Misfit Podcast
Misfit Athletics provides information and programming to competitive Crossfit athletes of all levels.
Misfit Podcast
How to Peak for The Open - E.334
What if mastering CrossFit could unlock new levels of peak performance and give you a competitive edge? In this episode, Hunter and Drew dive into the crucial steps for preparing for the upcoming CrossFit Open. They emphasize the importance of practicing key movements and honing foundational skills like squats, deadlifts, and thrusters to ensure athletes are ready to perform at their best when it matters most.
The discussion explores sports-specific training, breaking down the movements that frequently appear in the Open, and the value of adopting a competition mindset. The hosts highlight the importance of refining movement efficiency, developing strategic approaches to workouts, and executing with precision under pressure.
They also delve into often-overlooked yet essential aspects of training, such as self-reflection, understanding personal strengths and weaknesses, and maintaining consistency and self-awareness. By training smarter—not just harder—athletes can improve their performance, achieve higher scores, and climb the leaderboard.
Tune in to discover how thoughtful preparation and a strategic approach can help you unlock your full potential in CrossFit competition.
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We're all misfits. Alright, you big, big bunch of misfits, you're a scrappy little misfit, just like me.
Speaker 2:Biggest bunch of misfits I've ever seen. Either podcast on today today, oh geez did you mind out of the gutter, hunter unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Today's the day on today's episode.
Speaker 2:I got a little ahead of myself. On today's episode. We have a public service announcement, um that you should probably start practicing certain things. Um, before the end of what?
Speaker 1:is it?
Speaker 2:february. Um, we're gonna get into what those things are um and how to peak for the open um, but most importantly, you know, just sort of be ready for that one and done um kind of thing um housekeeping. Before we do that, if you are listening slash, watching this podcast on the misfit podcast on youtube, make sure you are also subscribed to Misfit Athletics on YouTube. For the next week or two we are going to be posting it to both accounts, but then eventually we will stop posting to the Misfit Podcast account on YouTube and just post to Misfit Athletics. So make sure you are subscribed there. And, of course, you can find your affiliate programming needs at teammisfitcom or the sugar wad marketplace, your individual programming needs at misfitathleticscom. Before we get into our public service announcement on what you need to be practicing and how to practice it life chat, hey, hunter, uh hey, drew, I was pretty sure your public service announcement was going to be that I'm more jacked in real life than you might assume.
Speaker 2:Unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Sebastian's first thing he told me was a great, nice big hug. And it was just man, you look more jacked in real life. It's like thanks, man.
Speaker 2:Hunter had a little. He said Drew's taller in real life. I like that we're sitting at the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, same, yeah, see, but what I do is I tip my computer screen to make sure that I'm at the same height as you. So, yep, yep, they know, they know better, taller and more jacked, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I think the energy where they pick can probably tell Hunter. You looked good. You had a little bit of a pump going. I don't know how many curls you did before he showed up, but you did look a little more jacked.
Speaker 1:I did nine burpees, did nine burpees, seven toes to bar and a couple power snatches, all right that's what the body responds to nowadays. Does that count?
Speaker 2:as your life chat. Yeah, that was about it cool um that's all you really need. I jinxed myself running my mouth about the fucking steelers last week. Oh yeah, I. I did say, though, that there was a likelihood that one of the three outcomes would be good, and only one was, so maybe I'm reverse jinxing myself this week and we'll move back in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Do you guys clinch a playoff spot?
Speaker 2:Gotta be close. Yeah, I think if, if the odds aren't 100, I think it's probably um, they did. Yeah, and, to be honest, like I want one cool thing right now is the uh, for it could be a russ revenge game. Right now it lines up for uh pittsburgh to play the broncos um, which would be great, honestly, just in general, because all my college friends are huge broncos fans and um, the broncos suck, so that would be cool. Um, but if george pickens isn't back, I'm not really sure. And also, if he's back, there's a chance that he might fight half of the team. I don't know if you've seen them play this year. Hunter, he is a wild card. The steelers he is a wild card of the like, maybe the highest order I've ever seen. He's extremely talented, extremely volatile, gets into fights regularly, finds a way to turn, so the pass is thrown and you're like there's no way this guy can catch this ball.
Speaker 2:He catches the ball and then somehow finds a way to make it not a catch, so like he'll land on one strategy and like leap out of bounds after making the greatest catch you've ever seen and not get his second foot in when he could have just stood there. Huh Cause he's trying to. It's, it's crazy. It was like a. There was like a three week period where he had the most absurd beautiful catch non catches Two of them.
Speaker 1:I feel like I remember kids like kids in high school doing that or it was like like do something absolutely incredible and then, like go off sides on the ice and you're like, you're the fucking worst it's like yeah, just got past four defensemen and then you iced it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so he's like the key to them playing well and the like, biggest liability I think I've ever seen. I wouldn't be surprised if if he got ejected in the first quarter of a playoff game for punching somebody in the head. He's a real weird dude.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I can't say I've seen a Steelers game. Well, I did see the part of the Steelers game this weekend when they got into some sort of like a fight would be an exaggeration a little tussle at the end zone and then Mike Tomlin not looking very pleased with what the referee was telling him, he said get the fuck away from me.
Speaker 2:He, yeah, okay, that's what I was kind of like.
Speaker 2:I was like I don't have to be a lip reader to read get the fuck away from me and then wave him off so that tight end that threw that kid out of the club is six foot seven, 265 pounds, so you're supposed to stop blocking once you get out of bounds, but like, that's one of the most fun things ever to run someone like onto their bench or into the wall, oh. So he basically just blocked him all the way through and then it sort of seemed like, oh, who's going to try to pick a fight with darnell washington? But he didn't do anything. After that he stopped and backed up and then the little guys started punching each other nice, which I thought was funny, um, but yeah, the fact that they just gave the steelers two penalties on that and the the eagles won was nuts yeah, we were already fucked, so we didn't need any.
Speaker 2:We didn't need any help from them. All right, um. So we have. I think we'll get some new listeners, um, for this podcast, depending on you know how we title it, um, but we want to talk about how to peak for the open, and there would be a huge preamble for an episode like this had we not done the previous episodes that. We just did so over the course of the fall and into the last few weeks, we did an episode on how to improve your engine, an episode on how to get stronger, an episode on skill acquisition and an episode on how to actually improve in the CrossFit space.
Speaker 2:Once you put all of those things together, I would say one of the better four-episode batches that we've done in a long time. I think those I think those went super well. We had a pretty good conversation there, um. So I think one of the best ways to understand what we're going to talk about in this episode would be to go back and to listen to those Um, but for like that not happening. Um, hold on one sec so I can. I don't know if it's through yours, but I can hear myself. It's playing back into my head. I tried to fight it. I couldn't do it. I could hear myself playing through my headphones. I think that's going through over on that side. I think I'm good, yeah, cool.
Speaker 2:So with this episode specifically, we want to get into what it could mean to have sports specific training. Um, and in a more traditional sense, when we're looking at the strength and conditioning world you'd be looking at like a baseball player, a hockey player, a football player comes to you and, depending on how much of a runway you have before their season actually starts let's say you're really far away. You're going to get into like what would make you, from a physical sense, a better athlete in your sport. So it could be endurance, it could be power, it could be strength, speed, whatever it is. But obviously, as we get closer, we have to figure out how to continue to increase gpp and get you better at the sport, but also do enough sports specific training so that you have also like fine tuned um, whether it's the actual workout execution itself in terms of strategy, or what we're going to talk about a lot in this episode is is specific to like movement prep and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:CrossFit is unique in the sense that, for the most part, people do the sport to prepare for the sport.
Speaker 1:Right, spend the first 15-20 minutes of practice maybe working like literally edge work, like working on your ability to to turn let's make a small radius turn on your edges, on your skate blades. You're not touching a puck, you're not competing against other people, you're not trying particularly hard, you're just focused on a very specific skill. We do that here, but we don't like the, the, the, the sport, the non-sport specific version of that is dry land training, right. So we're training, we're squatting in the gym, we're doing stuff on a field and then the sport specific thing is actually getting onto the ice and playing scrimmages and games, whereas CrossFit, like the you know the off season stuff you're still squatting, you're still pressing, you're still pullingting, you're still pressing, you're still pulling, you're still doing your conditioning and stuff like that. It's just, as we get closer to the season, we kind of narrow that band down a little bit as far as what movements we're going to focus on, what sort of like and what we know about how the sport gets tested at the open level.
Speaker 2:For for the in the context of this episode, yeah, and the the thing I don't, especially right now. I don't want to give hq a ton of credit for anything, um, but it's not as crazy and varied as a lot of like detractors would make you think. Right, so it's like sure, like we want to, we want to standardize the sport and I know that there are certain entities right now that see an opening and want to want to basically create an offshoot of the of the crossfit games, and a lot of what they're trying to sell is like it will be more standardized, um, but I think we'll deliver a message in this podcast that lets you figure out that it actually is standardized, until they tell you time, domain reps, movement combinations, things of that nature, right, um, there are a lot more answers to the test that are given out, um, that we've used to to create, you know, a successful competitors for a very long time. Those, I think, are the basis for telling someone how they could actually peak for the Open. What I'm going to do right now is, from 2019 to 2024, there have been 12 movements that have been programmed three times or more in the open.
Speaker 2:I'm going to start with the least programmed and work up to the most programmed Deadlift, dumbbell, snatch, power snatch, wall walks, wall balls, bar muscle-ups, chest-to-bar pull-ups, bar-facing burpees, rowing, toes-to thrusters and double unders. Now, one of the things that I do when I look at that list is I combine a bunch of them right, because the, in terms of like, really understanding movement there are, there's a lot of carryover there. There's a lot of like like this movement can be put into this category. Or like obviously like they're really biased on pulling gymnastics and have been for a very long time. Um, so, in terms of like, one thing that you could think about is when I see toe to bar, chest to bar, bar muscle up as three of the most programmed movements like just your basic, starting all the way down at the lowest level of someone who wants to improve in the open. It's like can you get your pinky knuckle up on top of the bar and control a gymnastics kip by opening and closing your shoulder?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean it's kind of I'm a little surprised here, only because you've got like. So if we go further down the list of things that have only been programmed twice or once, once in quotes between 2019 and 24, we've got box jump, box jump over, burpee, box jump over. So like very, very similar movements. Yeah, same thing with like unilateral stuff dumbbell overhead, walking lunge that's a quarterfinals movement. Step up uh oh sorry, that's a single arm lunge, single dumbbell step up lunges. So a lot of these movements, even though they're separated by line item here like front squat clean, clean, complex clean.
Speaker 1:And jerk squat clean, all have their own line item, but they're all the same movement and I think like, if nothing else, it goes again to like I actually really like seeing this list because when I program or kind of structure out the affiliate programming, I have my movements that are deemed like high frequency, medium frequency and low frequency. So you're not going to see ghd sit-ups as often as you're going to see wall balls in the affiliate program.
Speaker 1:Hopefully you don't in any program, but we get the idea of, and all of these movements that we see three times or more are either like one of the nine foundational movements in CrossFit or a very close descendant of that movement, and they're all super basic movements. They're all movements that force large ranges of motion, so large loads, long distances, quickly, and it's just like these are the movements that test fitness. We have a whole shitload of other movements that we can use to train it, but when it comes down to the open in particular, where we need to test a shitload of people in order to narrow it down, it makes sense that we're not really pulling movements from the fringe here. It's like thruster, thruster rowing double under.
Speaker 2:Thruster, toe-to-bar row double under, like the first four movements, like, say it ain't so just like basic classic CrossFit, not because it's basic classic CrossFit, but because those movements have the capacity to essentially bury you Right and like, done at intensity is going to force the fittest athletes to the top of the leaderboard at intensity is going to force the fittest athletes to the top of the leaderboard Right. And like you go, you, you look at it from the standpoint of, like old school CrossFit programming of the weightlifting, monostructural and gymnastics, yeah, and you're like, okay, we have double unders and rowing, like those are our monostructural movements. Maybe you pull the wall ball into that.
Speaker 2:You've got your bar facing you've got your bar facing burpee. Yeah, that is a very doable list that goes. That's antithetical to the idea of no standardization, because the sport wouldn't be the sport if we just had to figure out how to master a single workout. We have to master the movements and we have to master the separate time domains and we have to master like 10 double unders, 40 double unders, 300 double unders, whatever it is. But there's so much more standard as standardization to this than you would think. And then you see 12 instances in six years of pulling gymnastics and it starts with like I love the idea of like the totobar being the one that's highest up on that list, that shows up the most often because like, that's the like to me like the easiest movement to start with from a foundational standpoint in terms of understanding pulling gymnastics and then you sort of work your way down to the chest bar, to the bar muscle up and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:So again, this list, as you alluded to, could be condensed way down right. There's probably 25 movements on this list but it includes thruster and wall ball and front squat and clean, complex and clean and jerk and squat clean, right, like how much could be like like squatting in the front rack, like do we know? Yeah, exactly Exactly, do we know how we're going to move if it's 75, 95, 135, a one rep max, like that sort of thing. So, understanding with that sports specific transition and hopefully you know it's I think it's january 13th you start open prep with us and we help you peak. But like you can start these things now, you can start to look at this and say every single year there's double unders and they've gotten rid of quarterfinals.
Speaker 2:So those years where they did rowing not in the open and then in quarterfinals you're gonna have rowing right, like that sort of thing, and we get so wrapped up in the muscle ups and maybe the pistols and the handstand walk in the strict handstand push-up and I think that will transition us into the leveling conversation.
Speaker 2:But that's, that's the cart before the horse. Like you could get really, really good at the open by locking in on double under thruster toe to bar row, bar facing bur let's leave out the chest to bar. Like if those movements, if those movements showed up enough, or the adjacent movements that we referenced, and you practice them and you warmed up to do them and you thought about your movement efficiency, like you would fly up the leaderboard in the open and that could just be like hey, I like to use this as a metric to show that I'm making progress. Or we could be talking about the athlete that can consistently flops around from 1800th place to 3000th to 4000th and kind of up and down and all over, that wants to qualify for the online semifinal. Like you, locking in on these movements and understanding how to execute them, um, I think could completely change your placement outside of the entire conversation of peaking in terms of getting you as fit as you possibly could be yeah, I mean what you just said getting you as fit as possibly could be.
Speaker 1:It's like it's not the conversation isn't necessarily get really good at these movements. It's understand that just looking at them, anybody who's an experienced coach or or programmed for a long enough time knows it's like yeah, obviously those are the movements that you're going to see the most often. Like I said, they they big ranges of motion, they can be. There's a lot of kind of uh, there are a lot of ways that they can be programmed to elicit a different stimulus and you know when the goal is not to create workouts that get somebody stuck immediately. You know we had that one the muscle up wall ball double under workout that year 12. However many minutes of work that you've done and all that comes back to how is your fitness? It's not going your your in your ability or inability to do a movement. If you don't have the ability to a movement, obviously that's a stop. That's a hard stop but like a perceived low capacity in a movement is not nearly as detrimental as not being good at those movements that Drew just listed from a capacity standpoint.
Speaker 2:So I look at this. In a lot of cases, if I'm auditing, if someone's coming to me for advice or I'm their remote coach, I'm looking at this list and kind of bracketing some of the movements and that's why I just listed the movements that I did. So we have double under thruster, toe-to-bar row, bar-facing burpee. I would put those in that sort of level, one kind of category. I think that's a good bracket to start with. Bracket to start with. What do you say? Or how do you coach the athlete that has the requisite fitness and struggles with the movement patterns? So your athlete that's tripping more over the double unders or inefficient in their thruster or scooping their total bar shoulders back first in the row, like that kind of thing, how does an athlete, as we try to peak for the open, also incorporate the fact that if you're more efficient in those movements, especially in the merry-go-round 20-minute AMRAP, you can do a hell of a lot more of them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think that kind of goes back to the conversation we had last week about skill and for the most, in a lot of of ways, we were alluding to maybe gymnastic skill or that's maybe what people think of when they think of skill. But like, again going back to the conversation, the thing that I said at the beginning of the podcast in a sport like I played hockey for a long time as a kid like I didn't go. You don't go to hockey practice and just scrimmage the entire time. Every kid would love to do that. We'd all rather play the game than do edge work and do puck handling drills and whatnot. But those drills are what improve your ability to play the game. And it's the exact same thing here.
Speaker 1:If you suck at double unders, we need to break it down and figure out whether you actually suck at them, whether it's a mechanical, is it a? Is it a mechanical thing, like we're literally just putting our hands in the wrong spot or we're jumping inefficiently? Or do you just need more exposure to the movement in a low intensity setting so that you can practice things like breathing through a set of double unders? Can you, you know, can you practice doing a kip swing with your toes to bar and then bring your knees up to the bar and then straighten your legs back out and get long again. Can we make these? Can we just break these movements down outside of intensity, make them beautiful and then put them back in it's? It's like the athlete that you're talking about, man, if you're, if you're somebody who has the requisite fitness, but you suck balls at those movements like, uh, jesus, like we've seen it though.
Speaker 2:You get someone. You see it across the games.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, oh yeah, I mean like at the extreme level, like guys, people with phenomenal capacity, but the movement patterns of a fucking goat like we. It's just.
Speaker 1:It's see sebastian in the corner there but, uh, yeah, it's just, it's for that athlete, it's so. It's either. Maybe it's part of the warm-up, it's part of it's part of the practice session or whatever it is. But, um, yeah, we, we need to break the movement down. We don't to get better at thrusters. We're not just going to do fran every day. It's like what about the thruster do you suck at? Is it positional? Is it mobility? Is it just a lack of understanding of core to extremity, that sort of thing? Or you just you're a muscle hamster who doesn't need to worry about using their legs and their arms? What? What is the actual problem? And then it's it's just the practice of the component parts of the movement. Same thing you would do for any sport. You want to get better at a certain thing. You practice, you break down that movement into its singular parts and then try to put it all together.
Speaker 2:During competition prep. There's a column that has sort of taken over in our programming called practice. I call it reps during competition prep. Um, I call it reps during competition prep because it's the idea of there are only so many opportunities within a week for us to get movements in and it's only appropriate a percentage of the time as well. You know, if you're doing a bunch of running, doing a bunch of double unders or box jump is not necessarily going to be the most appropriate thing. If you're doing a ton of toes to bar that can take away from your chest to bar your your bar muscle at volume, that sort of thing. But the overall idea of this isn't going to show up in the programming. So I'm going to have you practice.
Speaker 2:It is something that at that first bracketed level, the lowest level in terms of skill, where you could easily practice those things under low intensity, and I would much rather see an athlete do that on top of their workout of the day and the one lift um, than to add any volume with intensity, like, like, just, you know, five or six sets of an easy or a smooth or a hard set of double unders. If you did that every week leading up um easy or a smooth or a hard set of double unders. If you did that every week leading up um, you'd probably have a a much higher likelihood again of doing better. And I know that it's boring to say that you will be doing double unders 100 of the time, and it's honestly not even real that you would be doing muscle ups 30 of the time, because they typically put them in a place in the workout where you'd have to be fit enough and efficient enough at things like double unders to even get there, so it might be 0% of the time.
Speaker 2:So that's why I bring up the conversation of leveling, because I've seen too many athletes come to us, whether it's in the gym or at a training camp, that are like look, I finally have my double, my triple on the muscle ups. I'm handstand walking, I can do kipping, handstand pushups and then, like their wall balls are really ugly, they're tripping over themselves and have the like one hand is, you know, up by their ear when they're doing their double unders, that sort of thing, and it's like this is a very backwards way to look at, like how you should come in and attack this um. So again, like that public service announcement. To like circle back to it is really just you have time to get into this and we're not going to start that peaking phase for another month.
Speaker 1:But like, identify those movements and we'll continue down the levels a little bit, but identify those movements that give you the problems and just practice them like it will make a huge fucking difference yeah, yeah, and I think they for for that athlete who is maybe in that, you know, level one sort of tier that you're alluding to, the lower, lower skill, like man, I would say this goes, this goes beyond that as far as, like athlete ability goes, because I do feel like the farther away we get from you know, maybe grounds, crossfit, ground zero in the early 2000s to today, like the, the, the methodology is going by the wayside from for a lot of competitive athletes.
Speaker 1:Uh, that a lot of competitive athletes see the crossFit games and are like these are the movements. I have to do without a more foundational understanding of, I guess, of CrossFit as a whole. And it's like pyramid the development of an athlete, above your nutrition, is your metabolic conditioning. It's not gymnastics, it's not your skill, it's not your ability to do muscle ups. Gymnastics, it's not your skill, it's not your ability to do muscle ups, like that doesn't come until you have sufficient metabolic conditioning to even rate.
Speaker 1:Moving on to like gymnastics, body weight movement, and that doesn't even. We don't even touch weights until we can. We have a baseline of metabolic conditioning and the ability to move your body through space. So, and I'm not saying like, hey, that's, that's the order, you know you're not going to don't touch a barbell until you can perfect the muscle up. But we understand the idea that, like CrossFit does a pretty good job when it comes to programming for competitions, the open quarterfinals, whatever, of finding the right athletes, based on like how do we find the fittest person on earth using the CrossFit methodology? And that's, you know, the variance, it's the time domains, it's the stimuli, it's all that sort of stuff and all of the movements that create that are the most basic movements that we have for the most part.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to look at a different list here to talk about the second set of bracketing, just because there's this whole issue of there's no quarterfinals this year.
Speaker 2:So when I'm looking at the list it's like hey, how much more complexity will they bring into the open? So I also have a list that basically combines the open and quarterfinals. We only have four years of data, we only had four years of quarterfinals. So I'll do the same thing any movement that's popped up four times or more in that combination, starting with the least program to the most program, wall ball, strict, handstand, push-up, snatch, rope, climb, muscle up dumbbell, snatch, chest to bar bar, muscle up, double under burpee box, jump over row, um. And we can create, I think, our sort of second set of bracketing there just by looking at it from the standpoint of you gotta be good on a rower, like if that wasn't obvious to this point, right? Um, like getting good on a rower and getting used to the rower and, trust me, there's enough rowing in our three movements or more, three times or more, I mean.
Speaker 2:I went four times or more. Okay, yeah, um and so. So the row and the double under very present. There we have a little bit of a level up. When it comes to the to the burpee, we've got the burpee box jump over, but, to be honest, there aren't going to be a ton of athletes who take the time to understand that it's a hip closing movement and not a push up on the bar facing burpee. That aren't going to be able to translate that. And the GPP over to the burpee box jump over, um, and really beyond that, we're just getting into more complexity with the pulling gymnastics. For the most part we've got the strict handstand push-up in there um, again, typically put towards the end of a workout, that sort of thing, um. So most of that to me, most of that second level of bracketing is more complexity within pulling gymnastic what movement just just going from.
Speaker 2:So in that first bracket we have the total bar, um, and now we have bar muscle up, chest to bar muscle up. So like, like, that seems to be the place and and that's definitely like okay at the affiliate level, just a very large separator like your ability to move through space in the pulling gymnastics once we get beyond the toto bar yeah, I mean yeah, and to be clear too, like the overlap is massive here, rowing burpee box, jump over, is you know?
Speaker 1:it's a different movement, but for all intents and purposes. It's a burpee yeah, double under bar. Yeah, the bar muscle up chest to bar. Just moved up the list slightly but, again, like I would, for the most part we haven't seen a ton of like same movements in the opening quarterfinals.
Speaker 1:So the movements that are on this list like they were preceded by, you know their, their lower skill, sure can yes, I guess, and like you know, a rope climbing quarterfinals, presumably that I you know we've got way more athletes at the affiliate who can climb a rope than can do chest to bar pull-ups. So you think about that more as probably a logistical consideration for CrossFit, with the Open versus a smaller sect of quarterfinals. But just what stands out to me is like yep, ball ball snatch, muscle ups, dumbbell snatch, chest to bar, double under burpee row. It's all just slight, minor modifications, which again indicates that we don't necessarily need to be worried about uber, worried about very specific movements unless it's a massive hole in your game and realize that these movements just get paired together differently. The weights change, the rep scheme changes and that's how the complexity and the difficulty kind of comes about. But for the most part there's a ton of overlap here between oh 100 quarterfinals.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah, there's a, there's a ton of overlap and again you have the. The first list that we talked about basically just naturally turns into the second list. If you are again efficient in movement and understand what you need to be doing to improve there, it's a natural progression to get good at this next set of movements. Um, one of the things that I think can be an issue is the like competitor mentality of the amount of volume that you need to be doing, um, to improve within the sport, specifically to like a lot of the athletes that you're watching and you're seeing how much training they're doing and then you're going to see their program and how much training they're doing are preparing themselves for a three to five day in-person competition. Like we're overreaching beyond the two to three workouts a day situation. The open is probably going to be one short, one medium, one long and maybe a lift, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like that's what we expect there and you spread out over three weeks, exactly Spread out over three weeks, and that is a skill in and of itself. Like there are athletes who would love to be thrown into this like gauntlet, this meat grinder of a weekend, because they know that they handle volume better, because they know that they're a little bit more well-rounded and that if the programming is good, that like it will come out eventually, like they'll spit out the other side where they want to be. Those same athletes don't always have the ability to execute in the one and done environment, either because they're not used to it and they haven't practiced it and they haven't really learned to lock in on a specific workout, or just because there's going to be less variance right, there's going to be less. Like they're not going to get to see that thing that they want to be able to pop up so that they can go take a huge score. And then obviously, the other issue here is the golf scoring versus game scoring. Like you can't take a really bad event in the open. You can take a really bad event in person, but you can't necessarily in the open.
Speaker 2:So the way to improve on this is to think about it from a bit more of an old school mentality Like I have every day that I go into the gym. I have that one workout circled, like I'm going to do my full sweat check. I'm going to stretch in the way that I need to to get into the positions, maybe the thrusters. Like you sit at a desk all day and then you go out there and you try to do thrusters before you do your squat hold and your couch stretch and make sure your ankles feel good and you know peanut on the T-spine and all that stuff. But you're going to go in, you're going to warm up the way that you should.
Speaker 2:You're actually going to look at the workout from a competitive standpoint right, like as we get closer and closer, you need to know we've talked about it so many times in the last few weeks how to read a workout and like what you need to do to execute um, which we can help with once the open rolls around. If you don't practice it before that on your own, you're kind of screwed there. So I really think that leaning into like I have this one thing and you can do more stuff, um outside of that, but just this one thing that you're really locked in on and you can understand how to put a ton of eggs into a single basket problem doing two to four or five training pieces in the gym every day and it's like you, you're, you're, you're as a coach, you're like, fuck yeah, like scores are going good, lifts are going good, we're looking good, athletes feeling confident.
Speaker 1:And then it's like thursday 3 pm rolls around and it's like 10 minute am rap, burpee box, jump, jump over fucking thruster, whatever it is. Dumbbell snatch ladder, burpee. Dumbbell snatch, burpee box, jump over. Everybody loses their mind and it's like it's you know, it's the. It's like we never, we didn't see this coming. It's like motherfucker, what do you mean? You didn't see this coming.
Speaker 1:Like I need you to be able to go insanely hard one time. And the athlete that you're describing like the the gauntlet, it's like you know, I think of compare it to the affiliate athlete who wants to do a hero workout every day. It's like no, you just want to. You you're.
Speaker 1:The difference between training and competing is like, at some point, that that mindset has to switch over from like I'm doing all this volume in order to make sure that I'm well-rounded, but none of that matters if I can't put forth a massive amount of intensity for a relatively short period of time once per week.
Speaker 1:It's like your capacity to handle three to five workouts a day only matters when you get to a stage of competition that calls for three to five workouts a day only matters. When you get to a stage of competition that calls for three to five workouts a day and, like spoiler alert, statistically it's not you Like, respectfully, like we have to get through that initial gauntlet of the open that requires a tremendous amount of intensity that says I don't care if you can do a set of 15 muscle ups, I care that you can repeat your sets of three muscle-ups. I care that you can repeat your sets of three muscle-ups when your heart rate's at 190, or a thruster or whatever the movement is in the open workout, you have to be able to go hard, and that scares the shit out of athletes, because they don't do it often enough in the off-season.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we ask our athletes at the very highest level to have I don't know six to eight weeks a year where this is the type of training that they do, so that they have practice for this. Because what you're referencing is when you look at a whole week of programming for one of our highest level competitors and you zoom all the way out, the story that's told across all of the pieces is very impressive.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah and like you're strong, you're skilled, you were able to push on this machine, et cetera. But then we take the open leaderboard and it's like 947 reps, 946, 945, 944.
Speaker 2:If If you go to the top on those 20 minute AMRAPs and you see the best athletes in the world battling for a thousand reps of something which is absurd to say. And I don't know, you got I don't know 910, 890, like it's pretty good, yeah. Like, do you know how to warm up, strategize, execute, die, slash, cool down and like, actually go over your notes and try to figure out where you did what you were supposed to, where you didn't? Like, do you really know how to do that? Because there's a ton of fitness to be had in that, of course, but, like for a lot of athletes, it's a, it's a learning experience In that, of course, but, like for a lot of athletes, it's a learning experience and we'll see it here at the affiliate level. Like we'll get some pretty fucking good open scores at the affiliate level. Yeah, because, like, our members salivate at something real gross and they just come in and warm up really well and do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny. It's funny right before the podcast we did the. It was actually like open prep if I've ever seen it 11 minutes of nine burpees, seven toes to bar, five power snatches at 135. And it was like we did. I did the practice round primer for the 9am class to get a feel for it. It's like, hey, we want you slotting somewhere in that like five to eight round range. Here's the speed that you need to complete your round on average in order to get this score. It's one of my favorite things to do, because I coach classes that usually already have scores on the whiteboard and usually there's at least one or two scores that are up there that I know are going to hold pretty high on the leaderboard and the affiliate for the day.
Speaker 1:Everybody finishes their practice round and I get to tell them my usual congratulations. You are all on pace for the best score of the day by three rounds and it's like, it's like I. I have something to tell you all. Like, respectfully, none of you are in danger of the best score of the day, okay, so let's pump the brakes a little bit. Uh, one of the athletes who did it with me in open gym right after the class he did the practice. He and I did it together. He beat me through his practice round and he was like like huh, that was, that was kind of easy, but looking at the scores on the board, I actually need to go a lot slower.
Speaker 2:And I was like yeah, probably Dude piece feels so good.
Speaker 1:Dude, what do you mean? These 21 reps? I'm fucking. I'll pull a 108 round. I don't give a shit Easy.
Speaker 2:Easy. Yeah, it's uh. And that leads to the next note that I had here Like part of it takes a long time to do one and done correctly. If, if we're thinking about it from the sport perspective because we talked about the warmup, which would include in a lot of instances, to be more efficient, a ton of mobility, that's there you could have the practice round. You could compare the practice round to scores that you see on fitter or in discord and start to see like this doesn't, like I'm probably not going to get this many rounds.
Speaker 2:The more you get into your athlete iq journey, you should be able to know I'm probably not going to get that many rounds like to begin with, but having scores to compare, having a coach help you, is really important. Then we have to like cool down, potentially stretch again, and then we got to go over and look at our split times and like completely try to reverse, engineer this workout, because the jumping up, however many reps you need to on leaderboard, is like you have to have if you want to be anywhere near the like fullest potential that you could have. You need to execute incredibly well. So you could like do the workout like you did today, like if, using you as an example, how would you have felt about? Like if you had gone back and did your split times and thought about how you could have like improved on the workout or not?
Speaker 1:um, I mean, I kind of did that, like I knew I knew what the workout was.
Speaker 1:I did the math on the how, like, and I had the benefit of seeing a couple of scores that were like in line with what I I might be shooting for. So it's like, so I know what's possible. And again, in a lot of instances, like you as an athlete can do this, because it's like, unless you're doing the workout first or you just happen not have access to any scores like for the most part, you can get an idea of what is possible scores like for the most part, you can get an idea of what is possible. And if you don't like, just do ridiculous math and be like okay, the fastest somebody could possibly do that is this, and then you can be like okay, well, that's not me.
Speaker 1:So you know, whatever the round is, but I'm doing the math and it's like, maybe, maybe I'm, maybe for me I'm thinking about a little bit more of like well, could I have at what point did I feel bad in the workout and could I have made myself feel a little bit worse, a little bit sooner, and then held on and still held on to that for for the end, could I have for me personally, I'm very good at like picking a single pace and holding it very consistently. The problem, the problem that I run into is a lot of times like very consistently. The problem the problem that I run into is a lot of times like I pick the right pace such that I don't really have a whole lot of room to speed up at the end whereas a lot of people you get that one minute kick and I'm like, like motherfucker, I've been one minute kicking for the last nine minutes, like I'm, I'm in
Speaker 2:the kick, you know but a lot of athletes, which is how for sure, and but there.
Speaker 1:But then there are other athletes who like, maybe you do benefit from that. Workouts that not a good example, but maybe you do benefit from doing having positive splits, right. It's like we know that your first round, and there's this happens in a lot of different workouts, especially like a gas tank sort of stimulus or a muscle overload, one where it's like I expect you to have your first round to be your fastest. Just the nature of the workout. It's just a matter of like, how, how, how much can we minimize, whether it's rest in between sets, transition time, could we be a little bit more strategic? You know about how we break things up here or there in order to shave time off of the next round, whatever it is, and just that a little bit of self-awareness of what your strengths and weaknesses are. And then how do you leverage that in order to improve on a retest? Because you said it at the beginning, it's like we're testing.
Speaker 1:I don't remember what you said exactly, but this is the time of year where it's like we're not, we're not gaming this workout to get the best stimulus possible to work on our muscle ups, right, it's like how do I game the shit out of this workout to leverage my strengths, prevent my weaknesses from derailing me completely and get the best score possible. Um, and that comes through paying attention to what your plan is before the workout. And then a little bit of self-reflection after say, hey, where where can I speed up? Where could I have sped up? Where did things go wrong? Why did I think that doing touch and go in the first two rounds was a good idea? I'm an idiot Like those sorts of things. And then that can inform either the retest or, you know, just just inform future pieces form, either the retest or you know, just just inform future pieces.
Speaker 2:When I program, I use the youtube archives of crossfitters crossfitting. So much, yeah, amount of tabs that I have open because I want proof of concept immediately, like I want to know, like, hey, when it is this movement combination I think I remember that's whatever 17.2, let's go back and look at it and you watch these online qualifier workouts and the best athletes in the world and this may seem obvious, but I'll get to the point. They're always moving. You need to. We call it no standing around season. You, it's going to seem wrong, especially at the beginning of the workout, right Cause that whatever 108 round that happened out there for a lot of athletes didn't feel bad.
Speaker 1:Why wouldn't I do that.
Speaker 2:That doesn't make any sense and it's like well, um, you know, if you go outside and you run for 400 minutes, eight seconds at your you know 5k pace, it's gonna feel pretty good, right? Yeah, like, oh, that's easy. Why am I not let's run faster? Um, so you have to figure out in the context of the workout that you're about to do, how can I not stand there during this workout and crossfitters love to not game the workout and figure out the score and do large sets and large rest, and I don't care what your fitness level is what your skill level is whatever you're going to do significantly worse in the workout um.
Speaker 2:So there's honestly a bit of an ego check when it comes to this. That's what you, the workout um in. The easiest ones to learn on are the cardio workouts. So you see a workout and it's almost always sometimes it's a, sometimes it's a couplet. We had the wall ball and row workout Um, but the idea was like you should feel like you're on the rower the whole workout, like you sneak off the rower to do wall balls, but they're unbroken. You picked the ball up, you're you know an asshole about how close it is to your rower, like and you're just back on the rower and you have to row for that. For whatever I think it was, it was a 19 minutes Like you have to row for that amount.
Speaker 1:It's 19 and 19.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to row at the exact speed that allows you to continue doing those wall balls. Um, more often than not it's a triplet Um. You know, when we just have this one monostructural movement that's in there, that you have to pace like the shit out of to to keep yourself moving. And today you, you guys, had the you know the burpees not the easiest one because you don't have the rower screen telling you that one 42 is probably a bad idea for this workout. Um, but you have to figure out what is my cadence, cause that's really that's. I mean, unless you want to have slow transitions, it's kind of the only place you can slow down in that workout. Like, you need to know what your burpee cadence is to be able to pick up the bar and to be able to jump up to the pull-up bar and do that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or or have written down somewhere on a little whiteboard. It's like round one, the clock should say this. Round two, the clock should say that. Round three, the clock says this. And then you have an idea of whether you're ahead or behind your pace, because there are workouts that don't afford you that. Thinking about that, remember that dumbbell thruster 20-minute Sherb's favorite dumbbell thruster, toe-to-bar double under super small sets. The hard part about that workout is like you kind of have to do everything unbroken, so it's just a matter of like, literally that it's a little bit counter to what you were just saying, but it's like there's no standing around. But like the problem is is like no standing around means like I'm always doing thrusters, toes to bar, double unders, which isn't possible.
Speaker 2:But there is a bit of like that it's like a deliberate transition period where it's like that was a body language workout Like can you stay calm, smooth in your movement, not rush to the next one? But again.
Speaker 1:You can look at the. You use the other tools that you have. You use the clock. You have a coach or a training partner who has the white board that says like hey, you are six, you are three minutes ahead of matt frazier. Like stop it, you're an idiot.
Speaker 1:Like you know that sort of thing. And then then there are workouts like we had the whether it was it last year, the rowing deadlift double under, where it was same thing as the wall ball row thing, where it's like literally the only thing that matters about this workout is that you are on the rower as much as possible and nothing else, like there's nothing else that matters if you do these deadlifts and double unders unbroken, like the fact that you are seated on the rower means you're going to have a good score and as long as you're not rowing like a jabroni, you're going to have a good score.
Speaker 1:A lot of people rode like a jabroni. They didn't get a good score.
Speaker 2:Yes, they sure fucking did um. So, yeah, you're looking at a workout and as you get outside of the cardio realm, there's going to be things where, like you know, let's say they had a heavy thruster or you know, a moderate to heavy weight I mean, honestly, power snatches just suck, unless they're 45 pounds.
Speaker 2:Cancel them, but like when you get into those movements where it's either like I literally can't dip out of the muscle up or press out of the handstand push-up, or I can't breathe and do more thrusters or power snatches. That means that you have to figure out how to not make that happen, and which means breaking it up a ton, right?
Speaker 2:so that's when you would get into the situation where, like, you're just way out ahead of somebody because they decided early on to do I don't know, two, two, two in their muscle ups, or they decided to, you know, um, you know break up their, you know, thrusters is one of those ones where you see, like a really high level athlete, you know there's like they went six, five, four on that what, and then later on in the workout you take your first 30 second break and they've accumulated 30 seconds total across the entire workout. Um, then that's when they just fly right past you and that sort of thing. So you have to again. You're circling that one on the calendar, you are coming up with the best hypothesis that you have based on actual math and capacity and personal history, and then you're figuring out whether you were correct or not afterwards because we listed off, basically double under thruster, total bar row burpee, like you're going to in our open prep, the amount of combinations that you will see of those movements in the time, different time domains in different rep schemes and etc. Like there's a really good chance that you'll have notes for the work for the open workout pretty damn close to it If you actually took the time to do this and then you're going to know how to execute.
Speaker 2:You know, like I wrote down what went wrong, what didn't go super well here. Um, and I've been kind of locked in recently on this conversation that I've had with a remote client multiple times of whatever it takes isn't always like run through the brick wall 46 times a day, like. Whatever it takes to a like type a personality could be pretty boring. Whatever it takes could be taking notes, could be strategizing, could be stretching, could be warming up, cooling down, like, like, really like struggling at the fucking dinner table at 7 PM with that chicken breast that you don't want to get down, putting the video game controller down and fucking actually going to bed, like waking up when you're supposed to like. There's so many elements to all of this where it's like whatever it takes could be kind of boring, and that like window that I'm referencing with the one workout a day where you know which one you're going to do it for, will completely change how you do within the open.
Speaker 1:Even the mental stuff, it all comes out of the same gas tank, right. But from a pure physical standpoint, there is a point at which more rowing intervals is not beneficial for you. That more thrusters is not going to move the needle for you, at least today, right, and it's like so what is the thing today that moves the needle a little bit for you? And you're right. For a lot of athletes it is like, hey, go sit in the bottom of a squat hold. How about that? Go do your pliability, go to your, go sit in the, go get in the ice bath, something like that. These or or take notes, you know, plan how you're going to execute this workout, whatever it is like.
Speaker 1:It might be the boring, the monotonous, and that's that's how. Like that's that's the life of the professional athlete too, right, it's not like you. You turn on the TV every Sunday to see your team throw down for three and a half hours and you're like this is fucking sick. It's like, yeah, the other six days and 20 hours were fucking either. Boring as shit, monotonous, miserable, monotonous, miserable. It's all the same stuff. Like, it's all the practice. Like what you just see for a lot of athletes is the is the sexy stuff, and how they got there is not so much, and that's the case like everywhere, in every single thing that you're going to do.
Speaker 2:Right, like, eddie valen got to like stand in front of the like 80,000 people, whatever it was, and do those guitar solos because he just sat in his bedroom and played with his guitar like his entire adolescence, like locked himself in a bedroom and did that like.
Speaker 2:And we see it in the professional sports realm. Um, we've had a conversation about quote-unquote. How do we know what we know when there's like no resources for it? Thousands of hours of staring at people's feet while they squat and snatch and like like having the eye for you know, having the eye that that we do for things like muscle-ups is watching the most absurd amount of variations of the craziest looking movements you've ever seen in your entire life. Yeah, we've seen all of them and we've watched them over and over and over. So this applies kind of across the board and again, can be a way to audit whether you actually want to do this thing, because it might not be the like glitz and glamour that you expected, although this is such a brutal sport that I can't imagine too many people are that delusional.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you get punched in the face pretty quick. It's not as much of a like come on in, it's fun, water's warm, it's like Fran.
Speaker 2:Yeah, water's fucking freezing. No, all right, later See you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had oh man aside, yesterday was bike sprint day and we One of our, one of the new members. He's a local news anchor at the gym and he's been done CrossFit for a long time. But I asked him. I was like, hey, man, have you been? Have you been at MF for a bike sprint day yet? And he was like nah, I was like you're the first person and he actually he hammered it, he sent it, especially on the assault bike, and a lot of people is one of my favorite things when people come to MF for either the first time or they're doing like a bike sprint day for the first time and like for the most part, I just assume that most people who are either dropping in have never actually done what we're about to ask them to do, which is just absolutely try to rip the handles off the bike.
Speaker 1:And even when you communicate that to some people, you get them on the bike and they're doing like, like it looks like you're like, looks like you're trying pretty hard in a peloton class and that's your perception, it's riding a an old airdyne in a basement.
Speaker 2:yes, correct, yes, exactly that is exactly what it is, and you're just like hold on a second.
Speaker 1:And I've gotten to the point where I'm like I'm going to put this bike in the middle here and I'm going to sprint for five seconds, I'm going to sacrifice myself, but I want. This is like roughly what I want you to look like. And, long story short, he just hammered it, he like, he went full send, he paid for it. And then afterward I was like hey man, the first person ever to come in here and actually do a bike sprint day correctly without having to show you how to ride the bike hard. So I have a question.
Speaker 2:So I programmed that and my goal was, depending on fitness level, people flirting with threshold in either around four or five or six. What success rate do you think that I had? Did anyone just cruise through all six rounds?
Speaker 1:uh, only like our biggest, most powerful athletes. Yeah, and I I mean cruise, relatively speaking. We had a couple dudes who were just nine seconds on both machines every round yeah they didn't.
Speaker 1:It's not like they didn't pay for it after, but yeah, yeah I, I told and I kind of knew that and that was kind of the intent right. It was like for people who can really hammer it, it's like this is very much power output training, where you might finish your last round, you'll be hurting a little bit, but like it's not going to be quite the same as like a 50 Cal sprint where we really put you into that past threshold point. But for the most part, like for me, that was me, like what you wrote, that was perfect for me. That's the distance, that's the timeframe where I can go pretty much like I will start the interval at 100% and I will be at 87% by the end of it in rounds four, five and six, and that's perfect for me. And then athletes who were a little bit less powerful. It was like, well, this was a little bit more of a bike sprint death sort of day, but we still, I saw some people in stream fit.
Speaker 2:That went from like 12 seconds to 19 and I was like there, yeah, one of our, one of our, it is one of our one of our member who's historically been a morning member.
Speaker 1:He's been coming into the evenings. Lately had his first encounter with Pukie. Such a gentleman just tied a knot in the trash bag, brought it out to the dumpster. Whoa, what a guy. Just great dude yeah.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful.
Speaker 1:My man Are you a puker?
Speaker 2:No, have youer. No, have you ever? No, I haven't really, because, like, I've definitely like, like honestly, was it this week? No, it was last week. A member sent me a text about doing a workout with him in open gym and I was eating a poke bowl. So I had like, but I don't know that I was ever in real danger, like, I've had a few times where I felt like I was.
Speaker 2:um, I ran 400 meter repeats at elevation, hung over and puked, but that's like that doesn't count. I say, yeah, that's the only time. That's the only time that I've thrown up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think I've ever. Maybe I've just never tried hard enough, but I feel like I've tried pretty hard a lot of times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can confirm that I also just don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hate it, I don't. I hate throwing up. I don't know how many people like throwing up? But I'm like I'm going to do everything in my power to not set myself up for failure of eating close enough to a workout that might make me throw up. But I've gotten. For me it's more. Just like my tummy hurts, my legs hurt, like I need a nap. It's like just a bad feeling, but throwing up never been my thing.
Speaker 2:I'll get that like central nervous system shock I now know what it means by reverse engineering it. Like those days where you can tell that you have 48 to 72 hours of like, impaired, everything Like cognitively you're not quite there, like it's across the board, the afterglow of those workouts kind of as bad as puking, it's close, I just think. I just think my body deals with it differently. But that like like that tingly like vasodilation, feeling like when you have that 90 minutes after a workout, yeah, something's fucking wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like yeah, I'll get the headache post, post sprint, sort of thing. But yeah, yeah, and that can be worse, that'll fuck. Yeah, that those yesterday's the bike sprint day, oh, that's something that has a potential to fuck me up for, yeah, two days afterward just kind of like, just kind of sluggish like yeah, that was always the one.
Speaker 2:If I do um like a truthful assault bike echo bike, no, probably not echo bike. A true assault bike um power output session, that's when my hrv tanks for like multiple days. Yeah, which is kind of funny because, like we I think we referenced it the the whole the myth of they tested, like if you pull a one max deadlift, your central nervous system shot for like six and a half years. It's not the case if you go, if you have a high heart rate for a long period of time, yep, crossfit um, that's when your central nervous system actually tanks. So it's kind of weird for me, um that my intensity can be high enough yeah, that short of a window can fuck you up too.
Speaker 1:It was, it was either. It's like heart rate elevated for a long period of time.
Speaker 2:Time under tension was also one of the things so like yeah, yeah, maybe just assume happens in crossfit, right right.
Speaker 1:But I mean there are certain workouts where it's like that's not like today's a good example. It's like burpee, small set of toes to bar right power snatch, that's probably singles. It's like that's mostly concentric loading. Yeah, it's like burpee, small set of toes to bar power snatch that's probably singles. It's like that's mostly concentric loading.
Speaker 1:It's like, hey, three sets of 10 heavy deadlift, you know touch and go deadlift where it's just constant time under tension, I would imagine for you on the bike like that's the equivalent right, like time under tension, as far as just like constant concentric action on the legs and being someone who's pretty powerful, like yeah, and actually like it has to be.
Speaker 2:It has to be the continuous thing too, because, like I can bury myself in the moment on the skier or the rower, it doesn't fuck me up.
Speaker 1:No, it's all concentric right. It's like or I'll almost half the time under tension.
Speaker 2:Really Craziest one's definitely the marathon prep, though, logging those miles. Yeah, you sleep so well. It's crazy. Yeah, it is crazy how well you sleep when you run that much. I get why people love the endurance stuff.
Speaker 1:From a physio I would say obviously people like that are super fit in CrossFit's terms, fit in a pretty narrow vacuum. But I understand why people really kind of fix themselves to the endurance stuff. It feels great. You sleep like a fucking baby.
Speaker 2:It's like getting up to beat the heat and running in the morning in the sun three or four times a week. It's just like, like it's nice.
Speaker 1:Meditative.
Speaker 2:And, honestly, the most insane thing for somebody like me to say. Right, Like if young Drew was here he'd square up Like fuck. Did you just say Like you've gone soft on us, what?
Speaker 1:are you doing Fucking barbell on your back? Sit right on there Fucking now.
Speaker 2:All right, my final thoughts are going to be a bit of a like a recap, a bit of a bulleted list here, but we are transitioning into becoming more sports, specific with the movements, the way that we move, the way that we strategize and the way that we audit. Our strategy like to me really just locking into. This is not just another monday, tuesday, wednesday, whatever it is. This is in close proximity to our season. You're still going to get fitter, you're still going to get stronger, you're still going to become more skilled, but you are practicing the actual sport and if you can't quite wrap your mind around that, get into the discord. Um, let's have some back and forth. Like, you will be very happy with your results if you can start to do that right now. Don't even wait for january 13th when we start open prep. Start that as soon as possible, um, and you're going to get significantly better at the actual sport itself, while, of course, continuing to lift and go hard and work on your skill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say. My final thoughts are that it pays. In CrossFit it pays to be a little bit smarter than the people that you're competing against. It pays a lot.
Speaker 1:It pays more than you'd think yeah, and especially this time of year and that isn't isolated specifically or solely to workout strategy and execution. It is training as well. Right, it's like what are the things that I need to get better at? What are the basics that I have not drilled down yet? Why am I? You know, the little it's, the super little things it's. I'm starting to thruster, press the bar overhead before I use my legs like just super basic stuff that you can that are like my, my, my opponents, my or my peers aren't doing this because they maybe they just have the raw capacity to skip through it and jokes on them like if they have the raw capacity, then that just means they would have a greater capacity if they did the movements correctly. Yeah, so again. And man, like final thoughts from last week to like learn to do the movements correctly.
Speaker 1:That's part of being a smarter athlete. It's recognizing when you need to improve positions. It's like I don't have access to certain hip range, emotion, boring shit like that. And then you know, obviously we we tie that in with the workout strategy learn knowing, kind of where your personal strengths and weaknesses lie. But, um, you can, you can learn like you, you should like it. Training is where you learn all this. The open quarterfinals, semi-final, whatever the fuck, I don't know whatever we're gonna call it this year. Uh, like, that's where we show off in the same way that that's where you express your fitness. That's also where you express your athlete IQ, your just general intelligence for how you approach to your training. And now we're approaching these tests.
Speaker 2:Start now, carry it over. You will be very happy with your scores, your placement on the leaderboard, all that good stuff. Can we do it, cheers? Thank you for tuning into another episode of the misfit podcast. Make sure you head to misfitathleticscom to get signed up for your individual programming needs. You can head to teammisfitcom or the sugar wad marketplace to get signed up for our affiliate programming.
Speaker 1:And all those movements pop up in affiliate programming lots of times.
Speaker 2:Yes, they do.