First, a big thank you to everyone who attended on the weekend!
We had lots of interest for the day, but understandably, a few people couldn’t make it. We got loads of requests to record it, so we thought we’d do exactly that. Unfortunately, despite 2 backups, our cameras and mics still failed to record the whole talk, and we defaulted to using our phones.
This does mean we missed some of the content. So, to make up for it, we have decided to write a rundown on what you may have missed from the talk and the video.
We started by going over the CrossFit Methodology with Coach Elliot. Coming off his Level 2 course, he had this very fresh in his mind.
He discussed CrossFit’s main definition: constantly varied, functional movement performed at a high intensity. Put simply, we do workouts with different movements and demands constantly - time, weights, and reps can all change, for example.
In CrossFit, we do functional movements, which are movements that use multiple muscle groups, and we use intensity, which is commonly associated with maximising results.
But why do we do ‘constantly varied, functional movement performed at a high intensity’?
Greg Glassman (CrossFit’s creator) found this the best way to improve fitness. To understand how we improve our fitness, we have to define what ‘Fitness’ is.
Fitness is defined by CrossFit as your work capacity across broad time and modal domains. Essentially, doing workouts in loads of different time domains with varying movements.
Hopefully, this gives some context for why we do certain things in CrossFit.
We then moved on to Coach Joe, who talked about nutrition.
Joe is approaching the end of his training as a Nutrition Coach. He’s passionate about eating whole foods and fueling his body for health and fitness. On top of that, he has seen firsthand the positive effects this has on the body and how it helps people reach their goals.
Whole foods are single-ingredient foods, such as nuts, fruit, vegetables, and chicken. If it has an ingredient label, it is not a whole food. If we start to think about what we are eating and use the whole foods method, we will start to feel better and correctly fuel our bodies.
We understand that counting calories works for some people, but we do not believe this is sustainable.
We all, including Joe, have busy lives. Jobs, kids, and other such responsibilities. We simply don’t have the time or energy to weigh and count out every meal we eat.
Although the 20-year-old on social media says, “it’s the best way to lose weight”, that influencer has no kids and centres their whole life around fitness and social media. It’s not fair for you to have to put the same pressure on yourself to count calories and track intake.
At Market Town, we believe the best way to make sure you are eating a balanced diet consisting of mainly whole foods is by using the Plate Method.
The Plate Method involves dividing your plate to best suit your body's needs. It works as a starting point, giving you a rough guide and a better understanding of what you are eating.
You can use this method as a way of viewing your plate.
You split the plate in half and one half into quarters. You then fill 1 half of your plate with non-starchy carbs (vegetables). With the remain quarters, you will dedicate one side to a protein source (ideal lean protein) and the other side to starchy carbs.
Use this method at every meal. This will ensure you are eating a balanced meal at every meal.
Next up was Coach George, who taught us everything we needed to know about the programming.
He talked about how, although CrossFit is constantly varied, it is not random. Every workout done at Market Town CrossFit has a plan and stimulus for the day with an intended end goal. This goal might only be obvious towards the end of the training cycle, and that’s okay!
CrossFit training isn’t about burning calories. We are training to improve our health and fitness above all else. We look at improving strength, stamina, musculature, speed, longevity, and a host of other things that you can take with you throughout your life!
Take this workout as an example:
If you do the maths, the grand total of calories burned here will be 50 for guys and 35 for ladies. Now, that’s obviously not a whole lot, and it definitely won’t compare to something like a 5k run or a Hyrox race!
But this workout is still valuable in CrossFit programming. It works on your sprint capacity and power output. You can push your power to its upper limits and increase the intensity and effectiveness of the workout.
You’ve probably heard it from a coach before in one of our classes. We encourage tracking results.
We do this because CrossFit, in its variety, makes it very difficult to track your progress. Tracking these results helps you see trends in your own performance and what you are improving.
As we all know, CrossFit is hard. And it never really gets easier. You just end up lifting more weight, doing more reps, and going that little bit faster. Tracking helps you see this progress as it happens.
The last topic George went through revolved around the stimulus of all workouts.
Stimulus is the intended effect of the workout. This can vary daily and change based on what the programming is looking for.
For instance, let’s use this workout:
We could have a couple of different approaches. The programming and the coaches will dictate these approaches, depending on the stimulus of the day.
Different stimuli will encourage different fitness gains.
And to make things easier for everyone, all of our programmed workouts have ‘Notes’ attached to them. If you’re interested, you can click the notes tab on the workout page of our app to learn more about the stimulus of the day.
Our final topic for the day was intensity with Coach Sarah. As explained in the methodology section with Elliot, intensity is commonly associated with maximising fitness gains.
Intensity is very hard to measure.
We at Market Town CrossFit like to use the RPE scale (rate of perceived exertion). This takes time to learn but is a valuable tool for adapting workouts based on how you feel for the day. We use a number out of 10.
RPE 10/10 would be an all-out max effort. You couldn't squeeze any more reps or weight out of your body.
RPE 1/10 would mean you’re chilling on the sofa. This can then be adapted for how you feel on the day. And no, we will never ask for you to hit an RPE 1/10 during a CrossFit class!
To give an example of how RPE can change based on someone’s day, see below:
This is still hitting the 10/10 effort, but that 10 looks different on each person.
Practice is using designated time to practice a skill. These happen routinely in our classes or can be scheduled to work with a coach 1-2-1 to hone this skill.
Once you have practised your skill and become more consistent with it, you can take it to training. Using the skill with intensity in a class setting is how we define training here. It will mean you’re going from less to more fatigued as the workout goes on.
The final step after you've trained it with intensity would be to test yourself. This will allow you to see where you are and what needs to be improved. This is a max intensity setting and can be used as a benchmark for your fitness compared to your past self.
Sarah used the example of Fran as a benchmark workout in her talk:
This is an RPE 10/10 workout. It should be max intensity with the goal to finish between 2 and 5 minutes.
She then went on to use examples of two different athletes completing the workout:
Remember, the goal time is between 2 and 5 minutes.
Jemma is within this time domain at 4:04, and Anita is outside at 9:48. Anita did not get the stimulus. Anita was limited by strength and skill rather than a cardio limitation. She would need to spend more time practising and training before testing this again!
We then dived deeper into Jemma:
Jemma can do 3-5 kipping pull-ups; so why did she scale to jumping pull-ups?
Because we are training INTENSITY.
If she was faced with 21 kipping pull-ups, the overall INTENSITY would go down as she has to break the pull-ups into too many small sets. During this time, her legs will recover, her heart rate will stabilise, and her breathing will go back to normal. Therefore, the overall benefit from that day’s intended stimulus won’t be achieved.
The goal is always intensity, and you have to earn the ability to use that skill under intensity. This is going to drive results in getting you fitter and stronger.
A very common concern is that if you’re not using the kipping pull-up in Fran, for example, then you’re never going to get better at it. However, this isn’t true.
We include skill-based progressions in our programming to help touch on these skills, but you will get results and improve when you focus on intensity.
We want to thank everyone who attended our What Is CrossFit Seminar and hope that the video or this document was useful to all those who missed it.
Thank you again from your Market Town CrossFit Coaches.
