

PROGRESS – This progress refers to the intention, research and development behind the structure and details of the programming, as well as the development of the coaches as coaches (not just as athletes). There are always new things to learn, better ways to do things and more details to understand. A program that doesn’t change and grow, will become stale. Our commitment is to review and improve our programming every 6 weeks. And if it gets better by just 1% every 6 weeks, that’s a massive improvement over the course of years. 

There is obviously a lot more that goes into the design, creation and delivery of a great CrossFit training program. 

But I honestly believe that if the above are taken care of, the rest will fall into place. 

We pride ourselves, not just on delivering a program that follows the above rules, but on always developing better ways to do things. And that definitely contributes to why we’ve been operating for almost a decade. 

So if your goal is to become the Fittest you’ve ever been. Come down and check out our CrossFit program. 

It’s SAFE, It has PROGRESSION built in, it’s stacks of FUN and the COACHING is fantastic. Our CULTURE is epic, we FOCUS on the right areas with the right intention and of course we are always aiming for PROGRESS. 

Click the link below if you want a free trial and book a session. 

We’d love to meet you. 

Have a great day

Denee 

BOOK MY FREE TRIAL
2019-09-13T14:57:22+10:00

About the Author:

Denee Lalouette
A UFT PLAYground is a place that people of all shapes, sizes and ages learn to develop their movement abilities through an infinite learning and development program. UFT PLAYgrounds have been created to re-inspire our natural ability to move, create, adapt, re-act, connect, have fun and of course PLAY. PLAYgrounds have been developed to allow people to feel and explore their own abilities by utilising a multidimensional, infinite, creative and PLAYful approach to training. We live in a world full of specialists and obsessions. At an ever increasing rate, people are specialising more and more, in their jobs, in their businesses, in their sport and in their training. The result, is a backward step in human evolution. By specialising, we limit ourselves to thinking that 1 particular way of doing things is the right way, or the only way. We promote creativity, not only in movement and training methodologies but in thinking in general. A UFT PLAYground is created to provide the general public with an opportunity to PLAY across multiple styles of training and moving, to be able to progress in the training methods that they become passionate about or that excites them and to be a part of a community that promotes more than just fitness. The “fitness” industry above all others has brought about a need to specialise in order to achieve anything, and majority of what we do for “fitness” is for an aesthetically pleasing reason. We understand that aesthetics are nice and we too love to look and feel good. However a UFT PLAYground is developed to allow people to move better than ever before across a broad range of training methodologies and ideas. Aesthetics, therefore are a result not a goal of that system. We know that “If you train to look good, you will not always enjoy what you do, but if you PLAY a lot, and do the things that you love, you will ending up looking good”. Aesthetics should be a result not a goal. For years now, we have recognised that the best movers on the planet are children. They are flexible, mobile & fit, they have better relative strength than a typical adult (and even most adolescents), they are the best creators and innovators, they learn faster, the adapt better, they interact better with other people, they are more connected to nature and most importantly, they PLAY more than anyone else. As adults, we tend to believe that because we are taller and more experienced in “life”, we are better, and then we get to an age that says we are “too old to PLAY”. As we grow taller (and in a lot of cases rounder), we experience things that inhibit our ability to move, think and not think. We allow our experiences to limit our abilities as humans, whether it be a physical injury, a story that we heard or a youtube video that we watched. We also allow our emotions to control our behaviour because of our past experiences. Maybe it was the feeling of humiliation when we tried something new, regret when we failed or heart break when it was taken away from us. Because of this, we allow our experiences to control our future instead of learning from them and creating our own . This is what UFT PLAYground’s are built on. The understanding that we as humans need to go back to the way things were before our negative experiences took over our subconscious mind and body. A UFT PLAYground gives people the ability to re-learn what they have lost, as well as develop new sets of skills that will allow them to follow any particular passion that they uncover in PLAYtime. When we PLAY, we are simply, exploring. Through exploring we become curious and through curiosity we become obsessed or passionate about a particular thing. This is why in a PLAYground we allow people to PLAY across a broad range of training systems (minimum of 3), Through this system they are able to identify 1, their current limitations and be educated on how to overcome them, and 2, identify their passions and learn to develop, grow and excel in them. UFT PLAYgrounds are also a development centre for up and coming entrepreneurs in the fitness industry. Each PLAYground founder will have been trained and will be continuously trained in UFT’s Trainer Success System. This system allows personal trainers, coaches, teachers, instructors, etc. to continue to develop in their fields of specialty (as they play they will find it) and in the philosophy of PLAYtime. They will also be trained in the business systems of UFT in order to have their own successful and profitable business. See UFT Trainer Success System for more details.

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