Misfit Podcast
Misfit Athletics provides information and programming to competitive Crossfit athletes of all levels.
Misfit Podcast
Skills Acquisition - E.332
What’s up Misfits! Episode 332 is all about ‘Skill Acquisition’. Enjoy!
The gang discuss the nuances of skill acquisition in fitness, emphasizing the importance of patience and intensity. They explore the difference between practice and performance, highlighting how repetition and consistency lead to mastery. The conversation also touches on the common pitfalls in fitness where individuals do not push themselves hard enough to achieve desired results.
Coach Drew and Coach Hunter, delve into the intricacies of skill execution and intensity in sports, particularly in CrossFit. They discuss the importance of understanding the different levels of intensity, the journey of skill progression, and the application of first principles thinking in coaching. The conversation emphasizes the need for a structured approach to training, including programming, scheduling, and executing workouts effectively. They also highlight the significance of accumulating quality repetitions at low intensity before introducing higher levels of intensity and complexity in training.
You must introduce intensity in training, particularly through running and interval work. They emphasize the need for appropriate programming that allows athletes to progress in their skills while managing fatigue. The discussion also covers the concept of finding the 'zone' for optimal performance, the significance of consistency in training, and the often overlooked boring work that leads to success. They highlight the necessity of learning from setbacks and the neurological adaptations that occur during breaks in training.This episode is a reminder that true mastery requires both patience and passion.
If you enjoyed the episode, please don’t forget to leave us a review, and share it with the rest of your squad.
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We're all misfits. All right, you big, big bunch of misfits, you're a scrappy little misfit, just like me.
Speaker 2:Biggest bunch of misfits I ever seen either of the Misfit Podcast. On today's episode, hunter and I are going to be talking about how we think about the world of skill acquisition. This is one of those topics that I think gets talked about a lot and there is a lot of nuance to it, but the intensity that you need to bring to it oftentimes is an intensity of patience and a lot of don't want um to do that over a long period of time. Um, but before we get into that, make sure you head to misfitathleticscom to get signed up for a seven-day free trial of all of the programs. A lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about today's episode is built into our programs and you can use a or you can do a seven day free trial um. You can also get a free trial of team misfit affiliate programming.
Speaker 2:Um are the artist formerly known as team misfit affiliate programming. That'll take me a while to change misfit affiliate programming um on sugarwad. Or you can head to team misfitcom and get started there before we jump into skill acquisition life chat. Hey, hunter Inquisition.
Speaker 1:Life chat. Hey, hunter, what's up? Not much. Went down to New York City for Thanksgiving, which was exciting. Visited Little Italy for the first time Also very exciting Got some pizza Would recommend. Felt like it was like a Dave portnoy reviewable pizza spot. You know probably would drop like a, like a solid seven, five to eight, like good, good rating, um, but what is your?
Speaker 1:favorite style of pizza margarita probably. I'm a. I'm a traditionalist when it comes to that, at least, like as far as evaluating the quality of sure a pizza place or pizza. It has to be like cheese or a margarita.
Speaker 2:But what style so like new york style like to ambi.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the only way I can describe styles is just by visually describing the pizza, because I just can't fucking remember um I do like the thin, like a really thin crispy crust which I think is like that's a new york style.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, I really like that. Um, I mean, man, you'd find a good like deep dish pizza. Um, you also don't know the difference between deep dish and chicago style. I think it's that the sauce is on top on one and not on the other, but I can't remember which, so I just the I think the one you're talking about is Detroit style, which they do in the pan.
Speaker 2:Yes, that, yeah, that's Like a deep wall like the thick crust is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's more.
Speaker 2:That's like a practical version of deep, deep dish pizza is insane Like true. Deep dish is the one with the sauce, like Chicago style, and the sauce is on top right, yeah, and there's like like I'm not complaining, but there's like six pounds of mozzarella on top of the like a piece is like a piece of I don't even know fucking shepherd's pie.
Speaker 1:Like it's. It's actually thick, okay, yeah, yeah. Then I would say more I go at all. I'd probably say I haven't had like a good Chicago style deep dish pizza. Then probably say I haven't had like a good chicago style deep dish pizza.
Speaker 2:Then, yeah, good, good detroit style pizza. I went to the place that oprah like says is the best because she's a chicago person. Um, I'm trying to remember. We were driving across the country. I don't remember why we were there. Might have been just when I was in college, driving back and forth from maine and colorado, but, um, it was good, but like I don't even know that it's pizza.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just, it's kind of a different thing, so it was good, but like it's not the kind of thing that you would order and like, like I don't know how, how long it would take over the course of a week to finish one of those pizzas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Yeah, no, I'd say probably a New York style pizzas if I had to pick.
Speaker 2:So there's actually, there's actually a um gluten-free Italian restaurant, a hundred percent gluten-free Italian restaurant in little Italy. That's really fucking good. Um and like I don't. I don't think most people would know that it was gluten-free if they just went there. They just like walk.
Speaker 1:I feel like you were talking about that recently.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was fucking good. I had literally every dish. It's like all right, I need a pizza, baked ziti, lasagna, let's go, come on yeah, so did that.
Speaker 1:And then uh told you, told you guys, yesterday I did a, did a couple of peloton classes, more fitness related, but my brother's got a peloton just in his apartment but I'd never use the like done like a class, because I we just go to hotels that have a peloton but it doesn't actually like log in so you just end up. I just pedal for 45 minutes in zone two but I actually like took a class and I can see why people like it. It's fun. Yeah time, time goes by pretty quick.
Speaker 2:Get a good sweat like yeah, I feel like that's the. That's the biggest thing is if you are like, even for us, there are times when you go to do a zone two session and we're fucking absolute nerds and you're just like, do I want to do this? Like, do I want to just sit there? Especially if it's the kind of machine or whatever where you're not gonna like listen to something or watch something. Uh, yeah, do I really want to do this? So it's like, if that barrier to entry is there for us and we're obsessed with fitness, how, how high is that barrier to entry for the general public? Yeah, so let's get a screen in front of them and distract them, like yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 1:I was also listening to a podcast recently um Stacy Sims on on Huberman Um, and the podcast was about women are not small men.
Speaker 2:Is that her?
Speaker 1:Yes, yep, um, but she, she got to a point where she was and I think it's like general good advice. The problem with fitness, like as a whole, is that most people don't try hard enough to get the benefits that they're after and instead like that's why and then she was referencing women just because of, like you know, call it cultural reasons, call it just general education about what exercise is. It's like the F45s, the orange theories, it's like this is perfect because people feel it's kind of like the equivalent of a dopamine hit versus like the longer, a longer term sort of thing. Feel it's kind of like the equivalent of a dopamine hit versus like the longer, a longer term sort of thing, where it's like I feel good immediately because I'm sweating, my heart rates up.
Speaker 1:But the problem was is that you went too hard to get the benefits of like aerobic exercise in zone two, you did not go hard enough to get any sort of power anaerobic benefit and like circle back to the Peloton, like as somebody who understands, like okay, if she's telling me like hey, you're going to go a little bit harder, and then harder, my brain immediately is like okay, I got three gears, like we're going to go real hard for that. When she says this we're going to go kind of hard for this and like I can do that in my head. But I have 15 years of fitness and coaching experience, I can do that right. The problem is the general population. It's like I'm gonna try a little bit harder but like as soon as it starts to burn, like let's, let's crank the old resistance knob down a little bit and it's like, okay, some fitness is better than none, but it's also some fitness that is almost completely useless and if you don't try hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're not manipulating your metabolic rate. To change, yeah, you have to go hard or you have to do a lot of volume to manipulate your metabolic rate.
Speaker 2:And we talked about this and I don't remember maybe the engines podcast, but we talked about it honestly in each one. Like the amount of lifts that you do times the weight that's on the bar is how you get like you either have to do really heavy and not very many reps, or not that heavy and a ton of reps, and with fitness, the level of intensity multiplied by how long you go is what makes the change. So if it's medium intensity and medium duration.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're kind of in junk mile no man's land territory. Yeah yeah, the basal metabolic rate thing was good, Like a good reminder, Cause it's like you. The idea is, like you, you elevate your cortisol levels enough that it's like you're stressing your body out, which happens during exercise. But the problem is is that you've elevated your cortisol levels and your heart rate and your basal metabolic rate to a point where it's stressful on your body but not but is not going to elicit an adaptation.
Speaker 1:We either need to really stress it out with like that high power output stuff, and then we can get adaptation that way, or like, go to the other end, go really low intensity but for a long time, where we're stressing a different energy system. But that middle portion is where most people live in fitness. It's like I'm trying hard, but not so hard that it hurts, and that's where, like I think, a lot of people just get lost.
Speaker 1:Um and that's why they don't make progress. So join us at Misfit Gym Portland, where we will beat your head into the wall in such a way that adaptation will occur.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of that, this podcast, we won't be. We won't be like telling anyone anything because this podcast will drop after, after. But tomorrow is the opposite side of that coin.
Speaker 1:It's three by 120 calorie row you better do that, you better do that now I gotta gotta rest day queued up for tomorrow. I fucking bet you do. Yeah, I'm sick that day you're gonna jog some fucking 19 miles on the treadmill session. I think I need a nice low intensity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I can stay focused. We talked about staying focused, so I'll just stay over here, um, but yeah, I mean we got. We got, depending on how slow you go. You're looking at three by two k at the gym. It's kind of a fun conversation to have in the programming meeting of being like how long can we have them go, like what's appropriate, what's not like death for everybody, and I'd say three by six to seven minutes is pretty nice, yeah yeah, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm definitely sick tomorrow.
Speaker 1:I'm already calling out that's one of those days where you look at the day that pops up and you forgot that you programmed it and you're like what the fuck was I like? Why did I do that? Like you, you could have done. You could have chosen. Anything could have been, you could have chosen. Anything Could have been fun Yep, could have been good.
Speaker 2:Could have been. Could have been, it's not. You got 12 minutes of rest, 12 to 14 minutes of rest built in. That's fun.
Speaker 1:No, it's one to one. It's one to one. Maybe it's worse.
Speaker 2:No On the opposite end of the spectrum.
Speaker 1:I'm doing work on getting rid of the pumpkin cheesecake leftovers, but those calories are still inside you for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I ate a very large piece on Sunday right before bed and I got a real bad sleep score, so last night I ate it at, maybe seven, seven, 30.
Speaker 1:Still pretty still pretty.
Speaker 2:I mean, I went on five points.
Speaker 1:All right, yeah, but I'm like 20 points below, where I'm normally at so tonight You're going to eat your pumpkin cheesecake at 430p. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, but it's like I get it once a year. It's in my fridge, I can't help it.
Speaker 1:Wait, do you just buy it? You just buy a big pumpkin cheesecake. No, maya makes it every year.
Speaker 2:Ah, it's so good, it's amazing. Homemade ah, it's so good, it's amazing. Homemade. She make it herself. Yep, yep, it's incredible. Um, so I got I probably got three more nights of cheesecake, I think somewhere in that range or by friday, I could do the right thing I could do the right thing and just eat all of it tonight yeah, I was gonna was going to feed it to your son.
Speaker 1:Make him Yep.
Speaker 2:He hasn't really had sweets yet. Kid hasn't had sweets. He hasn't watched the TV. He's just living in this little fucking primal cocoon.
Speaker 1:It's fucking crazy. One of my best friends they just had their first baby and like she will be, like the dad will be like feeding her and she's just insubordinate and shirtless, is her. It's just like not, not, not cooperating. As soon as you give her a like small inject, um, so it's like to help with gas bubbles. You probably know what it is, but it's like a small injected, like just liquid, not injected like you just put it in the mouth.
Speaker 2:Well, I do not know about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, yeah just straighten the thigh, maybe I don't know. No, just like, uh yeah, syringe in of just liquid into her mouth and it's like a little bit sweet, um, so that it's palatable. Immediately stops crying and it's just like. This is amazing, it's like even the smallest amount of sugar. And the mom, even when she said she was like when I'm, when I was pregnant, if I would eat something sugary, like the baby would calm down.
Speaker 2:It's like holy fuck oh yeah it's crazy, it's addicted to sugar my son is definitely addicted to berries but like can't eat that many. They got fiber in them.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean but dude.
Speaker 2:His diet is crazy. It's incredible. It's literally like meat, avocado, berries, vegetables, like every meal. Sick Hammers all of it Eats every bit of it, every time.
Speaker 1:It's fucking Running around with cheese graters and shit.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that's true. Time it's fucking running around with cheese graters and shit. Yes, yeah, that's true. He uh, basically now his thing is if I'm not chasing him, he'll start running anyways and yell get you, because I say I'm gonna get you when I'm chasing him, so you just hear him laughing, running around the house, going get you, get you nice so I'm getting like probably at least a thousand, if not two thousand steps in a day by chasing him around just chasing a kid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he laughs nice like his ass off the entire time. It's nice. It's kind of like a little puppy dog. It's just like honestly looks at you and like very similar in his tail like come on, come on, let's play.
Speaker 2:Supposedly. You notice the difference between it's a funny thing to say, but I'll give it context. You notice the difference between it's a funny thing to say, but I'll give it context. You notice the difference between your dogs and your children after age two. A two-year-old is roughly as smart as a dog and then that obviously hopefully improves for the human at some point. You can like kind of understand. It makes a lot of sense. It's like how's the like cause dogs don't say anything, obviously, so you don't know where they're at. But supposedly, from an intelligence standpoint it's about a two-year-old.
Speaker 2:All right, practice, skill acquisition, um. So I have a little thing that I wrote out here and it is paraphrasing a bit um, and it's from multiple sources. So, uh, logan gelbrick um, a lot of people know him um as the the owner of of deuce gym out in california. Um, he said he worked through this with carl powley, who if you're an og crossfitter, you know who he is kind of crossfit gymnastics, um that sort of thing, and it was one of those things where is like a light bulb moment of we started having the, the practice sessions on the website as part of the programming, um, which I thought was really necessary and actually a conversation that that hunter and I had, I think the first time on a podcast, where we were like remember when we used to practice like in sports and like this this thing that felt complicated became routine because we practice it and it's like we don't really do that in crossfit.
Speaker 2:There's just an element of intensity that's applied to all this stuff. So we put it into the programming. And then um lo Logan was explaining this concept, that he gave a lot of the credit for it to Carl Paoli, but really just kind of a light bulb moment for me and, I think, a really cool way to talk about what practice is, especially for your type A athlete who's like I have to be perfect, I have to do X, y and Z, etc. So I am going to read this Practice is not doing the thing, it's coming back to the thing. Meditation is not the moments when your breath is on point and you see the blue sky through the clouds and your mantra is money.
Speaker 2:Meditation begins when the mind drifts and you make a choice to return to the practice. Practice is noticing when you deviate and coming back to the thing. The finish line is also the start line. We do the thing, we fuck it up, we come back to it over and over. If you come back, you're in the game. If you pick up your toys and go home, you're not. I like it. I just thought it was really interesting to frame it as like, if you're doing the thing and expressing it in this perfect way or the way that you intended for it to be, are you really practicing or are?
Speaker 1:you showcasing, expressing your fitness, expressing your skill, etc yeah, when I I read that briefly before we started and it was I also yelled at you across the office and said prepare for a lot of golf swing metaphors and talk when it comes to practice.
Speaker 1:Um, but the one one thing that I've I noticed as I start. So I was the other weekend I was watching college golf. They were doing like their national championship and I watched enough professional golf this past season to notice the difference, however slight it is, between the professional game and Division I, college, and they're obviously all exceptional golfers. But I'm looking at some of the approach shots, which is for people listening. That's like from the fairway onto the green, it's the, it's the shot that you hit trying to get the ball onto the green. Um, and like the professional game has such a high level of control that you can tell it's like okay, I'd expect a professional to hit this within 15 feet and with a level of control of the golf ball that that like parks that ball exactly where they want it. Roughly, yep, the call the collegiate game. It's like you can tell that it's just not quite as tight. It's maybe instead of 15 feet from the pin, it's 25 feet. You're still putting, which is awesome, but like the, the level of control just isn't quite there and it made me kind of realize it's like the only difference between a crossfit games athlete and a recreational crossfitter is like the level of perfection of all of the things that they do like.
Speaker 1:I can hit my four iron the same distance as a professional golfer once. I can't do it repeatedly and I can't do it consistently. They can do it automatically every single time. A CrossFit Games athlete can hop up to the rings and perform a set of five flawless muscle ups every single time. You, at the affiliate level, form a set of five flawless muscle ups every single time. You, at the affiliate level, you might be able to do one muscle up reasonably well one time when you're like fresh. But the difference the difference isn't necessarily like this person isn't so exceptionally better. They just have so many more repetitions and so much more practice time with that movement and with, like the, the, the little movements that compose the larger movement, that they're just. It's just, they're just better at you at that thing across the board, in all kind of aspects of it. It's the same movement, it's just the, the consistency and the, the quality of which is just so much higher at the highest level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the different modes of intensity that we talk about all the time come into play here, because when I would think of golf, I would. So my framework that I use with coaches and remote athletes for skill is walk, jog, run. The question at the end of it is sprint question mark. So when I get done running with the skill, can I sprint with it? Can I just let it loose? And anytime that I watch sports at the the higher in like intermediate levels, the difference to me is being able to execute at this absurd level of intensity. So I remember as a kid we always went to college hockey games. We always went to watch University of Maine play when they were in their heyday and we went to a Bruins game for the first time.
Speaker 2:And the speed of the skaters. I mean, I was a, I was a little boy and I was like what is that? Like I, I felt like I couldn't watch it. It didn't make any sense to me, yeah, and it was like they're doing the exact same things, just like you said, but that speed. And then in football, like they, they honestly do a disservice when they do all the slow-mo Because it's like that guy's running as fast as a car, yeah, and adjusted like midair to make a one hand catch or something like that. But you bring up the instance of where does that intensity go and when the intensity needs to be dropped down. The intensity of focus to me is about, like the layering within the movements. Like there was an athlete out in the gym practicing her muscle up skill progression yesterday. Um, and the again the things that you would ask someone to do while they're working on. That just becomes so much different as they improve on the skill.
Speaker 1:Like we can?
Speaker 2:we can almost always iterate and make this thing better, make this thing cleaner, like that sort of thing. So it's like where does the intensity need to go? Yeah, almost always iterate and make this thing better, make this thing cleaner, like that sort of thing. So it's like where does the intensity need to go? Um, and I just it's a extremely interesting topic to me and I think once an athlete realizes what it takes to improve on a skill, there's a freedom that opens up and you can play around with things and really figure out how to move.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, you, I mean you can like at the lowest resolution level, like, take the muscle up, for example. It's the like do I get from below the rings to on top of the rings? It's like that's the lowest barrier. That's like the muscle up is complete. Then it's like, well, like, how tight is the kip? How big is the kip? How, how high do I bring my feet? How high do I bring my knees before I turn over? Where do I pop my hips? Do I pop my hips upward? Do they go slightly forward?
Speaker 1:The further you get into something, the higher level of resolution.
Speaker 1:You can look at a skill, look at a specific task, and when you do that and then you think about how many movements that we expect or athletes need to be proficient at in CrossFit, it's like this is a never, this is, is it literally impossible to perfect everything? Right, there's so many levels like, and there's an element of when, when it comes to skill progression, it's like if you're new at something, it's like you don't even know what questions to ask. You don't even know what skills you need to work on. It's like muscle up below ring above ring. It's like OK, we have a very broad understanding of what's happening here. But like a proficient coach is like OK, like, how high resolution can we get on the very nitty gritty details? And that's where it's like hey, you've got so much room to improve and therefore so many things that you can be working on with a given movement to improve it um, the cool thing with this and and we alluded to it in one of our more recent episodes is the universal application.
Speaker 2:Um, the context for which this idea was explained to me was actually based on leadership. So it's like you're putting out into the world, with your team as a leader, that this is what we're striving for, and you're very public about the execution of that thing. And because we're humans and we're fallible, you will fuck up as the leader. And again the question is do we go back to the start line when we fuck up? It's like, do we start over? Do we ret is? Do we go back to the start line when we fuck up? It's like, do we start over? Do we retry again? Do we do it that way? And again, I just like when we can go into these things that we learn in the gym and push them out into the real world? Yeah, I mean. So.
Speaker 2:Skill within the context of the sport of CrossFit has an interesting spin on it you alluded to. Can I get my muscle up? That is sometimes the way that we get our muscle up or the way that we heave ourselves up to that first handstand pushup is not advantageous towards multiple reps, right, right, so we go from. Can I do it once? Hell yeah, that's one of the most fun thing, that fun things that happens in crossfit achievement unlocked, like someone gets up over the, the bar muscle up is one of those ones where, like, because there's this stupid object in the way you see someone ram their body into a bar, however many times, and they realize they need to go around it and over it, like that's one of those ones where it's like amazing. Then we have to figure out how to do it quite a few times, which can be complicated, but if you are willing to walk and then jog, um, it just takes time more than anything then, how many times can you do it at?
Speaker 2:I wrote in the notes. How many times can you do it at? I wrote in the notes how many times can you do it at? Rpe 67 million, like? You don't just need to be good at the skill, you need to be able to sprint on the echo bike and then jump up and do 15 muscle ups, whatever. The crazy thing is that they're asking you to do Um, and that is sort of an overview of walk, jog, run, which I think applies universally. But again, the level at which you need to figure out this stuff within the sport of crossfit is, um, I don't know. It has a lot of complexity to it again, which I like because I like the layers. I like for athletes to know where they're headed next yeah, a little mechanical mechanics consistency, intensity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean like fuck, connor mcdavid is the immediate person I thought of. When you come to that, it's like that is you might be the best example.
Speaker 2:My god, he's the best, best hockey player on the planet.
Speaker 1:It's like. It's like you've got a lot of guys who are really really fast in the nhl. You've got a lot of guys who can handle the puck really really well in the NHL. There is a finite number who can handle the puck extremely well while they're skating extremely fast, and that's just kind of that next iteration in sports, is it like? And the hockey example there is Connor McDavid. He can skate at nearly top speed and handle the puck and know what's going on.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say the vision is the craziest part to me iq is stupid he is two.
Speaker 2:I believe he's two levels ahead of almost everybody because like to just to be able to skate and move the puck like that like there's usually at least one guy on an nhL team where, like you know that if he has the puck entering the zone, that like there's a good chance he might just fly past people in like in like a you know a scoring or passing position right off the bat. He's faster, but his body language, like his shoulders and his head they look slow, like he's just scanning the ice. It looks so effortless Like a lot of guys in hockey that skate fast.
Speaker 2:Look like they're trying real fucking hard. It's kind of a funny thing to watch not him I don't even understand where the power comes from it doesn't even make any sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, his ability to like dissociate his lower half from his upper half, to like move forward without like losing control of his body and then, therefore, the puck. It's stupid, but that's the highest level example of that yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:So walk, jog, run. Um again, just a framework to use to to, for example, in this podcast. Keep me um sort of locked in on what we're trying to talk about less tangents, but also just a really good example of, um, how you want to think about this thing. So for me, the very first thing that needs to happen whether you're a coach or whether you're an athlete to start the walk portion of this is to turn the noise off and think about things from a first principles standpoint. Um, I know like kind of a hot topic right now. Whether you love or hate elon musk, I don't give a fuck. Um, I will use the the parts of what he puts out into the universe that I like, and I don't really have any investment in his personal life. It doesn't have anything to do with me.
Speaker 2:Um, he is famous for first principles thinking being brought into these like incredibly complicated bureaucratic environments. So he walks into a room and like one of the problems with these huge fortune 500 companies there's these, these mega machines that can't do small tasks. They can put a man on the fucking moon and they like can't change the font on their paperwork because they need approval from 6,000 people. So when you go and look at a problem, it's complicated, and the way that I would say to translate this into the gym is if you took a novice coach or athlete and had them watch someone in real time try to do a muscle up or try to do a squat snatch at a very heavy weight, and then ask them like what do we do? Now? You'll be like I don't know. Get out a magic wand like, and that's when people say things like that person's not strong enough, that person's not fit enough, they're don't have the body type for this.
Speaker 2:They have long femurs, like we complicate the problem. But the beautiful thing is we can use first principles thinking to say what are the component parts of a muscle up, of a squat snatch, of a handstand walk, anything, what is the starting point, what happens after that and what happens after that and what happens after that, and in most instances we can find a. There's so many amazing coaches out there. We can find a way to turn this into like.
Speaker 2:You would think that there's no like long progression towards a handstand walk because, like you're balancing out in space.
Speaker 2:How would that even be possible? I promise you there are tons of ways to get people their handstand walk by breaking it up into its component parts. So we need to know the like step one, step two, step three, step four. Um, once you've done that, that's when the intuition of a coach comes into play, or somebody who just loves human movement of like, how do we turn that into a progression? Because, again, there are movements where, like I can't pause someone mid muscle up and be like okay, so this is what you're doing here, I need you to do this here. Um, so that's when it can get kind of complicated, but anytime you are over complicating it as a coach or as an athlete like what's step one like, and you can be really granular with this like step one of a back squat could be bracing um before even talking about like maybe one of the reasons why when they bounce and their ass comes up because they never had their midline.
Speaker 2:So this is like a lot of ways to think about it yeah, I, I like to do that with someone.
Speaker 1:If I'm taking, trying to think, an example I had, I was doing a front squat. So I was taking a class one of my with one of my coaches and there was another couple coaches in the class and I saw somebody squatting and they were hips, where basically butt was shooting up out of the bottom of the squat. That was probably like the obvious thing that a reasonably proficient coach would probably be able to identify. And I'm like, hey, watch this, like what's wrong with the squat? And I kind of ask the two coaches that are there and they're just like, oh, the hips are shooting up. It's like, excellent, why? It's like, well, they're coming out of the bot, they're not keeping their chest up. Why aren't they keeping their chest up? And it's like, oh, their weight is forward in their toes. Okay, their weight's forward, their chest is going to go forward, their hips are going to go forward. They hit the bottom of the squat, their hips go up, their hips go up and back, and now their chest is forward and they're trying to fight to finish the squat.
Speaker 1:So it's not like as an athlete or a coach, it not about identifying. It's great like identify the obvious thing. But the obvious thing is almost always like, we gotta like, why is that thing happening? Okay, well then, why is that thing happening?
Speaker 1:And all of a sudden you go back down and, like you said, there's like there are a finite number of fundamentals in basically every movement that we do in CrossFit and it's just about breaking, getting, getting being able to identify them as the coach or the athlete, and going as far back to like the foundation as possible. Because if, like, if you don't have that foundation this is why we talk about things like, hey, if your mobility sucks, like I don't care how many squat snatches you do, they're going to suck until you improve your shoulder mobility. That's first principles for you, for example. And then going back, like you go back as far as you can to the foundation, perfect the basics, and then you can build from there. But until you have that, you're just, you're fixing, you're putting band-aids on, you know, open arteries, just you're fixing?
Speaker 2:you're putting band-aids on. You know open arteries, yeah. And if the sequence is off to start, how are you supposed to execute? Right, like the amount of times that I've asked an athlete to start doing kip swings and the second they jump up to the bar. I'm like nope, come down. Or like in the front, squat, no, re-rack the bar. Like I don't even. Like I don't. I don't like the way you're touching the bar.
Speaker 1:I already know where this is going. I don't even need to do squat. I know where this is headed.
Speaker 2:And you need, and sometimes you get the eye roll and it's like if we aren't doing this part right, then we are going to try to like correct the whole time. Throughout this movement You're going to be fighting the thing that you did wrong to open.
Speaker 1:But then you will. You will inevitably get all the way back right To the initial prop, to the root cause. It's like okay, so, if let's, if, okay, so, push your hips back in the squat. Okay, got it, I still came forward. Yes, I know that that's because your weight, like you, weren't evenly distributed in your weight before you even started the squat. Like, let's skip a good coach, hey, let's skip all of the like. Okay, now that you fixed that, let's fix this. Now that you fixed that, we'll fix this. It's like no, no, no, no, let's get down to the actual root cause of the problem and then work upward from there.
Speaker 2:From the point of identifying the component parts and then breaking those up into a progression. The subcategory here is program schedule. It might sound boring that I'm saying that, cause you're literally like okay, write down the thing that I'm supposed to do Then we are now in the jog phase of walk, jog run. Correct no, no, we are still in walk. We haven't actually done anything yet.
Speaker 1:We've only identified what you got. Program Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, program schedule execute.
Speaker 2:I say that because the athlete could get bored. So when I leave a session, if a member here says help me get my muscle up, when I leave a session, it's how many days a week am I doing this? When am I doing it? And then, like, send me videos or whatever. Create a framework that actually gets you to do the thing that you said you were going to do. Like, like, try to set something up where it's like I feel like I'm like beholden to this thing that I need to get done, versus I don't like your kip swing. You should probably work on those at some point. Walk back into my office and then the person's like I got bored on day three, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:Um, in terms of how to program, schedule and execute and maybe we can go over some examples it has to be based on the physical demands of what the practice is so like.
Speaker 2:If you're practicing something that has a larger amount of, like, muscle fiber breakdown or central nervous system fatigue attached to it, you can't do it a billion times, you can't just do it over and over and over that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:So make sure you're paying attention, because everyone who's listening to this podcast is either trying to compete or coach or at least do really well in their workouts in the gym.
Speaker 2:And if you decide that you're going to do strict pull-ups 19 days a week and your hands are bloody and you go to do toast a bar and you don't want to grab the pull-up bar, whatever, there's all kinds of different examples, so just make sure that it fits within the program of what you're actually doing. Um, and then the walk phase is repeat this until the baseline skill is achieved. So, like this could be the front squat example and you have a few weeks of squat holds and some form of like barbell therapy that would be, with you know, doing tempo, empty bar squats to really feel your feet, feel the connection to the bar in your front rack position, whatever, and that you know, next time it comes up in class we might be jogging you might want to do a muscle up, a strict muscle up, a hand stand walk, a strict answer, whatever a handstand walk, a strict handstand, whatever this sort of thing. And the walk phase is a long time right, like we could get into an instance where you're walking for six months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was about to say, like the trajectory of this walk, jog run is not linear by any means.
Speaker 1:You're going to spend a shitload. You should and if you want to be able to run eventually and eventually, like you said, sprint, like we have to have enough time in that walk phase to one just establish like literal neuromuscular connections, like the kind of brain body connections to like wire your body Like. There's one thing that I've actually worked with with Kelly on, for example she moves extremely well, almost too well, to the point where it's like, hey, I actually need you to be comfortable with in a competition setting slightly less optimally in order to go faster. Like we're teetering on that like threshold of of run, sprint right where it's like I actually need you to go further than run, I need you to sprint. But that is because she has put so many hours and repetitions and good hours and good repetitions of practice that her natural like movement is, like is is nearly flawless.
Speaker 1:It's like my back was starting to round so I dropped the barbell. It's like you, like you were in a excellent like what the fuck? No, you weren't. Like god damn it, pick the bar up. You know that that sort of thing. But it takes a shitload of time in that walk phase and it's like almost a flat line until you have wired yourself well enough to like jog and if you've established that baseline in that walk phase, like the jog phase might not be that long because it's like we just take off and see progress rapidly. It's the people who jump ahead where it's like yeah, I'm like I got 70 of the walk phase, let's fucking send it and see what happens.
Speaker 2:It's like short, short-term mindset in her version of doing the thing and then coming back to it would be like again, we just use the muscle up like bitch nastics, bike sprint into muscle up, yeah. And like can I make? Yeah, can I create threshold for you to flirt with, the movement being not perfect, that kind of thing yeah and you come back to it and who knows what the actual what is the practice of?
Speaker 2:is the practice for her getting back to doing it exactly how she should, or is the practice of it going back in again and not asking herself to be perfect but to get the work done? Yeah, yep, all right, let's talk about jogging. So once again, we need to program, schedule and execute. This is when we would get into your Misfit Sets, your Ladders, your EMOMs, standard Linear Progression Program to achieve low level capacity. So misfit sets are something that, um, we basically designed to have four rounds of really deliberate practice on a movement, um. So the example would be four rounds, one smooth set of kipping handstand push-ups. So like you're like, okay, I can do, my max set is 20. So I'm going to do tens or something like that. So you get four. These are supposed to look really good. But then your fifth set is as many as you can do and you don't move up in your smooth sets until you can double the number from onto your max set. So again, you do four sets of 10, kipping handstand pushups and you finally get to a point where you hit 20 or 21 in your max set. You can now go up to 11 and then go up to 12, do that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:Ladders I have found work best on pulling gymnastics, for whatever reason, I think probably because they're more complex and you get to start over at a lower number once they start to break down, whereas in the misfit sets you're either doing the same amount or more. So a ladder would be I do one chest bar, pull up, drop down, shake my arms out, do two, then do three, then do four, and once I start to break down I stop, I rest and I repeat that for maybe like two or three sets, something like that. And the linear progression there would be like I'm climbing and now I feel comfortable, and once you feel like you're kind of doing maybe too many reps, we go up by twos instead of ones like that sort of thing. And then probably the most common would be the EMOM. A lot of people like a 10 minute EMOM with three strict handstand pushups and then four and then five and so on. But they're all iterations of program schedule, execute standard linear progression to achieve low-level capacity. That is our next step in this process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the broad kind of the point of this is to accumulate really really good repetitions at low intensity. And what low intensity means in this context is like I'm not gonna do a set of the movement that induces fatigue, like I'm going to do no more repetitions in this movement than I can do flawlessly, and probably even less than that. I. I personally, and especially at, like, the affiliate level, the EMOM is like probably the best tool in my opinion, because like hey, I can get a 12 minute EMOM. A 15 minute EMOM is pretty reasonable to ask somebody to do in class and let's say it is a kipping handstand pushup or we could go with a barbell movement to like two squat snatches or a hang squat and even one rep, and it's like you have 15 opportunities to move, evaluate your movement, iterate and then make an adjustment for the next one With something like a misfit sets where you only have five opportunities. You have to have a baseline capacity in that in order to kind of reap the benefit.
Speaker 1:So I would say, for like a brand new skill, like your best bet is to do a shitload of sets of the movement with a very small number of repetitions, and that just ensures that the repetitions that you do are excellent, they're not fatigue inducing and, like you can actually evaluate. You can feel like, oh yeah, I did that incorrectly or my, you know, I, I kipped, my, my kip was off a little bit, whatever it happens to be, you can make that evaluation and then you can adjust and you've got 14 more sets to make that adjustment and improve. So lots of different ways, like you just said, to do that and I think, like the, the general theme is like give yourself a shitload of opportunities to do a very small number of reps so that you can really focus on it before we start to beef up the sets or add intensity yeah, and you, just you continue to go through those things.
Speaker 2:You iterate and repeat until introducing the skill under fatigue is appropriate and one of the ways that we learn. Obviously, this is almost all based on learning through failure. So you're probably going to try too early and that's okay. But I would urge you to go back to like it's almost like on a day where you have the jog um, you know the misfit sets, the ladders, the EMOMs, like the walking is like your warmup, like am I moving? Really well, I got this like locked in and then I'm jogging.
Speaker 2:You need a really high level of capacity before running because there's I mean there's there's a lot of different reasons Could be injury, could be, you know the movement pattern could get, you know, I don't know tainted, like you could completely change the way that you're moving and not really know it, that sort of thing. But really the, the jogging phase needs to to be pretty constant. It needs to happen for a pretty long period of time. We're just continuing to iterate and like it should pop up in your programming once it's appropriate, but it needs to also stay within the realm of practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is also kind of a phase where, like you do, you get that first muscle up right, you heave yourself over the rings. It wasn't pretty, maybe there was a chicken wing. You kind of squirmed your way out of the bottom of that. That doesn't all of a sudden unlock like oh sick, we got to work out with muscle ups in it next week. Like I got my muscle ups, like let's get after it.
Speaker 1:It's like no, probably not. Like we need to spend time, probably still spend more time in the walk phase, like perfecting the small things. Then we can start to jog, add some volume and accumulate some reps under low intensity, and I think that's where a lot of athletes at all levels, you know, as they're trying to get better. It's like I have, I've unlocked the skill or something, something clicked in a lift and it's like we're off to the races. It's like maybe, but also like probably not. Like the odds that you just perfected that movement in that one session is basically zero. So let's like, hey, good job. Like sweet. That's another kind of rung on the ladder, but there's still, like you know, there's still 30 more rungs to get to the top.
Speaker 2:And again, in terms of mindset, how do we stay locked in when this could be a longer sort of time horizon? I think, again, going all the way back to the beginning of this topic, you hitting your first really good set is not necessarily practice. That is expression of the new skill that you have.
Speaker 2:It's when you're doing that set and when you finally introduce a level of fatigue in your EMOM that you notice that you've deviated from the movement pattern that you worked on with your coach and you go back to executing on it. That is when, like and you see this happen in, like, such a beautiful sequence in a remote coaching situation when the athlete starts to send you I didn't like the way my turnover looked in these, or like the butt kick wasn't there, or I wasn't, I didn't let the bar travel to my hip. That's when we're really cooking with fire. That's when we're like, like starting to get to a point where it's like I feel what's wrong and I'm going to go back and correct it.
Speaker 1:That's like that's funny. I was talking to a friend about that. That's where I'm.
Speaker 1:I've kind of found myself in my like progression with the sport of golf. It's like, yep, initially you get out there and you hit a couple of really good shots and you feel excellent, and then all of a sudden, things take a turn for the worst. It's like I don't even fucking know if I had to know how to swing this goddamn golf club and it's like the most frustrating thing on the planet. And then, but then like, as you get better, and then it's like, okay, well, is it X, is it Y, is it Z? And you don't even know where to start with. Like, well, what did I do wrong? Could be, could have been 600,000 things. As you get better, you start to identify like, ah, there it is.
Speaker 1:So now for me in golf, it's like if I'm swinging poorly or hitting a bad shot, it's like I'm going to make sure, like, was my physical grip on the club correct? Was my foot position at address correct? Was my where my hips turned slightly too open versus like square to the golf ball? Like these super, super small things.
Speaker 1:But I have a small, a very finite number of things that I can run through kind of my checklist small, a very finite number of things that I can run through kind of my checklist and most of the time it fixes it or at least puts me in a spot where, like, okay, I'm onto something, and you start to get to a point where it's like there are only a few things you know of that are probably what's causing your error, and then you can fix them and you're able to fix them quicker and then you can get back to practicing the movement correctly and well. So initially it's like, hooray, I got it. Tomorrow I don't got it and I don't know what's going on. It's like, okay, well, let's slowly trudge through that a little bit and eventually it becomes I don't got it, but I have a pretty good idea of how to fix it on my own.
Speaker 2:That's another iteration of kind of moving in the right direction and, again, nobody's above that that's at the absolute highest level, that's when we're bordering on like Jedi level, and I think I don't know if people noticed it or not I sort of see the world through this lens in most cases. You know, Bryson did his viral hole in one challenge that fucking took the internet by storm, and like again viral hole-in-one challenge that fucking took the internet by storm and like again, sort of like the slow-mo bryson doesn't see the ball tracker.
Speaker 2:He didn't see the fucking red line and the ball is not even halfway over his house and he'll say pushed it, pulled it, like he knows immediately, yep it. Dude's aiming for a hole this big, like it's like in the level of knowing exactly in his swing what is happening there. And it's just like I find it fascinating to watch those guys Like I'm not even really interested in golf but from the coaching aspect when they do those videos like I don't think a normal person could get through them. They're so boring.
Speaker 2:He talks about grip for 19 minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he'd be an interest If you don't. It sounds like you do, but if you don't watch him.
Speaker 2:He's super cerebral about that sort of thing and it's like yes, that's what I'm taught, that those basics, they're everything. They're everything you can't like. If I'm going to hold the club like this, with knuckles pointing in opposite directions, nothing else that I'm doing is going to matter in my golf swing. So just the way he talks about those things is pretty crazy. Um, all right. So now we have moved on to the running phase. Um, again, if you're going to make an omelet, you got to smash some eggs. Sometimes those eggs will. You'll throw them against the wall and they'll drip down the wall instead of into your bowl to make your omelet.
Speaker 2:Uh, intervals first. That's one thing that we really try to put out. There is just this idea of I want you to experience the thing and then have time to rest and recover and also think about what just happened. Like, go to your room and think about what you just did. Um, we need those moments built in. That's why we do a lot of intervals at training camp. I need that one minute powwow with you about what changed as the intensity was sort of brought into this equation.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of funny. It's like the way that our Google sheet works, but I sort of think about it in that order of like mobility's here, practice is here, intervals are here. They sort of go within that direction. The progression of interference is also really important. So like an example would be we just talked about Kelly doing echo bike into muscle up. Yeah, In an opposite scenario we might do muscle up into echo bike and build in some fatigue round by round pace. When you jump up to do a set of muscle-ups, knowing that the devil's tricycle is waiting for you on the other side, it's just not the same. And then, as the workout moves on, you also won't feel the same.
Speaker 2:So, we can build in interference afterwards and we really need to be thoughtful about the way that we are going to run interference on that movement right, we're going to run interference in that interval, in the instance that I was just talking about, by having your heart rate be a little bit higher each time you go to do a set of muscle-ups. At that point we can then flip that order. But we can also do things where it's just like a general level of fatigue, your cardio stimulus. Can I set you up to just continuously have a higher heart rate. You're going through these things. Then we introduce more and more complexity to that. Like are you going to row before a muscle up?
Speaker 2:like yeah, so I was gonna don't go too far at the beginning yeah, yeah, the intervals.
Speaker 1:And when you said general advice intervals first, are you talking just interval on that singular movement or like an actual, like couplet or triplet crossfit interval?
Speaker 2:so yeah, so running, I think, is when we begin to introduce intensity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, so like the, the imam, the ladder, the misfit sets and kind of the jog phase that is, those are intervals, those are effectively intervals, right. And so now that we've developed a baseline level of capacity at, you know, low to moderate intensity, the run phase is where we start to add that intensity, whether that's through volume of good quality repetitions or, like you're saying, you know, interference with other movements, which is where, like kind of the CrossFit aspect starts to come into place and I think, like, yeah, I think your example, you can almost think about it as like a progression of difficulty, like initially we're looking at like mild, moderate cardiovascular fatigue without muscular interference, right, so put them on the bike or the first time.
Speaker 2:That Exactly, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I'm like, hey, I'm doing like an maybe for Kelly it is like, hey, yeah, you're going to, you're going to bike, you're going to do your muscle ups and then you're you're going to bike afterward and then you're going to rest. So like the carryover of the metabolic fatigue is what's going to make the next set of muscle ups difficult? Maybe the next one is like you're going to C2 bike, so localized muscular fatigue that isn't in theory going to interfere with muscle ups, but your heart rate's up, so we get a little bit of both and you're going to do that before you do muscle ups and then you're going to rest. So we're going to make the muscle ups harder, like up front, but the muscles that you're using aren't necessarily directly interfering. Then, like you said, it's like okay, so now we have capacity in with like an advanced movement under cardiovascular fatigue and even, like you know, severe metabolic fatigue, like a kind of a gas tank stimulus. Now what happens when it's wall ball muscle up, row muscle up, in that order?
Speaker 1:right it's like specific interference, localized muscular fatigue and metabolic fatigue designed to make those muscle ups like extremely difficult, and that's just kind of that's the progression, right that, but that's not the first thing that we do, that's not. We don't go ski muscle up after you proven you can do three unbroken muscle ups, right, it's like, yeah, ways to.
Speaker 2:And I mean, like the athlete iq thing is also huge here. Maybe you only did emoms and misfit sets and you've literally never done two sets of a movement.
Speaker 1:You know what?
Speaker 2:I mean general advice there. I'm going to give a quick overview of the way that we would work this into our programming and we do it in two separate ways.
Speaker 2:So one way that you would notice on a day-to-day basis is non-mandatory work.
Speaker 2:A lot of times when we're in our programming meeting and there is a cell that we know is non-mandatory, which means if you don't follow our programming, we tell you all the stuff you need to do and then there's a way to personalize your program with those extra pieces. A lot of times this style of workout we talk about from a non-mandatory standpoint, like this, is almost like kind of weakness work here. So we have, you know, like rope climb, C2 bike or something like that we really talk through. Is this set up in a way where the athlete can figure out how to go back and forth between these things and do it? So that's more of just a day-to-day basis of us working things in when we know that it's potentially weakness work. The other way that we do it is with our phase bias, and I think it would be possible for almost any coach to write something like this with the framework. I could be wrong. I could be so far down the rabbit hole that I think people are halfway down with me and they're not.
Speaker 1:They're looking down the hole. They're like, oh man, that looks deep, guess we'll launch.
Speaker 2:What's happening down there. So program schedule and execute. Once again, misfitfit athletics phase bias progression. So we start with a test. Please, for the love of God, make the test appropriate. So that goes back to the things that we were just talking about. Like is your first run example? Is your very first run example? Like a muscle endurance test with a chipper that has a million of?
Speaker 1:the movement that you just figured out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that probably shouldn't happen. So the test should be appropriate. And there are a lot of different ways to make a test appropriate. Are we running interference with the other movements that are in it? Make sure that that's not too high. Are the other movements actually helping you? That sort of thing? So, again using the upper body example, we send someone out for a run or we have them do the C2 bike, something like that, and you have time to sort of recover, but your heart rate is still high. So the test needs to be appropriate, not just because it's going to be our metric for did you improve or not, but also because you're not really going to know anything or learn anything from a test that just doesn't make any sense for you.
Speaker 2:Um so, from a coaching standpoint, make sure that your test is appropriate, specific to the athlete.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah and uh again. Like this is there's a bit of nuance there, um, like everybody's heard the term like he's in the zone, she's in the zone, whatever it is, and it's kind of that, that sweet spot of optimal performance. The task itself is like I'm executing slightly better than I'm capable of, but I'm in that perfect slot of development. And that's actually where the, where the term zone comes from. The guy who invented it I think his name is Victor Yagovsky. So the zone of proximal development.
Speaker 1:And it's also the same principle as how you teach young. As you teach kids to speak, you speak at a slightly more. If you're talking to a two-year-old, you try to speak at the level of a three or a four-year-old, so it's just advanced enough that an adaptation can occur. But if you're talking to your three year old like he's in a PhD course, it's like that's too far, it's too there's, there's no adaptation that's going to occur. And it's the same thing in in fitness. It's like we need to be, you need to be put into a situation where this is just slightly harder or slightly outside of what you believe or are capable of. But that is attainable, because it's like I don't know if I can do this. I think I can If you're presented with something that's like this is fucking impossible, like I'm going to die, you know, and that's what a lot of CrossFitters perceive is like how to make progress. It's like I'm going to do fucking triple Murph with muscle ups in a vest and like that's the muscle up to. You know. It's like right.
Speaker 1:No, like that's important, that's it's. It's too, it's too far in that direction. We need something that is just outside of what you currently are capable of but could potentially be capable of, you know, if things line up correctly. So like it's about finding, putting yourself in that, in the zone, so to speak, of like what is just appropriate enough to be like. I don't know if I can do this, but I might be able to.
Speaker 2:I also believe that to be twice as appropriate for the mind of an athlete. So you're talking about maybe the general public, and that the concept is really like is this task worthy of them rising to the occasion? If you give them a boring task, they're not going to get in tests. And tell me that maybe they were kind of boring. Like they're just like, eh, like it's just not quite. And, of course, like have you tried trying harder, go ahead.
Speaker 1:You can try my favorite hunterism.
Speaker 2:So that is part of it. But if they look at it on paper and you either can't sell them on it or they just look at it and go, eh, like, it just isn't like. There are some athletes these would be the athletes who rise to the occasion in the open and quarterfinals at the CrossFit games, and they're not like a showstopper on a Tuesday. They just go in and kind of do their thing, um, and there's just. I mean, you guys are all like this is to the listeners. You're all fucking crazy, we all are like you wouldn't be involved with this, you wouldn't be doing this. So I think it's twice as important, when you're talking about the mind of an athlete, to either write something that is worthy of them rising to the occasion or again telling them how they could sort of doing that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:So that's going to be week one and week nine we're going to test and we are going to retest, obviously a like staple of crossfit, the test retest model that you know. We're going to check back in in six months on our fran time, crossfit total, all of these different things. Um, and there's physical, plenty of physical reasons why that's the case and obviously many physical reasons why that's the case and obviously many mental reasons why that's the case, kind of sort of need, that thing dangling out in front of us. Now there's multiple ways to attack the middle, but I'll start with what would be the first iteration. So weeks two through eight, you would alternate between more jogging and putting it into the actual workouts.
Speaker 2:So if it's a newer skill, I usually say like weeks two, four, six and eight are still jogging, still practice, still developing, and then weeks three, five and seven they're in the workout. And if, again, new skill, maybe it's all intervals. Now as you get better and better, those can flip, like it can be appropriate for an athlete to be under intensity in weeks two, four, six and eight, maybe more Metcons, again like this is a never-ending thing, like you think that you finally achieved it and then you go work out against Tia to me and you're like, okay, back to the back to the gym, back to the rubber mats, let's go get after it. Um, and the way that the way that the skill if you are programming for an individual would look, hunter has already alluded to.
Speaker 2:We want to start week two or week three or wherever we're starting our skill progression, with a shitload of sets of a small amount of reps. It's actually gonna be the highest volume that you would do because, again, lower intensity needs to be higher volume to make that adaptation. Hopefully it's going well and we can use linear progression and you sort of like let's say, week one has a hundred toes to bar in it and you're doing 10 by 10. And the final week of the skill progression is actually only 60 toes to bar, but it's three by 20 or something like that. The intensity is inside of the set versus spread out over the course.
Speaker 2:Um, so that's how you would want the skill to trend. Um new skill, we've already talked about it interval intervals and interference. The way that you run interference has to be very thoughtful. Once the athlete has gained some momentum and they're really just battling for to be the tip of the spear, that's when crossfit really comes into play and we need variance. We need to run interference intentionally with the super high heart rate, with the cardio element of there's just so many reps within this workout, with the, you know interference of sort of muscle endurance, that sort of thing. We need short workouts, we need medium workouts, we need long workouts, we need couplets and triplets and chippers and all these different things, because you will find these moments where either the skill is exposed within the workout or the athlete.
Speaker 2:IQ is exposed within the workout.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at that point we're stress testing it, right. We're like now it's like so we've, we've tried to, we've tried to bulletproof this. We've built up some capacity, we've added some intensity and it's like all right, like what's going to, what's going to fuck me up, like what is, what is the combination of things that is going to stress test and find the chink in the armor? It's like okay, so you can accumulate 50 muscle-ups over the course of a workout, what happens if I slap 30 of them? You know, think like the standard snatches muscle-ups, clean and jerk. 30. Clean and jerks. 30 muscle ups, 30 snatches. It's like is that the thing for you? It's like what is the linchpin now? Where can we get you stuck? Where do we expose the chink in the armor? And then now we're trying to find ways to prove that you're not as good as muscle ups as you thought you were. Right, right, just for with the purpose of of making that person fitter yeah, I mean we'll have games.
Speaker 2:I mean that you think about the games programming where this stuff comes up. It's like this chipper has a set of 50 muscle like, yeah, okay, what the hell happens to an athlete when they have to do 50, because we see it all the time the great muscle upper like overreaches in that workout and they're way ahead and then they literally walk off the rings or start their next movement at the exact same time as the person who was like I'm not very good at these, I'm gonna do fives and then fours and then threes, and you know, yeah, I mean we saw it.
Speaker 1:We saw it like the first I don't know if it was the first, first or second year of quarterfinals when it's like like fuck yeah, get to show off my muscle ups. It's like like fuck yeah, get to show off my muscle ups. It's like, oh yeah. It's like did you know that you needed your hip flexors to do muscle ups? Turns out, those GHD sit-ups before an otherwise pretty manageable set of muscle ups is like wow, like welcome, welcome to the Thunderdome. Like that's, that's where. And that's when a test is well-written, where it's like, oh, I did not expect this to get hard, hard and it got hard because of this other thing that I just didn't put together right. And that's like I think that's where good programming I like to think we're pretty good at that being like I know this is going to be easy now, but like hold my beer in round four and the best athletes have that like ridiculous memory of the last x amount of workouts that they've done.
Speaker 2:And some people will say like, oh, you guys have predicted all of the workouts that they've done at all these competitions and it's like it's variance, that's what that is. But then when we get there, they're like, do you remember this one? And like they go back to their notes and they're like okay, so it was like this pace and whatever. I know what that's going to feel like and like maybe I didn't, maybe it's like it looked easy on paper because it was a merry-go-round workout and then you didn't do the math on the total reps and it's like, obviously we're gonna have to break at some point.
Speaker 2:This workout's got, you know, 150 stamp push-ups in it, or whatever it is that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:Um, so we again. This is meant to be looked at as what we explained at the beginning we're always going to start over. No one is above starting over. No one is above walking. Going back to, we have gotten you to a point where your capacity is good enough to flirt with the level of competition that you want to be at, and we want to improve and go up. Let's get that slow-mo camera out and take a peek. Let's go back and look see where it's at. Oh, you've started to do this, you've developed this habit. Let's make sure that we change this. That sort of thing. No one is above these things.
Speaker 2:And I love the you know the Steph Curry warmup that he does before every game. That's God knows how long. That's him walking every single day. And if he, for in terms of dribbling and shooting, needs to walk on a daily basis, you are not above that. So a CrossFitter who is like Tolo was a guy that I use the example of. Like he used to be in the Northeast, used to come up to the gym every once in a while. Dude, his barbell therapy warmup strongest man in the sport. It was incredible to watch.
Speaker 2:It was so meticulous, so detailed, and it's like we're not going to be above this thing, right, and it's like the level of competition continues to rise, like, and if our shining examples of what we're chasing, um, didn't have this mindset, they would fall off and wouldn't be the example anymore. So not even they don't get to rest either. Yeah, like they're being chased by this pack of people. They need to continue to be so. Like there's just no, as we found out that that was possible.
Speaker 1:It's like how many people just shoved the human potential to the right by being like oh, turns out we can do a four minute mile. Turns out you can snatch 225. Now everybody and their mom does. Yeah, I think the warmup thing. I was actually going to allude to that too.
Speaker 1:When you see a professional athlete, I always love the behind the scenes day in the life, behind the scenes, know, day in the life behind the scenes, that sort of thing of a professional athlete. But when they get again, let's think about, we'll think we'll use, we'll keep the hockey example up like dudes arrive at the rink and it's like their, their pre-game prep is essentially the walk, jog, run, all just condensed over a period of a couple hours. Right, but they do. But they always do start at walk, right it's.
Speaker 1:I get to the gym and I do go sit on a bike for 15 minutes, it is. I go, I start to move, I start to do some muscular activation, some like very low intensity stuff, and then and then I, you know, grab a stick handling ball and I'm warming up my hands. You know stick handling. I get on the ice, I go out for that initial skate and then for in the NHL. It's like there's a morning skate before a game, Like I'm getting, I'm doing the walking and starting to jog a little bit, kind of knocking the rust off, and just that progression slowly. You know we add layers of intensity until you know puck drop is run sprint.
Speaker 2:Think about how dense the foundation is because their muscle memory is so many layers deep of doing that over and over and over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but they still do it, it's still like I do have.
Speaker 1:I have, you know, a 47 step procedure that gets me from arrive at the rink to puck drop, but I do it every single fucking day and all of those are just opportunities to like re-ingrain what it means to walk perfectly, what it means to jog perfectly, and that because I've done that, I can also run pretty damn near perfectly. That I can also run pretty damn near perfectly and you know, when you're in that, when you, when the, when the stars align, and whatnot, and you, you find yourself in the zone we can, we sprint?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the? That's the question at the end of this podcast and and we can talk about it, but I don't know that it needs to be answered. Um, we continue to do this thing over and over and there are points where we've built ourself up so well by starting over and walking and jogging and running, and then walking and jogging and running, that the challenge in front of us is so big and so tough to get into that we have to sort of like again fall back on that foundation and just go do it, just go execute, just express all this stuff that we've worked on, and that's the sprinting. But again, it's it's it's more of a question, um, of did I just express all this stuff that I built and then I'm going to start over again, or do I need to go back to the beginning before I can execute in that way?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean, I think I think of the sprint as like as the you know, as the games. It's the, it's the competition that you showed up for, it's the you know, it's the sunday round of golf, it's the whatever, whatever. It is the pinnacle of the thing that you're doing. The thing with the sprint is like, if you get there, you're there for such a short period of time that it's like we go back to the walk. We go return to the walk every single time. It's after the CrossFit games are done. I fucking, I was sprinting for a weekend. I can't do that. It's not sustainable. It's not sustainable and it's not going to allow me to see progress. No-transcript, invisible ceiling. And it's like yeah, man, like you are going to need to take. The real answer is you're going to need to take three or four steps back if you want to take.
Speaker 2:Dude, the reality is so boring it sucks. Yeah, it's not fun. I mean, well, it's not boring to me because I think there's an art to it and I think it's amazing that someone would be willing to surrender to that. But it doesn't have the like sexiness attached to it. The sexiness is the end result, the sprint. You know that thing and you know a lot of athletes in the space.
Speaker 2:Wonder, wonder, like, how does page? Why is she always there? How does she do what she does? Like, like, anytime they interview the athletes and like, who's the most underrated athlete? All, like so many of the women, say page, and of course she flies under the radar. That's part of it. But people always forget that she didn't qualify in 2020 and 2021. And when you ask her what changed, you would not believe how boring it could sound. It's the warmups, it's the barbell therapy, it's the working on this skill, it's the. Am I sleeping, am I eating? The way that I should be, all of those things right? She was so used to performing at such a high level um, beginning in her career in crossfit.
Speaker 2:Before that, you know, you know you know, playing hockey, doing that thing, that she was a you know, a runner, maybe jogging every once in a while, but like that's what she did, she went out and got after it. But this sport I mean, my god, the amount of walking and jogging in this sport before you get even get a chance to do the other things is is so large that if you can't surrender to those concepts of, like mastering the basics, your, your time in the sport will be pretty short-lived.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the wrap-up right. It's that the difference between the professional athlete who gets paid to do what you do recreationally is not that they have some sort of magic thing that they developed or that they that they have or that they're you know, there's not some weird hack that comes with being at the professional level. It's like they just did the boring, monotonous stuff so many more times than you are willing to do it that they just had to be better than you. Right, that's all it is. They just have more, more reps than you, more time than you. They don't mind being in the walk, you know stage for fucking weeks, months, years at a time, because they know that that foundation is what's going to propel them forward.
Speaker 1:It's like the iterations of that is just like how do I catch the football and then turn and run as fast as I can? How do I? You know it. There's just, it's all the little things, there's nothing special about it, it's just the best in the world have done it so many more times than you have. That it's automatic.
Speaker 2:The basics, their, their default setting is sprint relative to your default setting being walk so my final thoughts, um, I think, are maybe turning the opening concept into something that's a bit more macro than micro. Um, it ended with if you come back, you're in the game, but if you pick up your toys and go home, you're not. Um, so, like hunter, can you think of an example recently where shit did not go the way that you wanted it to in the gym, relative to something that maybe not necessarily super high skilled, but had some sort of movement efficiency component to it?
Speaker 1:um fuck, I mean thousand things. Let's see. Can I give you a golf example? Or does it need to be crossfit? It can be golf. Uh, let's go with. I had a. We were doing chest to bar pull ups the other the other week. That is notoriously like one of my I'd rather do bar muscle ups than chest to bar pull-ups the other week. That is notoriously one of my I'd rather do bar muscle-ups than chest to bar pull-ups. Yep, and it was just fucking wonky. My shoulder kind of hurt. Yeah, I was just like Right, this is just bad, I can do better, I have done better, I know what my capacity is generally and this was just bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in the examples that we've used today, we would want hunter to notice in the moment, maybe, that he wasn't moving the way that he should and he was relying way too much on his grip strength and not his hips, would be my guess um the fucking guy can hold on to the pull-up bar for six hours, why does he need to use his hips?
Speaker 2:um, the real example, the life example, is that you're gonna do chest to bar pull-ups the next time that they come up. You're not done with chest to bar pull-ups. Yeah, it is okay and gonna happen that the the fuck this, I'm done. Meme happens in the moment. The papers are up in the air, I don't need these. But then the guy's like I, actually I need those papers, I'm gonna go I'm gonna go pick those up.
Speaker 2:you picking those papers back up is the more the bigger picture idea of this. There's actually science behind it, which is always cool if you're you know less into the, the kind of the woo-woo stuff I love both sides. So the science is there are neurological adaptations taking place between the time that you mess up the skill and then you come back and you try it again, and we need space in between for that to happen. So if you're not making those, you're sort of not like burning those in while you're doing it as much as your mind needs time in between.
Speaker 2:So an example Hunter would be. The chest to bar session went really weird on a Monday and then you went to do them again on a Thursday and you're just feet, hips, feet, hips Like how did that happen? You know what you're trying to do and a lot of instances is just sometimes where there could be a lot of different reasons why it wasn't the case, and your body needs to make the connection, or your mind needs to make the connection between the idea of what you're doing and that actual physical action that you're trying to do.
Speaker 1:so there's actually this, this idea of like, um, like, leave it alone for a little bit, and that is like a really excellent example of coming back to the thing I mean, how many times have you like, like I've been practicing this thing for weeks or weeks, or I've been doing, I've been squatting for every you know once a week, for every, every week, and like my max is still not going up, you leave, you don't do the thing for a week or two weeks, and the next time you do it it's like, oh my God, like I am, I am Matt Frazier, like I am God, yep, it's the same.
Speaker 2:I feel that way with rope climbs. That's a rope climb thing for me Every once in a while I will do a rope climb workout and, like one of the times I was actually doing one, you were like I just I was standing and then I was. You know, my hands never move before I stood and then I go back up and then two weeks later it's like no dude Gone, it's fucking.
Speaker 1:Bob Froning.
Speaker 2:Dick Froning, distant cousin.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What you got.
Speaker 1:No, I was just going to it's funny you were. I was trying to remember if it was you and then I remembered it was actually jay, uh, one of our, one of our members. He was talking. He's a teacher, um, not a, he's a administrator, but is in teaching with, uh, like elementary school kids and one of the thing he was telling me he was doing a, um, some sort of like educational seminar, whatever they talked about, a study that they did with kids. That it was basically like almost like learning intervals, and it was like you, the most successful kids were the group of kids that practiced something. I want to say maybe it was like piano or something along those lines. You practice something for literally 10 seconds and then take a walk for like 20 seconds and you come back to it and the like the brain activity sounds like intervals to me in the brain activity in the gap was like was greater than when the when they were actually, oh, it was typing.
Speaker 1:It was wasn't the piano, it was typing. It was like you're gonna type for 10 seconds and then you're gonna take a lap for whatever 20 or 30 seconds, whatever it was, and the brain activity during the break was basically like mapping what you just did, what the kids just did, on to like you know the neurological system and that's how they like that was the most effective, like interval, whatever that they they studied, where it was like a really short period of work and processing, and then take a break, um, so that the brain could essentially process and kind of map that into into your, your neurological system.
Speaker 2:It was pretty interesting, so you just explain why I think meatheads are the most practically intelligent people on earth. You have to fucking do the thing and work hard and rest and recover and do the fucking thing. Yeah, Like that's how you get from point A to point B. Did we do it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was a good one.
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