On Strength and Virtuosity

This month you will see a pattern in the "randomness" of our workouts.  The pattern is this; Max Effort on one of the big lifts followed by a tight couplet or triplet. 

I draw heavily from Coach Glassman's words from his letter titled Virtuosity dated August 2005.  Click here to find it.  In the article Coach says, among many important things,

"There is plenty of time within an hour session to warm up, practice a basic movement or skill or pursue a new PR or max lift, discuss and critique the athletes' efforts, and then pound out a tight little couplet or triplet utilizing these skills or just play."

You will see I chose to spend a little more time on the pursuit of a new PR or max lift than the other great options available because strength or force  production, the most simple of terms is the single factor that you can control in order to perform these couplets and triplets at greater and greater speeds.  So in other words to decrease the time to complete a workout like Fran is controlled mostly by power and strength of the two movements.  When 95# thrusters are only 60% of your 1 rep max, the velocity on the bar and speed which you can perform the thruster can go up.  You have to practice at that speed, but only after you have the strength to do it.  Without going into more detail of the force-velocity curve, we chose to focus on force and not velocity due to logistical reasons.  Bands and chains don't lend themselves very well to CrossFit style workouts. 

In my opinion most gyms that offer CrossFit classes have gotten away from this basic idea that worked so well. In the same article Glassman offers a reason or explaination for it which I think is dead on. He says,

"I understand how this occurs.  It is natrual to want to teach people advanced and fancy movements.  The urge to quickly move away from the basics and toward advanced movements arises olut of the natural desire to entertain your client and impress him with your skills and knowledge.  But make no mistake: it is a sucker's move.  Teaching a snatch where there is not yet an air squat, is a colossal mistake.  This rush to advancement increases the chance of injury, delays advancement and progress, and blunts the client's rate of return on his efforts.  In short, it retards his fitness."

 There is a natural tendency for the athlete to want to do more advanced lifts and there is a tendency for trainers to want to do crazy workouts just because they are hard.  Neither is beneficial for either party.  I have been accused of not doing enough Olympic lifting at times and I can always lean on this paragraph as to why.  CrossFit Costa Mesa is all about transforming people's lives; the Olympic lifts are fun, but it's the mastery of the basics that leads to virtuosity.  It's strength that leads to faster workout times, so the goal then is master of basic strength.