Misfit Podcast
Misfit Athletics provides information and programming to competitive Crossfit athletes of all levels.
Misfit Podcast
Competition Preparation & Execution - How to get yourself ready, and use it on game day - E.373
Most athletes don’t lose because they’re undertrained; they lose because their systems fail when it counts. We unpack a full, practical framework for competition prep and execution that turns hard-earned fitness into points on the leaderboard. From building a “maturity meter” through daily habits to knowing exactly when to chase threshold and when to game a Metcon, you’ll get a clear plan you can run tomorrow.
We start with becoming a student of the game: logging strategies, testing at real intensity, and identifying traps in event design before you face them under lights. Then we zoom into the taper: the lowest volume week with smart, safe intensity, plus a competition-week layout with a 3-movement primer Metcon and lift to wake your CNS without draining your tank. Traveling? We cover steps, mobility, time zones, and how to schedule warm-ups to the minute so you hit the floor hot, not flat.
Fueling is where many athletes donate positions. Learn how to hold your ideal performance bodyweight in prep, carb load without bloat, and hydrate beyond the bare minimum. On event day, we explain why lowering core temperature via hands, feet, and forehead is the unlock to exit a catabolic state, how to send the “recover now” signal with whey and carbs, and why 40 to 60 grams of carbs per hour for three hours beats lump-sum strategies for later events. We wrap with execution: find your competition-only gear in transitions, micro-pace upgrades, and relentless movement—without redlining in minute two.
If you want warm-up templates, taper structure, and between-event fueling you can copy-paste, this is your playbook. Subscribe, share with your training crew, and leave a review telling us the one tactic you’ll implement this week.
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Good morning, Misfits. You are tuning in to another episode of the Misfit Podcast. On today's episode, we are doing the deep dive into competition prep and execution. As always, before we get started on the daily topic, we will do some housekeeping. We'll do a little bit of live chat and then we'll dive in, talk to you guys about how to go through a competition prep, how to taper, how to execute things to think about. Just sort of what's the difference in a lot of instances between the way that you would normally train and the way you change. The first housekeeping item is kind of by request of you guys. So I'll I won't bury the lead. First thing that I'll say if you guys want the leaderboards to be consolidated and to look better on fitter, I need you to cancel your subscription and sign up for comp. Um, it's gonna be the exact same price. You're gonna get the exact same programs, but then you guys will all be on the same leaderboards in terms of Hatchet and Masters. When we changed to do the bundles like everybody asked for, where you get all of the programs together, we didn't want to force every single person to cancel and resign up. That was really the only way for us to be able to do that. So what we did is we started adding the bundle essentially to whatever program you were already signed up for. But right now, there are people basically doing the same program, and there's three different ways that they could be accessing that. So basically, what you want to do is just go into Fitter or check your statement and see the last time that you got charged and try to line that up as close as you can and get signed up again on Fitter so that the masters and hatchet leaderboards populate more people. And I think everyone wants that. So basically, the next time you get the opportunity to do that based on the dates, please go in and do that. If not, if you don't care about the leaderboard, do it as a favor to us. That'll just help consolidate things a little bit. We will be in Boulder, Colorado at CrossFit Roots January 30th through February 1st. And you can get signed up at the link in bio on our Instagram. It is the top thing on there. Signups are rolling in. We are currently under early bird pricing. And so if you go in, you can get signed up for$4.99 once that date passes. It will be$50 extra to get signed up. Um, really excited for camp. Think it's gonna be a really cool experience for everybody. Excited to see all you guys out there. It's the only camp that we have on the books currently, and really good timing just kind of leading into the seasons. Um, looking forward to see seeing you guys there again. Link in bio for that. Uh, and last but not least, we are in primer week right now for phase one, and then we'll have retest week next week. So that means that phase two gets started on Monday, November 3rd. We are going to do a phase two podcast, and then the one after that will be our annual spooky season podcast because phase two is when people maybe let the training, you know, the wheels fall off the bike, and then they're on a bike with no wheels, they're not going anywhere, or they jump off the bike and throw it in the woods. So we will do uh yeah, we'll do a after we do the podcast about phase two and what you can expect there, we will do a scary season episode so that you guys understand what we can do about that, how we can change certain things and keep our momentum because half of the fucking game related to all of this stuff that we always talk about is staying consistent. And that can be challenging when you feel like you're in no man's land in terms of dates. All right, that's all I got for housekeeping. Hunter, life chat. What's up?
SPEAKER_03:Um, all right. Well, I have a housekeeping note of my own, if you recall, not but two podcasts ago did we uh chirp the shit out of poor old Eric. Eric knew immediately that Jack threw him.
SPEAKER_02:We were talking about Eric? What? I don't know, who knew?
SPEAKER_03:Uh this was our this was our joke about scaling in uh in class, scaling certain workouts, because Eric Eric went through a stretch of posting some according to Eric, it was one seven hundred some some scores that were let's say outside of the target time or score domain. We'll say, Eric.
SPEAKER_00:I I shouldn't be talking shit.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, been there. I mean I today's workout, I was I I guess technically I attained the target score, but I'm gonna haze myself for what the fuck that just was. But anyway, I got an email from Eric. Uh Eric talked to me in person, but he wanted to make sure that he sent a screenshot. This was last Tuesday's workout. So I think the podcast was released on Tuesday, and Eric assumed that we were talking about that workout, um, which was the 50 cal row. It was the cube test, row, 50 cal row, max cal bike. Right. Um, and Eric just wanted me to send over or wanted to send over a screenshot of his 71 calories to uh Kirk's 48. Um so yeah, uh, just for the record, I fucking smoked him in that workout. Smiley emoji, two screenshots, one of the leaderboard where he's at. Have you seen you've seen his his little avatar in there too? It's like the Barbie girl with like the blacked out, like it it fits. She's having a rough time. Uh yeah. Yeah. And then honestly, like great Sherp. Kirk's got his score in there, and then Lisa Gearhart first comment. Did you sit out around? And then I just like that, yeah. Yeah, she uh and then Kirk replied, I don't even know what BBG means. I'll leave that. Damn, BBG haven't been cut that deep since my last knife fight. We got, I think, I think there's I think it's I think it's fucking prison rules in the gym from like 4 45 to like 7 in the morning. Yeah, it's literally I'm like I'm gonna I swear to god, I'm gonna come in one day and there's gonna be like four people ground fighting on the floor, and Andy's gonna be like, that's that's what that's what they wanted to do today. It's like, all right, that's fine.
SPEAKER_00:Listen, we live up to the name. I had a when I was at uh when I was at Crash, CrossFit Crash this weekend, proven had a group on the other side of the wall, and they were doing like a synchro primer day. It was crazy. It looked like the military, basically. And then Erica and I were in the other room, and Hiller was standing there, and he's like, What's the difference here? And I was like, I told you we're misfits, dude. Like, we're off doing our own thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Um, yeah, second, second life chat is, dude, I am so I resent Nunsuch River Golf Club for getting me to a handicap that's respectable that in no way translates to an even like moderately good course. And I say that with a little tongue-in-cheek because I played pretty bad on the two courses that I played that were away games this past weekend, but good fucking lord. Putting putting on greens. Yeah, no shit. For sure.
SPEAKER_00:It's different out there.
SPEAKER_03:Like played at Falmouth, played at Falmouth, and then played at Portland Country Club with uh Nick Daly and his and his dad. And in my defense, like both of those courses, those those were by far the fastest greens I've ever played. But like we're talking like that ball, you tap that ball, and that thing's like runs eight feet past the hole. And you're just like, I can't do anything about this.
SPEAKER_00:I could be on and I would do scrambles at places like that, I would legitimately putt the ball off the green and be like, I don't understand what's happening.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I don't. It was it was the most infuriating. I'm working on some swing stuff, like it's all came together in order for it all to come apart, all wonderfully at the same time.
SPEAKER_00:Needless to say, those two rounds did not go into the uh the handicap calculation, but um yeah, the it's funny because it reminds me of the like if you only use the same pull-up bar and the same barbell and the same whatever within the gym, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, but honestly, from like a practicality standpoint, like you're not gonna spend God knows how much extra money to just travel around when you have a nice course that you can play at. But you're probably like like there's a level of like you know exactly how certain things are there, and then there has to be a level of comfort, like definitely.
SPEAKER_03:No, all of those are factors, and like you know, I could I didn't, yeah, it all and it all had it was all just kind of a whirlwind. Everything everything that was probably gonna go wrong definitely went wrong, and then like five or six other things that were just like, yeah, man, you're just like that was that's just how it was. But holy fuck, talk about I was not not happy. I was so deep inside my own brainstem, I could fucking see down and out the back like Christ.
SPEAKER_00:It was yeah, so I was on I don't stay up for sports anymore, really. There has to be like a real reason. Like that's one of the reasons why I said I was glad the Red Sox didn't carry on because that'd just ruin like a month of my life. But I was in South Carolina on Thursday night, Thursday night football, the Steelers played. This is a way that I can feel not as old. Joe Flacco out duels Aaron Rodgers in shootout. Reminds me of my childhood. Happened on Thursday. The one thing that is weird though is that they look old. What'd you say it was called?
SPEAKER_03:What was the game called? The Uncle? Oh yeah. Something like that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, they look old for sure. Like, especially Rogers. They're basically my age. That part of it's weird. That part of it's real weird.
SPEAKER_01:Where they're like, how the fuck is this guy even alive? And I'm like, what the fuck? I'm right here.
SPEAKER_00:Come on now. I think I might be the same age as Flacco. I don't know how old he is, but that's always depressing. I'm just like that was that was so fucking frustrating because the Steelers finally have. I mean, then the Bengals defense sucks, so I shouldn't say much, but they finally have an offense and a quarterback that can like do something, and they went out and signed all of these extra people on top of a defense that was already pretty good, and their defense is fucking terrible. It's so frustrating. So I stayed up until fucking 11 p.m. for the first time in god knows how long to watch the Steelers give the game away, take it back, and then lose at the last second. So that was fun. What I did not stay up for, so the Bengals scored with a few seconds left, and the Steelers were gonna get a play. Aaron Rodgers threw the furthest pass in the NFL in like years. He threw the ball 69 point something yards in the air. Hold that fuck also fucking right. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah, that man can throw a football 70 yards and he's like 41 or something.
SPEAKER_03:Especially in a game situation. Like I feel like that's like you can you get in a practice field, like you can wind up and like you know, catch the wind.
SPEAKER_00:No, he did the thing where you would have to run around in the backfield to not get sacked until the players can run 70 yards.
SPEAKER_01:And then just then you throw the ball, basically.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, that was a fucking hoot. And then my other life. Do you know what the do you know they gotta keep those kind of stats, like what the like ball speed is, like they do, but I don't know I don't know how that works with where it's measured, because obviously it's gotta be way high up in the air. Like that's one thing where I laughed when they mean like actual toss Yeah when they did the softball toss at the games, it was like if you want to throw a base speed for a softball really far, you have to throw it really fucking high. Like really high. Right? Like if I was to it's completely different when you're going for distance versus speed. Cause like if I'm trying to throw if I'm in the outfield and I'm trying to throw somebody out at like third or home, I'm gonna be like run and catch the ball and crow hop and throw it on a line as hard as I can. Yeah. But if you're playing long toss with a friend and you want to see if you can throw it 400 feet, you throw that thing fucking way high up in the air. Like you can get a lot more distance on it. So I honestly don't know. I mean, obviously, the correct loft and how hard you're throwing it would create the greatest distance that you could have.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah, it was fucking I watched the replay, it was wild to see. Fucking 40-year-old man throwing a football 70 yards is so crazy.
SPEAKER_00:Because a lot of the guys that can throw the ball 70, 80, 90 yards usually aren't very good.
SPEAKER_01:They don't get to play.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. They get to play in preseason. Let's see what Gemini says about that. Cards estimate the ball was released at about 57 miles an hour.
SPEAKER_00:Which is a tough thing to say because a football obviously weighs a whole lot more than for context.
SPEAKER_03:Fastest recorded throws in NFL history typically fall in the range of 60 to 72 miles an hour in game situations or at the combine. Yeah. Checks out. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Can you still get imagining trying to catch that bitch? Fucking bare hand spiral coming straight at your fucking tits, just 60 miles an hour right in the chest.
SPEAKER_00:It's easy to catch a ball that's thrown really hard from far away, but it's n the the like the brain issue with processing when someone like when you break off a route and then you turn your head and the ball's like an inch from your face. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The quarterback that played that started that was two years older than me was like that in high school. Like always hitting people in the face mask with the ball. Like always. And there was one there was a week where he smoked a SIG at a National Honor Society retreat and got a one-game suspension. And then the kid a year older than me was sick. So I was like 14, 15 years old running the varsity offense. Like I probably weighed like 140 pounds. And all the receivers loved me because I like put some touch on the ball. Yeah. Like I it never occurred to me on a slant to try to murder the person that was there. And they're all like, can you fucking play instead? Like it hurts when he throws me the ball. Okay. I have I have some comments on society as my life chat. I just had a like a little bit of a run where our world, I just think we live in a completely different reality than most people. So I took Carter to the playground, like now, I guess it would have been like a week and a half ago. And there were two moms at the picnic table having a discussion about Ozempic. And one of the women wanted to get on Ozempic, and she was really mad because she was not obese, therefore, insurance wouldn't pay for it. Like she very clearly was not the original clientele. You know what I mean? Like she might have been She's a little overweight, but a little like a little, like very normal looking. And then the wife was like, Yeah, my husband was in the same situation, but he's on it and he pays, I think she said like$500 a week. I don't remember. It was the number was very high. And I like so badly wanted to say something. But like obviously I'm gonna like watch Carter and there's like kids everywhere, and I'm just like, I gotta leave this. But I wanted to be like, Do you want the like muscles in your face to disintegrate? Like that medication was made for your cheeks to just turn into fucking crazy. Like, what are you so that that was that was tough. And then I went to the airport on Wednesday last week, and one of the escalators was broken, and there was a line that was legitimately, I would say you had to wait in line for about 90 seconds to go up the other one instead of going up the stairs. And I was the only person on the stairs. The other Hardos weren't even with me. I go up the stairs just because I'm like, I gotta sit in that fucking seat and like I want to get my steps and yeah, I'd love to sit down or I'd love to take the escalator, but then my back's gonna hurt more. So like I gotta, I gotta keep it moving. And it was just crazy to see. They all just got in line, like everybody else. And part of it is I don't want to go up the stairs. The other part of it's the like like drone, like herd mentality, like everyone's like zombieing their way there, like, oh, everyone's waiting in line, why don't I wait in line? And my brain just can't I can't comprehend that at all. And then all the people in South Carolina at the the the restaurant in the airport opens just so that the bar can open. And there's like seven or eight people drinking at like drinking beers and whatever at like 8 a.m., 7 a.m., whatever it was.
SPEAKER_03:I just like Well, everybody knows there's no fucking time in an airport.
SPEAKER_00:There's no time in an airport, but there they weren't with their family going on a vacation, they weren't with their boys, they were more than likely alcoholics. Yeah, it was Monday morning. It's time for a drink. Yeah, it's time to get away. And it's like it's I don't fault them as much as I do like let's open up this restaurant at 8 a.m. and not serve any food. It's dark in here, but we got the TVs on and we got the beers fucking ready for you. Man, it's just weird because I'm like like like if you take the like the Kool-Aid drinker spectrum and the people that are really serious about their health and wellness, like I live somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and my mind is still blown just like watching these things take place and seeing how people have access to information and like I feel like gym culture is like more prevalent than it was when we were young, and it's worse. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean I but I think there's I feel like there's a almost a stigma associated with it, right? It's like this weird like being healthy and fit is probably more relevant now than it was maybe when we were kids, or it was like cool to do that for sure. But it wasn't like but if you're that person now, I think just like the polarization of basically everything, it just automatically slots you into like uh it's like that that like being healthy and in shape also attaches you to like other certain ideas where it's like this is completely irrelevant, I just want to be healthy. And it's like for some basic psychology, right?
SPEAKER_00:That's you're triggering other people by being the thing.
SPEAKER_03:True. Yeah, yeah. I just think it's been I think it's just exacerbated over the last you know five to ten years.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the more people crazy, the more people who become pre-diabetic, obese, you know, heart disease, all of that stuff, the more people in society that are that way, that becomes the normal thing. Right. And again, psychology 101, if you're really mad about something or you're really annoyed by something, it has more to do with you than them. Oh like, yeah, I just it makes me, I don't know, it's weird. I could go in either direction. It makes me thankful that I'm like part of this thing and like held accountable. And then it's also like, why can't we help more people? But get rid of the food, we're not gonna get rid of the, you know, people just stare at their phones now every second. Like we're not gonna build a.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I think that what you do the point you just made is kind of it. It's like, it's like the what has become somewhat of a norm. And then like, you know, companies, whether you're, you know, you're a food and beverage company or something like that, you get put in a weird situation where it's like, and this is not to defend anybody or anything really, but it's just like we're gonna like provide people with what they want, or like, and then as far as like recommendations, you know, like the obviously the medical industry and healthcare industry is just like not set up to it's like I don't know what to do for these. It's set up in a way. I mean, it's set up in a way for sure, but it's like, and the further people trend towards like that, you know, a super unhealthy lifestyle, it's like the system is like cater it caters to like kind of the majority in a way. It's like we have to be able to accommodate the largest number of people, which happen to be the sickest, and then it's like, well, we can from there, it's like we just we can fix, we can address symptoms rather than an underlying cause, which is just crazy. I think I really think it has a lot to do with just like initial education. Even as a kid, I don't I don't remember getting any fucking education on health, nutrition, exercise, anything like that.
SPEAKER_00:My mom apologized apologizes to me for my diet as a child, like two twice a year, every year.
SPEAKER_03:My mother does not.
SPEAKER_00:She's just like, I didn't know. Yeah. I'm like, this is what you guys wanted to eat, so I gave it to you.
SPEAKER_03:Like for sure.
SPEAKER_00:Chicken fingers and Mountain Dew, baby. Let's go. That's all you need to be a varsity athlete.
SPEAKER_03:I haven't had a Mountain Dew in so long.
SPEAKER_00:It's not quite as good as you want it to be. It's worth it's worth grabbing a diet one and drinking like a third of it and throwing it in the trash. You can get your nostalgia from that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I do remember not that long ago. I maybe I was at like Subway or something in a pinch, and I got a cup and I filled it like with literally just enough for like a sip, and I cranked some Mountain Dew in there, and I was like, nice. Fuck yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Hell yeah, dude.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, when I go to the Delta Lounge, especially the one at JFK, the the syrup to carbonated water ratio on their Coke Zero is incredible. It's good. I I could I could sit there and drink like four cups. So I'm like, this is zero zero calories, right? And don't I need to drink like 10,000 cups to get cancer? I'm just gonna have my four and I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna be happy as a fucking clam.
SPEAKER_03:I got another 9,900 to go. Yep. Isn't that how the McDonald's has like why their coke tastes so good is because they like it's the proportion of syrup to carbonation that's a little bit different there than everywhere else. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. Yep, that's the good stuff, dude.
SPEAKER_00:All right. So today's episode is something that's front of mind, and then sort of part two into us testing the waters on this educational platform. And one idea that I have for it are quick, sort of like probably one-day or two-day courses, not just for coaches, but also for competitors. Like if you're that nerd who wants to know how to go in and execute a taper and how to think about competition and how to think about when workouts are announced or whatever, I'd love to put out basically like a quick thing where you watch a video of us explaining, read, you know, a little thing, you know, maybe take a quiz. I always hated the quiz parts of those. I thought they were kind of dumb, but I think there has to be something there. So something that I'm working through. But essentially, the last few times that we've talked through this, it's been like, hey, coaches, do you guys want us to deliver more information to you? And this time it's a little bit more for the athletes. And obviously, if a coach of an athlete can listen to this and then help them execute on it. I know that there are a lot of self-starters out there. So, again, one of my ideas is to have resources for competitors as well. Because again, the like we're gonna talk about being a student of the game. And yeah. So, first things first, competition prep execution. We've done a lot of episodes on talking people through competition prep. And we've done episodes on how the program is written. So I don't want to necessarily go into that in detail. Maybe you follow our programming and then it's already kind of there laid out for you, and maybe you follow another program. I just want to talk about how to execute. I like the idea of the beginning of a phase, the beginning of prepping for something, there to be that idea of walking through the threshold where when you go into the gym on day one of a competition prep, the ideas that we're about to talk about begin there. People start a lot of these concepts way too late and then they don't become routine and you can't test, retest, and figure out the versions of what we're gonna talk about that work best for you. So the first thing that I have in here is being a student of the game. We don't want you going through the motions ever, but it is more costly when you're going through a competition prep. And there's a reason why, not just on a programming side, that we have the lower volume at the beginning. But I want athletes to have space in their day when they're getting ready to prep for something where they can think about when they go to sleep, when they wake up, what does their warm-up look like, what does their cooldown look like, what does their mobility routine look like, and start to really dial those things in so that when the volume does increase, they become more of a habit. And sort of what I have written down here is just the idea of that test retest mindset for literally everything. So I do a lift, like what did I just learn from that lift? If this amount of weight and this amount of reps came up in a workout, how would I break it up? How does it feel? How does it sort of compare to my relative strength? What would I change about the way that I move, the way that I warm up, the way that I cool down? Am I taking notes? All that good stuff. So so basically, if you've got in a day your morning routine, your nutrition, your warm-up, how you are thinking about strategizing for a workout, how you're cooling down, how you're doing all of these things, like are you taking notes on that? Are you paying attention to what you're doing? Because that's really the only way that you're gonna take any of the information that we're gonna talk about today and personalize it for yourself, right? If there was a one size fits all program and protocol or whatever, we could probably put it down on a piece of paper and then everyone would do the same thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, there's, I mean, you just think about your it's gotta be thought of as like a science experiment on yourself, right? We we've talked about the n equals one sort of experiment, and that really is what it is because everybody's a little bit different. But when it comes to doing things like, you know, the nutrition, the warmups, the cooldowns, all that sort of stuff, like you have to understand that there isn't that one size fits all. And the more that you pay attention to, you know, kind of the if that then if this then that, like, hey, I slept really poorly, and then my workout went badly, right? That's just a super simple, straightforward example of that. But there are a lot more variables in that, and especially as you you try to, like, if you you know, if competition is kind of what your primary goal is, things like, you know, the quality of your sleep, the quality of your food, are you hydrated? Did you warm up well? Did you cool down well after yesterday's workout, that sort of thing? But like you you have to understand that you're just essentially everything you do within the day, including training, is kind of a variable in your science experiment. And it's ultimately impossible to control for all of those because of how many there are, but your goal as an athlete should be more to identify kind of the low-hanging fruit, the obvious, like, hey, this variable has to be like executed well if I'm going to perform well, or maybe more so like if nothing else happens before this, before X training session, before X qualifier workout, before X competition, like if nothing else happens, these three things have to happen. Like, I absolutely have to sleep for nine hours. I absolutely have to have, you know, I have to have my uh, you know, a breakfast that's this, you know, carbs, protein, a little bit of fat, something like that. Like it doesn't need to be dialing in every single little individual variable because that can be super overwhelming instead. But you can instead think like, hey, what is the absolute bare minimum things that absolutely have to happen for me to, you know, perform at 90% of my best, and then kind of whittling down the other things. And like when you kind of extrapolate this out to your affiliate athlete, you're just kind of everyday person, right? It's the same, it's the same set of variables. You're probably just a little bit, you know, you're you need to refine the bigger, more broader, basic stuff. Whereas a competitor might already have a lot of those things dialed in pretty well just as part of their kind of natural routine. And then I think the other thing, what you said about like, hey, when you come into the gym, and I say this to you know affiliate athletes as well, it's like you're not gonna feel a hundred percent every single time you come into the gym, and that's fine. Like you shouldn't expect to necessarily. But if you are just going through the motions without any sort of intention, uh, I I just think of that as like, especially the the sport of fitness. Literally, if if I just come in and move go through the motions of Fran, for example, like even if I even if it takes me four and a half minutes, which would be relatively slow, like if I just do that without any intention or anything like that, all I did was put, I just drove around in circles for for an hour in my car. I just put unnecessary mileage on my vehicle. You know, I ran through some gas, I burned some oil, I I took took some took some rubber off the tires, and I got absolutely nothing from it other than like a day closer to needing a new vehicle, right? And I I think fitness, especially, like there are lots of sports where you can practice elements of your sport for hours at a time and not necessarily, you know, that's more of a mental thing than it is a physical thing. I could, I could go hit putts for three hours and not experience necessarily any negative physical effects. You come in and you're just like, you're gonna train, you're gonna be like, yeah, today I'm just going through the motions. And it's like, I just did 25 heavy back squats, I just did a Metcon that accumulated 200 some odd repetitions, and like, and if you finish that training session and you don't have anything to show for it other than the fact that you did it, like you just drove around in circles for two hours.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, for sure. One thing that you said on a podcast years ago that has stuck with me for a while is the idea of the maturity meter. And basically these small decisions will go on the opposite of what we're looking for here. The athlete that you talk them through the correct way to warm up and you know, paying attention to how much water they're drinking, and they're like, I don't want to fucking do that. Like, I don't want to deal with it. Like, okay, don't don't win, don't get better. Like, that's kind of. Of your choice, right? But these tiny things that we're talking about, when you stack them up, that is the maturity meter. Because you could have an athlete that works very hard that has a very low maturity meter. And we all know the athletes that either have always just done the right things, but more often than not, you have your like come to Jesus moment. You have your I missed out by a rep on this thing, or I knew I was better than this athlete and they beat me. And, you know, I watch their YouTube channel or something, and it's like, oh wow, they sleep for nine hours and they get the right amount of carbs and hydration and they talk to people about you know executing and all that stuff. So like that's where my mind goes. If you don't care about this thing enough to do the easy stuff, then the hard stuff's not really honestly even gonna matter all that much.
SPEAKER_03:Um, yeah, I mean I think the like I think people have probably heard the phrase like little things are big things, and I really believe that. A lot of, you know, you can as a younger kid, you say to yourself, like, you know, why is it important that I, you know, make my bed the right way, for example. If I'm if I'm if the culture in the household is that you make your bed, like it doesn't matter that I don't make my bed. Like nothing, nothing negative happens. It's like that it's not the point. It's like, you know, and it it's you could extrapolate that out to adulthood where it's like you have an em if you have an employee who like claims to who, you know, who wants either more responsibility or wants to get paid more or whatever that, and you you assign them like a relatively medial, hey, I need you to go change out the paper towel dispenser in the in the bathroom. It's like you don't do that. It's like, why would I ever trust that you were gonna do anything more important than change the paper towels out if you can't do something extraordinarily simple and and you know, and just just easy. It's like I want the big stuff, like I want that 400-pound back squat. It's like, well, I need you to do I need you to do squat therapy. It's like, no, no, no, I'm not gonna do that. Like that's the that's too small. It's too, it's it's you know, it's it's that's it's it's beyond me. It's too simple for me. It's like, motherfucker, like you're that ain't it. That's not that's not how it works.
SPEAKER_00:I mean you want to build your house on a foundation or on quicksand, like that's what that is to me. That's what it's setting that baseline of not just what you're capable of, but who you are as a person. Because when you don't address that sort of thing and then times get tough, everything crumbles. You don't have that foundation set. Okay, so the last piece here on competition prep execution is knowing when you are going for stimulus and kind of pushing threshold in when you should be improving your athlete IQ, specifically to gaming Metcons. And I think there's two ways to think about this. The first one is very straightforward in the way that we do competition prep. I tell athletes on the way up, so let's call it weeks one through four, where we're building in low volume to high volume, stimulus is king. We are upping the intensity, we are making physiologic physiological changes, trying to get you as fit as possible. And then as we go back down the mountain, we are going to start to game some of these workouts, and you're gonna use your new fitness level to bring a lot of intensity to figuring that out. Because gaming a workout, like with the the sort of state of the sport right now, that shit hurts. Like you would not believe. They're not like mutually exclusive ideas. You don't game a workout and you cross the finish line first with like a zone two heart rate, like flexing, and then everyone else is just so dumb that they're in zone nine. That's not the way that that works.
SPEAKER_03:You're the you're the most miserable person who just exactly finished fastest.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Yeah. You're a little bit less miserable because you did better. So that's one way to think about this. The other is if you are going through and you see workouts where you really just don't know how to execute on them. Like I have athletes who want to be told exactly what to do in every single scenario, which I personally don't love. I don't, you know, not a student of the game if if I'm making up your mind for you. And then I have athletes who, you know, will go rogue and just do a strategy that's maybe not the most advisable. So that's not good either. But when you're looking at a workout in competition prep and it feels like a bit of a conundrum on if this came up in a competition, I don't really know how I would execute on it. That's when I would also ask an athlete to maybe figure the workout out a little bit more than I normally would. And that can be like it works a little bit better in intervals, right? If you get the opportunity to try one situation, but you've got round-to-round workouts, right? Like you can change the way that you move and you can even, like I will tell athletes here, this is three rounds for time. I'm gonna give you three separate strategies for these three rounds. And it's subtle, right? It's backing off a hundred cals per hour on a machine and going unbroken on gymnastics versus, you know, you know, breaking a certain thing up and going slower in another area. Like, like it's not, it's we're not completely changing everything. And then another way to do it is increased RPE round to round. So I'll tell an athlete, like, hey, I want you to be really smooth to open up this workout. And sometimes that is actually an overall strategy, but I want to trick them into it. It's like, well, if you just do that, then that's called pacing and you'll probably do well in this workout. But if you word it that way, you end up seeing a lot of times some pretty clean splits across a workout, just convincing people not to light their hair on fire to start. But it's really important to have both ideas and ability to execute on them during a competition prep. Like you got to get fitter, you have to have really high intensity in competition prep. But then if you take that mentality into, again, like there's a brick wall in front of you, and it turns out you can actually run around the wall and then keep going versus I'm gonna see if I can crack this thing open with my brain. Right. Those are kind of two different concepts, and I think things that are super important during competition prep.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Um, what proportion of the time then would you say is testing threshold versus gaming?
SPEAKER_00:A high athlete IQ athlete, I am pushing for threshold at least once a day on the way up, if not twice a day.
SPEAKER_03:And when you say on the way up, you're referring to the first kind of half of like first hour competition specific preparation cycle phase.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. And I say that because one of the things that happens when you get into competition prep and you get into higher volume, higher intensity is my elbows kind of bothering me, my shoulders kind of bothering me, my knee is, and I really drive it home, like that's fine. We can whoop your ass on that echo bike whenever we want. And there's nothing, you know what I mean, like you're gonna be fine there. So I really try to drive that point home. You're saying, hey, we'll work around this because we're just chasing stimulus. Yeah. Exactly. That kind of thing. So it really just depends on, and and the other, the other problem here is athlete IQ plays into to threshold as well. Like if you go way beyond the line, that's not gonna be helpful for yourself either, right? Like if you find threshold in round one of an eight-round workout, you probably didn't do what we wanted to for the rest of it. So it is honestly kind of a fine line. But I tell like ever almost every single workout on the back half, you know, in your last three weeks or so, I want there to be an element of you figuring the workout out. Because the really high athlete IQ people, when the workouts are announced, will go two weeks ago. We already fucking did this. We did this two weeks ago. I know what it is already. So then even if we're testing, we're a step ahead of like, it's not, it's not like, oh my god, I I've never done this combination before. And it's like, well, you did, you just maybe forgot what it felt like, that kind of thing. All right. Um, this next one is I think extremely important. It's just not always cut and dry when a competition is going to announce workouts and how much time you're gonna have once they announce the workouts, but it's important for multiple reasons. So, first and foremost, to test or not to test. If you are prepping for a competition and like there are competitions where we get it three weeks early, competitions where we get it two weeks early, and so on. If you know what the test is and you don't take it before you get there, I don't know what the fuck you're doing. Um, I know of one athlete, and I won't call them out by name, but I know of one athlete currently competing that just seems to have on the women's side like a perfectly dialed pacing mechanism in a lot of these workouts. Very impressive. And she has stated publicly, I don't test, it stresses me out too much. That's an exception to the rule. That is not, right? Like, if we know how to break workouts up, um, if we know what is maybe not hard enough, like the coach is super helpful in these situations because I'll get a score and then like the pacing that was that was executed during, and in my head, I'm like, we're gonna have to have a tough conversation on game day because this ain't it. Yeah. This is not this is like this is gonna be last place. This is a solid 27th, right? Exactly. It's really good. Um, so I will be very black and white if you know the workouts and you have time to test them, you need to test them.
SPEAKER_03:And you're talking specifically like we're getting ready to do a live event. This is was this, I guess the advice, you know, the cross CrossFit Games athlete doing 26.1. This is a different, like we don't necessarily need to do this multiple times.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, no, no. Online qualifiers are a whole different game. If you guys want us to do an online qualifier episode, we're gonna have to do more of the like um teaching you guys how to time out workouts and things of that nature. But I really like an athlete to have a feel for what something is because there are there are just combinations of things that don't look that bad on paper, and you don't think to yourself, like, when's the last time my triceps were blown up, and then turns out locking out it sucks on the rings when your triceps are torched. There's just there's there's little stuff like that. Good programmers are gonna find those little movement combinations. I personally will, you know, you you go do a uh there was one where it was burpee getovers, high enough volume burpee getovers, and kipping handstand push-ups. And I didn't think as much about how much I was pressing down to get over to the box and like what that did to my upper body. Like there are just these little things, even if a movement is wheelhouse where you gotta think about like, oh wow, I gotta use my legs more on this, or I just I gotta do small, quick sets on kipping handstand push-ups, which you normally wouldn't do.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And as a programmer who likes to put those traps in place, like testing a workout and doing it like at roughly perceived intensity is also important. I don't think that going through the motions to get a feel for like, well, yeah, my my legs hurt doing wall balls after I biked. It's like my heart rate got high in this CrossFit workout. Don't no fucking shit, Sherlock. But like what happens when it's like, huh, why is there this like this set of five toes to bar here between my bike and my wall ball? Like, why like what is the purpose of that? And it turns out like when you sprint really hard, it's like a really nuisance bit of non-rest that starts to compound and makes other movements difficult. It's like when, again, when the workout is like it's the it's the classic, you walk into the gym and you see the workout and you're like, that doesn't look that bad. It's like, yeah, yeah, good job. Like, congratulations. You're looking at one round, which you're gonna do every 45 seconds for the next 20 minutes, and all of a sudden everything compounds on itself. And a lot of times you just don't get the experience of that unless you actually do it, and then you realize, like, you know, eight minutes into the 20-minute AM wrap, you're like, ah, now I know why the set of five toes to bar exists. It's a fucking trap. And it's like, you know, it it become it teaches you something that you unless you are, you know, really well versed in programming as well, like, you know, you're not gonna see that trap.
SPEAKER_00:Right. This next one is near and dear to my heart. The stages of grief and practicing a new movement with imminent high stakes. So the example that I almost always give is the vested muscle up. Well, I thought this was gonna be a different example. Vested muscle ups because of the journey, especially on the women's side, with like women are typically better at men and like the pain tolerance side of things and threshold y type stuff, whereas maybe upper body, you know, power output is not quite the same spot. One of the things about a high power output movement, a movement where you need to be aggressive, is that if you're in the figuring out stage of it and you're not giving that level of intensity to the movement, yeah, it's either impossible or feels really shitty. And I think at least three times, if not four, a very high-level competition has announced before that we're gonna have to do vested muscle ups. And I can tell you right now that the first go is bad. It's really fucking bad. And it's even bad for people who are good at them, which is kind of funny. And what we need to do when these movements are announced is give ourselves that like true play practice. Let's just figure this out, let's feel this out session. That is the first thing that I'm going to program. It's not gonna be an emam, it's not gonna be sets and reps, it's gonna be either put your phone on FaceTime and put it on a tripod and we'll work through this, or if it's in person, definitely easier to help people. But the expectation of nailing it by the end can't be there. Like making an omelet, gotta break some eggs, gotta figure this out. This is a new thing. And the stress level is significantly higher because there is a day in time where you have to be good at this thing, and currently you're not. And there are just athletes who it's it's funny because it's normally I would put this as the high rep learner and the low rep learner. That doesn't even come into play as often when it comes to this stuff. It's more about headspace. Like I've got some high rep learners, people who really need just to log their time to get better at something, who are also very confident that can figure the thing out quicker in that scenario, just because they're kind of willing to go through it and figure out what we need to do to get it done. So those stages of grief where it's like the amount of times I have watched or listened to people cry related to something that they then end up doing very well on a week later or two weeks later, is it's at least 10. So giving yourself that first session to fuck around, to fuck up, to find out, and then letting your brain and your body and all that kind of work on it and doing some video review if you're a visual learner, that sort of thing, then we can get into hey, it's not gonna even make any sense to test this until right before, or maybe even not at all. So maybe we'll test like an interval of the other elements, and we will work in some imams, and then we'll work in an interval, and then we'll get to that Metcon space. But just those those stages of working through a problem, some people get buried in the I can't do this and I'm not gonna be able to do this, and it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like it will take over and ruin an entire event for you, and it doesn't need to.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The idea that you need to get good at something that you've never done the first time you try it is kind of insane. But it is the expectation because again, there is a day and time, you know, the clock is ticking, and then some schmuck goes on Instagram and shows you that they've already figured it out. Nah na na na na na na na na. Like right that doesn't help either.
SPEAKER_01:Like, look at this, look at this.
SPEAKER_00:I'm like, yeah, well, they're not that fit, so who cares? Like that kind of thing. So that is really fucking important. Give yourself the opportunity to figure some shit out first.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I like I like the idea of just kind of like the ex go, you have to go into that first session, whatever it is, even if it's a workout that you know it doesn't even need to be like unknown movement. It's like, hey, first time testing this workout, and you finish it and you're like, well, that was a fucking shit show, and like the result feels the same. It's like that's a terrible score. Like that would have been last place. It's like you have to remove the expectation, get rid of the clock, get rid, don't count the reps, whatever it happened, you know, whatever. Like, you have to put yourself in kind of a forgiving situation that says, like, hey, all literally all we're trying to do for this session is is try to kind of is figure, is learn, leave here knowing more than I know right now about this movement. And obviously, you know, the deadline if there's a workout what I I thought you were gonna go with, I forgot about the muscle up thing. I thought you were gonna go with the crossovers, watching athletes like announce the crossover single ones.
SPEAKER_00:Because we got to see that at volume, right? Because it was announced in a in a in an online thing where a lot of people were able to do it. Um, so we saw a lot of people whipping their shins out there. For sure. In the gym.
SPEAKER_03:But yeah, I I really like that. Just like, hey, give yourself a little bit of initial grace and yeah, don't fucking worry about it.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, for sure. Modifying programming. This one isn't black and white, but it'll seem that way. Man, uh the movement tracker shrinks for me as a programmer. It shrinks way down. I rely on maintaining variance through duration, style of workout, couplet, triplet, chipper, that kind of thing, and stimulus. I still try to make sure that all that stuff is in there because we know that that's how an athlete gets fitter, but I remove maybe the original elements or like if it's a remote coaching situation and I'm writing it as we go, I'm just I am pre-planning the stimulus and the duration and stuff and leaving the movements out so that I can go and put them in there. So again, the movement tracker really shrinks for me. If you've got a one-day comp coming up and they've announced it, am I going to like just annihilate you with the same four movements? No. But a lot of times we are being delivered semifinals or games, and there's enough movements over the course of those three to five days that, you know, all your bitch work now is running, rowing, and skiing. And all of your skill sessions are figuring out this movement. So I am a really big fan of getting into we do the testing and then we start to put these movements into different scenarios and develop them that way. Because you can, you can make a lot of change in someone in two or three weeks when that movement tracker shrinks down. Sure.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and if you're, I think this is where like having a a remote coach or someone who's savvy at this sort of thing can can help you out a lot. It's like if if you do have, you know, only uh 10 or 12 movements that are being programmed, that's where like, and you know, it's like, hey, I can't, I can't be doing I can't have 300 fucking wall balls under my belt on through through Wednesday, like, you know, and still expect to train. It's like, well, there's a lot of ways that I can elicit the same stimulus. It's like, okay, like shitload of rope climbs. Like, coach, I've been doing rope climbs, like my elbows hurt, my forearms hurt. It's like, okay, like, great, we're gonna row, we're gonna ski, we're gonna do something that puts you in a similar time domain, a similar stimulus. And then, you know, it's let's say it's it's rope climb, uh rope climb burpee, box jump over, something like that. It's like, okay, well, I can I can still fuck you up with a similar hip closing thing, and we could do, you know, it could do toes to bar GHD sit-ups and and box jumpovers or something like that. Having the knowledge to identify like what is this workout trying or what is this you know event trying to do. And then, you know, if we do have to have a scenario where it's like I need to substitute movements in while still preparing for the competition, that's where having somebody who can identify, like, yeah, this is the stimulus, this is where things are gonna get hard here. This, you know, 20 calories on the rower, I'm gonna have you row on a seven damper instead of a five, you know, and we'll get a super similar feeling stimulus, or even worse, and you know, you're gonna feel better prepared going into the actual event. So modifying programming is like, yeah, it's it's the movement tracker shrinks for sure. If you're not, you know, if it's a it's the CrossFit open, like I'm not gonna send you on a ruck, you know, sure, you know, in the weeks before, for example. But like, yep, you can still it doesn't need to be exclusively the movements that you're gonna do. We still want to chase like the stimulus and try to replicate that to the test.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And I also, this is gonna sound counterintuitive, but I'll explain. I make what I consider to be the hardest parts of workouts harder. And it's and it's more for like one example that I can think of in recent memory was the farmer's lunge workout at Syndicate two years ago, where it was Echo Bike muscle up, and then they had to lunge all the way down with the hundreds or seven. Yeah, you're grabbing 75s, you're grabbing eighties. Like, we are you're gonna be able to make adaptation and you're gonna get a lot of information about what you're gonna be able to do. But I want that like that moment where you get off the rings and walk over and pick that up to just be like, bitch, please, like I can do this. I've already done this. So heavier wall balls, an example, getting ready for crash. Erica did there was a workout that had basically the end of the each round was an ascending ladder in weight in descending reps of front squat. And she actually thought that the workout was started at 175 and went to 215, was 165 to 205, because I had every time she had done a session, it was just a little bit harder.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So so I'm definitely a really big fan of that. So quick recap definitely test the workout. Give yourself room to improve, give yourself a little bit of grace when it comes to testing anything new, and then modify the programming without fucking burying yourself, basically, but shorten up that movement tracker for sure. All right, so now we are getting into talking about a taper. Your final full week of training, in my opinion, should have the lowest volume that you've had the entire time. For us, it's very similar. Week seven of a prep, which is the last full week, and week one are basically the same when it comes to volume. And we are really thinking about gaming the Metcons. We are practicing routine, really should have your warm-up and cool down dialed in. And we'll talk about how to do some of that stuff here in a little bit. Um, see the moments within your program where you can still work on threshold. So, for instance, every comp prep that I've written in the last like five years has an eighth gear machine in week seven. Seven or eight rounds of 90 seconds on, three to four minutes off, where it's a very kind of safe space. You know, they're they're running or they're rowing or they're, you know, doing an echo bike. And I let them know like this is the hardest thing that you're gonna do this week. And I want you to think about it as a culmination of what you've done over the course of this entire comp prep. And I want you to really kind of get after it. Because if we're gaming the other stuff and maybe the weights on certain things have dropped or there's not as much weightlifting because the workouts have been announced, I want a stimulus bomb in there to be like, we're gonna go in and check that box off. Like you could have a fucking 20 strain on your whoop from doing this workout alone.
SPEAKER_03:Has that ever backfired on you? Either in the instance, examples might be athlete, turns out they they're actually really beat up, they did not perform super well in that workout, they couldn't give it what they had, and they're like actually now less confident going into you know a competition week.
SPEAKER_00:Or maybe they're uh yeah, I guess that's gonna be my if we were in that situation, I wouldn't program it for sure. I mean, I get I I kind of tell people there's also a threshold with the coach athlete relationship with like we need to, we need really gotta dial in our communication. And then on the way back down, it's like, hey, I gotta know what movements are feeling good. I gotta know, like, like, oh my God, I woke up and my HRV is this. Like, I really need to have a good understanding of where you're at. Yeah. And I would say roughly by like week six, if it's seven weeks long, that's when I start to get information from athletes that they're like feeling a little bit better about HRV starting to get back to the place that they wanted to be, that sort of thing. So I think it would backfire if I was not, if I didn't know that an athlete was kind of struggling a little bit and then they went in and tried to do that. Here's the good thing though, like I just think they would do worse and it wouldn't, you know what I mean? Like, like if if an athlete really crushing it was them going in, like I remember I had one athlete who held a 130 pace on 10 by 92nd row. And to me, we're kind of firing on all cylinders, right? If that was a 140, it's probably too late that something's wrong, but also like that's not really gonna bury them. Sure. Like that kind of thing. So they're gonna be.
SPEAKER_03:I was thinking more of it from like a psychological perspective where it's like, oh my god, I'm fucking stuck.
SPEAKER_00:I make it very I make it very straightforward of like you normally hold 65 RPMs on this, that's what I want from you. We're just gonna do it for two extra rounds. Like, I don't ask for something that they're not capable of doing. It's more just like this is gonna be really hard, and I want you to kind of grin through it, like that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_03:So it's not so much a like, hey, let's try to like PR this, try to see all the fitness that you've gathered. It's like here's a lot of times.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. But no, no, absolutely not. So it's somewhere between a softball and a yeah, yeah. Um okay, so that would be the final full week where we're thinking about it from that point of view.
SPEAKER_03:Sorry, for like listeners too, like from a calendar perspective, we're saying like this is the final full week. Let's say that the final full week ends on Satur Sunday, whatever. Yes, and then you would have and you were competing at the end of the following week, right? So it's a full week of training, then I've got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Wednesday or Thursday, I'm traveling, and then Friday, Saturday, and or Sunday, I'm competing. Yeah. So that's important to competition.
SPEAKER_00:I refer to that as week eight. So to give a little bit of inside information, if there's no comp simulation, prep would be eight weeks long, with the last full week being week seven. And then you just increase that by a week if there's a comp simulation in the middle, which which can be very helpful for a lot of different reasons. But then we have the schedule of the week of competition. So this is a week after, again, to clarify. Three days before the competition, we are going low volume, high intensity. Often that has to still be a testing day. So you would choose like one workout, especially if we're talking about like a local comp that's one or two days long. A lot of times they're going to be announcing that last one pretty close. So potentially we've got a test workout in there. If not, I'm probably looking for a short, high-intensity triplet or like a sprint chipper, something like that. Like something straight through where there's super high intensity, but there's really just not enough volume within it to do any kind of damage. To me, that keeps the central nervous system kind of awake and ready to go. And definitely an opportunity for a skill session. I like to have those spread out. So let's say you're typically doing an emom, I like it closer to like we're gonna do six rounds of this, and I want you to sit on a C2 bike for like two minutes between sets. Give yourself space so that we're not pushing like peak muscle endurance or anything like that. We're still potentially getting a little bit of volume in, but we're giving ourselves space so that execution feels good, confidence feels good. And then I like a 40 to 60 minute session to end that day. I like this in basically every day of this week. A 40 to 60 minute session of, you know, zone zero to zone one machine, two, three, four minutes, get off, mobilize, get back on, do the two, three, four minutes on there, get off, mobilize another body part, that kind of thing. I always like an athlete to go head to toe, no matter what, because you just don't know what it's gonna feel like after travel. I just think it sets people up really well. So, you know, you do your ankle mobility and you do your hip mobility and you do your glute mobility and you kind of make your way through as you're going and increasing blood flow, that sort of thing. Two days before the competition, rest day with then the same thing. It's not always possible. A lot of times two days before the comp is the travel day. So I ask athletes to pay attention to how many steps they're getting in. And then to get the amount of steps that you want, there's probably periods of time where you're intentionally walking for 10 or 20 minutes. Get some mobility in at the end of that, if you can, right? So if you're in your hotel room, you look down, got 5,000 steps in, go walk for 20 or 30 minutes and then come back to the room and hit some mobility, hit some stretching, get some really good blood flow. Voodoo Floss is a really good friend on travel because of, you know, especially if you're getting on an airplane and all that blood's being, you know, sent down to your lower half, that kind of thing. So again, that's two days before the competition. Again, often a travel day, and then one day before your competition is what we call primer day. Athletes' choice on whether they lift first or Metcon first, have a pretty even split, honestly, with athletes on that. We choose for the primer Metcon, we choose one monostructural, one gymnastics, one weightlifting movement. I like head to toe muscle engagement in that in that workout, but I let the athletes help write it. So I'm basically just there. To make sure that it's not like gonna blow their legs up or their arms up or their midline up. So, okay, athlete one, what machine do you want? And you start to build it based on, okay, what machine do you want? Athlete two, what gymnastics movement do you want? And you're thinking in your head, okay, athlete three, would you rather like lunge or squat or whatever? Or would you rather do, you know, shoulder to overhead like thrust or whatever it is, that kind of thing. Yeah. Really short, manageable rep scheme when it comes to that. And I try to write it so that with the numbers, it works out to about a minute around, roughly. If an athlete's lollygagging, I make them do four rounds. If an athlete knows that they get to stop if they look tired, then I will tell them to stop at three rounds. So I will literally tell them you're done when I say you're done. And nine times out of ten, because of who I'm working with, it's three rounds. It's like a three-minute workout, that kind of thing. You want your heart rate to get high, but then not to really do any work after that. Like the second you're like, I don't really want to be doing this anymore, don't do it anymore. Right? Yeah. The thing that you wish training was, but isn't. Primer lift is almost always a power clean to push jerk emam and that 70 to 80% range or power snatch emam. That being said, sometimes we get a lot of times there's kind of a lift on day one of a competition, and I'll make sure that whatever movement pattern, like we did at Crash, we did power clean into front squat instead of power clean to shoulder overhead, that kind of thing. So just gotta do the heavy squats the next day, prime that a little bit.
SPEAKER_03:What's your take if I'm traveling through time zones? So let's say, and and the reason I asked that is because I I'll I've had that with athletes. Tony went over from East Coast over to the West Coast for Wadapalooza. He traveled this is a little bit odd too, but like he because he was traveling actually the day before. So his primer day was kind of the same, almost like the same thing, and like there's he didn't have any equipment, so it was like, you know, but like, hey, I I spend a day traveling, I'm in a new time zone. This is supposed to be kind of my flush day. Will you tell an athlete, like, hey, you're gonna do a you know, five rounds, go downstairs to the hotel gym and like run five rounds, one minute run, one minute rest, something to elevate their heart rate in the name of like resetting circadian rhythm, like for the purpose of post-travel, like a little bit of high intensity can be beneficial to setting them up for you know a good night's sleep, something like that, versus like, well, I just sat on an airplane all day and like uh it's it's already it's late. I'm in a new time zone. Is there any considerations that you have for that?
SPEAKER_00:I would probably only do that if it was low stakes or like a one-day situation. I like to get athletes used to it may be unfair because I'm working with athletes who are traveling quite a bit to compete maybe three or four times a year. So what I don't want is for them to have to rely on a training day two days before competition every single time. So it's thinking about like, hey, you know, I'd love to see fifty, you know, 12,000, 15,000 steps, that kind of thing, where you're, you know, literally you don't go sit down and you know, watch, you know, dick around on your phone at the airport. You just walk back and forth all the time. Okay. And you're thinking about hydration, that sort of thing. So that would probably be part of it there. And then there's a lot of like the direction he was traveling is definitely friendlier. Sure. When you're looking at traveling in the opposite direction, when you're looking at traveling west to east, you either have to have the luxury of getting there an extra day or two days early, or you have to get into you gotta nerd out and listen to some of the Huberman lab stuff where you start you're you start to wake up like three days before you leave at like 5 a.m. to reset your temperature minimum so that you have an actual chance of sleeping on the plane on a red eye, like that sort of thing. Um But yeah, I mean, one of the things you're talking about is like if there are coaches listening to this and you have to travel, you do exactly what Hunter says. You go do a twenty go to the hotel gym and do a 20-minute AMRAP, get yourself real fucking sweaty, yeah, and then sleep like a baby and actually be like alert and awake and present the next day. That's that's definitely helpful for more just a general, general advice there. There's a little bit of nuance here with what day do you start competing and when did the final day of your previous week end? Because like a lot of these scenarios, my athletes are starting on a Friday and they trained on Sunday before. So they take Monday off, they train Tuesday, they take Wednesday off, they do primary Thursday, and it's all kind of set up there. Don't get too wrapped up in this stuff. You could train Monday and Tuesday in that scenario. I personally would rather see someone just give themselves that full rest day on Sunday if that's their schedule, and then do like a zone two and some skill work on Monday. You don't, at that point, you're kind of keeping things fresh. You're not necessarily moving the needle very much anymore the week of the competition.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think a lot of that is communication with the athlete as far as like, hey, what's your comfort level with these movements, the workouts? Is there, you know, is there a place to do two rounds of this five-round workout on, you know, a a Monday or a Tuesday without it, you know, creating there's also an a level of like antsiness than an athlete might have where it's like a full rest day might actually be, you know, not negative not a negative thing, but it's like, hey, we could do, sure, go ahead and do your zone zero bike and then every five minutes hop off and do two vested muscle ups, you know, to get just to feel feel like you're doing something and build confidence. But as a coach, you know that it's not actually gonna accumulate into anything negative before the the event. So a lot of that last week is really just kind of balancing nerves with like kind of minimum movement needed to stay fresh, but also recognizing that like hey, you got to compete in a couple days.
SPEAKER_00:We're gonna do some basic nutrition and hydration concepts here, partially because we're an hour and 15 minutes into this episode already, and partially because I really believe in the idea of the test retest model. This is generic advice that should be manipulated to basically be plus or minus so that you it can be personalized for you. One of the reasons why I think it's really important for athletes to know their ideal body weight during the year. So basically, if I get heavier, is the trade-off for how much stronger I'm getting actually worth how my fucking muscle ups and running and burpees feel, and vice versa. If I cut, and it shouldn't be based on the way you look, that's not gonna fucking help you. If I cut and my muscle ups feel great, and and to me, that's always the one. I love I love doing a cut and doing some muscle ups.
SPEAKER_01:It's fucking a beautiful thing.
SPEAKER_00:Um, but my muscle ups, my burpees, all that stuff, again, is that trade-off there for do I have the energy and the endurance pieces? Am I strong enough? And we test the we do a cut and we do a you know a surplus and maintenance throughout the year to know what that number is. And one of the main reasons we do that is so that we hold ourselves to a standard of I need to weigh 195 pounds during comp prep. I gotta eat and fuel myself to a place because athletes will wake up on mornings where they're six, seven pounds under because of their hydration and because of their nutrition. And you will not be able to train yourself to the point where you're gonna get significantly better during a comp prep. Um, so throughout the year, figure out what works best for you and then really make sure that you're, you know, weighing yourself on a regular basis. And one of the things that I really like here is at peak volume. So let's say you're following Myths of Athletics and it's you know week three, four, five of a comp prep, pretend like you're competing. Be really annoying about your meals, like write them down on a piece of paper, go in to the, you know, go into your app and pre-plan your meals and make adjustments based on that. Um, so like you get a test run, you get like high volume, high stress. Um, you know, you're dealing with maybe your sleep being, you know, interrupted a little bit because of, you know, how much volume you're doing, that sort of thing. How is your body reacting to the fuel that you're putting in it? And then you can make some changes. Again, if you have three weeks of it, you get the opportunity to make some tweaks there as you're going through it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I think the other just planning component I'd add to that is like, so are you are you doing this locally? Are you at home every night and therefore eating exactly what you normally eat? Or is it like, well, part of the day before competition is the giant Whole Foods run, and like, are you able to get the same food that you're used to eating? Or what like what are you gonna eat? Just a straight up simple, super simple question. Like what are you gonna eat like as you compete? Because if you're somewhere, somewhere you're not used to, you need to go grocery shop, whatever. What are you eating in between like events? Or you know, are you you you somebody who like, well, normally I just go home and blend together a a shake or a smoothie, and it's like, well, you don't have that. Like, are you gonna experiment with like some weird fucking goo the first day of your competition? Like, that's a terrible idea. You gotta like know what that kind of the logistics of that are gonna look like on game day and and practice it.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, for sure. So again, we are testing everything related to this. You get an opportunity in training to test how you're feeling, how you're recovering, and making adjustments based on that. I am a big fan of carb loading going into a competition, and it doesn't need to it doesn't need to be crazy, but we really want to top off glycogen stores going into a competition. And here's what I'll tell people that are afraid of drinking too much water, eating too many carbs, scared of sodium, any of that stuff. Do a situation where you taper and actually hydrate yourself and fuel yourself properly and see what happens. It is fucking wild. Like when your body is fully recovered and carbed up and hydrated and has the right electrolyte balance, we're talking about full percentage points of improvement in what you're doing, how what your output is. And I can tell you the psychological effect, the placebo effect of I feel good while I'm suffering when I normally don't feel this good is rocket fuel for a competitor. You feeling like you feel better in the moment where you're pushing harder allows you to push even harder. So I just want to put that out there. I know that a lot of times when you're speaking to the general population, they're thinking more about longevity than they are about execution, that kind of thing. So very important to put out there. Single day competition, your local throwdown, two days out. So if you're competing on a Saturday, up your carbs on Thursday and Friday. Pretty straightforward. If it is a multi-day competition, um, I would basically just add one to however many days of competition, typically. So if you're doing a two-day competition, it's three days before, if you're doing a three-day competition, four days before. Um, and all we're doing is increasing carbs by, again, we'll start with this generic assessment by 50% of your body weight. We'll call it. So you weigh 200 pounds, you're gonna add 100 grams of carbs extra on top. And it does help to do more of the carb loading kind of that night before to make sure that you actually are topped off. And then really the only thing that you have to do the morning before an event is get enough carbs for liver glycogen because your body will use that first.
SPEAKER_03:Are you doing that on top of your prescribed macros? Or are you, you know, if I add a hundred calories in carb or a hundred grams of carbs here, I need to find 400 calories where to get somewhere else?
SPEAKER_00:Definitely athlete to athlete. For a lot of, you know, let's take uh one end of the spectrum being a testosterone-fueled uh 23-year-old man. Yeah, 400 calories gets thrown into the incinerator. Doesn't fucking matter. What a lot of people do that are concerned with maintaining a specific amount of weight is it comes from fat. And then the digestibility is also very important. So athletes stop, you know, relying on higher fiber sources, you know, in those situations. One, because of like how full you feel and the palatability of them, and two, just because we are specifically trying to top off muscle glycogen in that situation. All right, finding your ideal hydration target during prep is another thing that's really important. We're just gonna do the generic start with a minimum of half of your body weight in ounces. You weigh 200 pounds, you are drinking at the bare minimum 100 ounces of water in a day. And the feedback that I get every fucking time is I drank 50 ounces of water to catch up towards the end of the day, and I had to piss 600 times before going to bed. How about spreading that out over the course of the day? Because it's actually not that much water if you're training, and you're gonna find that you need more. Yeah. But that is a really good place to start. You need more water if it's hot out, and you need more water if you're sweating during training. So that's our baseline, and then we're adding to that. And again, try training hydrated. It's crazy. I'm telling you. It's crazy. It's it's one of the ones where I personally like I know my gears, I know what I'm supposed to be holding on machines, and there's this point in around 65 to 75 percent in where you just gotta hold that pace for one more minute or two more minutes or three more minutes where it normally would be manageable, and that's when you feel your core temperature rising, um, get caught in mouth while you're doing a workout, like that sort of thing. It's hell, right? You either don't hold the pace or you go into zone nine on a workout that was supposed to be aerobic and smooth, like that kind of thing. So really important for people to try it out. Because I know a lot of people train without being hydrated, and there is a massive difference. Anything you want to add to that before we jump into like in competition?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the only thing, other thing that I would want an athlete to consider is like, hey, a week or two out, making sure that you are, if you're not already doing things like vitamin C, vitamin D, like protecting the immune system. Pretty standard supplements, but like especially the immune system if you're gonna travel and like, or if it's a multi-day competition where you're just gonna be around hundreds of other people in a tight, tight space. Um, just particularly relevant to me personally, got sick at the end of the Masters games. Kelly went into the games a little bit under the weather, probably less related to like the immediate surrounding area, but like again, you get on it, you get in an airport, you get in a plane, you go through get a connection, like so easy to get sick and just like that one.
SPEAKER_00:You also don't know you were sick until like Monday, and then you're like, that explains that event. Exactly, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So I think that'd be the only thing that I'd want somebody else to consider.
SPEAKER_00:All right, competing specific details on warming up. We do a sweat check to begin every warm-up that is 12 to 15 minutes on machines, going from your resting heart rate and ending around your zone two heart rate. I like to break it up into chunks for athletes that don't love warming ups. Five minutes on the rower, five minutes on the echo bike, five minute jog, that kind of thing. If the machine or running is in the workout, that's typically going to be the final four to five minute chunk so that you're actually doing a specific movement warm-up there. I do like a heart rate monitor and headphones in that situation. So an athlete can be paying attention to where they're at and not getting, you know, you know, doing more work than they need to. It's really about that is you letting your body know, hey, we are at rest and we're about to go to war. And it takes your body about 12 to 15 minutes to figure out that that's what you're up to. And it does not react in the same way if you don't warm up properly and then spike your heart rate. So very important there. Typically, then move on to mobility and stability. I give suggestions, but I really like an athlete that knows I'm about to squat, I'm about to handstand walk, I'm about to do et cetera. I know what opens up my shoulders, I know what opens up my hips. I know that if I gotta do high rep deadlifts, that I'm gonna do three sets of banded good mornings because that just lets me know what it feels like to, you know, maybe pick the bar up with my hamstrings and, you know, finish the rep with my glutes or whatever it is, that sort of things. Again, test different things during your prep and know what works for you. From there, we typically go to movement prep. Sometimes you gotta be really careful. So let's say it's really simple. It's like legless rope climbs, strict handstand push-ups, and a monostructural movement. The amount of actual movement prep there could be dangerous. Too many legless, too many pegboards, too many strict handstand push-ups before. So we're gonna make sure the positions feel good. We have to make sure that we do enough reps to make sure that we sort of know where our body's at. But like, man, the amount of people that will do like seven legless rope climbs in the warm-up area and then not be able to do enough out on the floor is definitely a thing. So you gotta be careful. You're gonna space your warm-up out a little bit, maybe have a little bit more time where you just go sit on a machine to make sure that you stay warm. But then we've got workouts with three movements, and I'm just kind of getting getting them a rotation. It is the machine that you're gonna be on in the workout, and then it's kip swings, and then it's empty bar front squats. And then each time we make our way around, we're getting closer to the workout intensity, we're getting closer to the either the full movement or the full weight that we're going to be using. And that's typically gonna take like 10-ish minutes, somewhere in that range. The style of workout will dictate whether we need a movement-specific primer, whether we really got to like jolt the heart rate. Some athletes get in their head about this and don't want to do a primer with bar muscle-ups in it because it will somehow magically remove their bar muscle up ability. So I'll let them just hammer the echo bike for 10, 15 seconds and call it. But I like a little, just a little run through at intensity that's honestly really short, like 30 seconds, 45 seconds, where an athlete's just like, okay, that's what this is, and my heart rate's up. And it's it's okay to really get your heart rate up because you typically got a corral for 10 minutes.
SPEAKER_03:Right. That kind of thing. I think this is honestly this warm-up portion is where having a coach is so helpful. And if you're an athlete on your own planning this sort of thing out a little bit ahead of time, like I do, I'll do this for Tony and Kelly literally to the minute. We're talking like, hey, your warmup starts 58 minutes before your key time, like to the minute. It's not 62 minutes because then you're gonna be standing around for 25 minutes instead of 20 in the corral. Like it's super specific. And the number of times also you see athletes like, hey, it's a lifting, you know, it's a lifting event. You're there an hour before the event, you're 10 minutes in, you're already starting to move a barbell, and 30, 20 minutes before you corral, you're already at your opening weight. And now you need to do something in order to sustain kind of the readiness that you've created. And you turn and you end up, they end up doing uh a dozen reps. It's just like, what are you what do you do? Are you working out or are you like getting ready to to do an event here? And having a coach to kind of like be you know in the athlete area say, like, hey, why like why is there 135 pounds on the bar already? You got 45 minutes, like piss off, like go go choose some bubblegum. Yep. Just like having that timing down is really important. Even with a like a Metcon, like you know, timing that sort of thing up so that you are doing that primer, like you know, hey, first call on the mic, it's like lane two, Drew Crandall. It's like, okay, Crandall, go do your primer now. Like, they'll be fine. You're not gonna get kicked out of the competition. Like, go to your primer, be breathing hard as you get into the corral. But like timing that the warm-up up is super important. And if you're like too far ahead or obviously too far behind, more often than not, athletes just kind of get antsy and start, just they're just like, I want to get going, I want to start warming up. And it's like, congratulations, you're ready to go with 35 minutes till start time.
SPEAKER_00:I pride myself on on responding to as many people as I can and helping you guys out. The next time you have a comp and you know that your first event is at 1235 and that they're gonna call you at 1225. Shoot me a DM, shoot me an email, and I will build you a template that shows you it's gonna take me 90 seconds to do, and I will show you what we mean. But I use Apple Notes for athletes. Um, sorry if you're an Android user, you can't, I you can't, that's in my uh remote coaching application. And I will just have it right there. They open their phone, they click on notes, and it's updated for each event. You can use Google Sheets, there's a bunch of different things that you can use. Obviously, the Android thing was a joke. Okay, execution in workouts. This this part's gonna be really quick, but we are the expectation at a competition is that you are doing the fastest version of said workout that you would do in all of the 365 days of the year, right? Like I am trying to do this as fast as possible. And I just like to talk about the idea of your the hardest you can go on a Tuesday might actually be like an eight or nine RPE, right? What are the stakes? Do I don't even have the adrenaline to go there, right? You know, the the the mom lifts the car so that the baby can get out. Like, yeah, our body works in different ways when we are in a heightened state. But where does it actually come from? What does it look like when it's executed? It doesn't really look any different. To the naked eye, there shouldn't, you should not be able to tell, especially if this is like a medium to long duration workout. It is, you know, when I get back in from my run, I do not chalk up and then start my rope climb. I am on my run already, like halfway up that fucking rope, right? Like I'm really thinking about the next thing that I'm doing. So it comes in your transitions, it comes in realizing that you thought that this workout was going to be done by everyone there at a thousand calves per hour. It's 1200. Yeah. Right? Like, and you might only be on that machine for 30 or 60 seconds, but it's gonna feel different. Um, that kind of thing. So it comes from taking 10% that's being saved for these moments and spreading it out over the course of whatever duration the workout is. So it's gonna seem really subtle if it's a 20-minute workout, and it might be a little bit more apparent if it's two or three minutes long and you just, you know, it's kind of a full send situation. But when you are thinking about executing, you have to think about spreading that intensity out. Otherwise, you're just gonna be another fucking person who showed up at a competition with the ability to execute on a level that they never have, and then you do not execute that way because you can't fucking pace. Yeah, anything to add to that. All right, cooling down. This one is very important. We are essentially chasing three to four things here. We need to keep our heart rate elevated enough and have muscle contractions so that our body takes the waste that is in our muscles and in our bloodstream and brings it back through the filtration system, which is going to be your lungs and your heart. If our heart rate, and what this is this is one of those things where um an athlete who is a little bit fitter, if you don't go do your cooldown, your heart rate is going to drop a lot because you're fit. And then that stuff is going to be very stagnant. So 12 to 15 minutes, once again, kind of the reverse order of the warm-up, we're keeping our heart rate up kind of a little bit. Maybe like because your heart rate was so high, you probably don't need to actually be at like zone two. It's probably closer to like zone one, but you gotta give four to five minutes of like almost a moderate, slight effort, probably harder than you want to go. And then we're just gonna taper that all the way down to going very slow by the end. If we've got a quick turnaround, you can start the process of carbs and protein pretty quickly there. I do like an athlete to have their wits about them, to be just trying to shift over, stimulating the vagus nerve, trying to get into rest and digest because your body's gonna do a little bit better with that. There are two versions though of post-workout nutrition. Number one is letting your body know that it is done trying to be catabolic and that it needs to become anabolic. And that comes from an insulin spike. And we get a good insulin spike from whey protein and carbohydrates. We can mix a lot of times that's gonna be in liquid form. So hopefully there's water and some sodium to sort of get that done. But that doesn't need to be a high number, that is a signal that you're sending to your body. So it's not necessarily actually refueling. Another thing that is missed often is lowering your core temperature. You will not get out of a catabolic state with your core temperature higher. Your body is trying as hard as it possibly fucking can, working overtime, to drop your core temperature. Your palms, the bottom of your feet, and your forehead are the three places on your body where you can rapidly lower your core temperature. So, do I need to cannonball into the ice bath and stress my body out like to the nth degree? Is that a good idea during competition? No, probably not. You can get in the ice bath or a cold tub, but it shouldn't be for very long. We just want, like if you're shivering, that's a problem. That's too far. That's for hormesis, that's for outside of the competition. So, you know, dunking your head in the water, getting your hands in the water, um, bonus points for feet and hands in the water. There's a reason why that sucks more than everywhere else. And that's because you don't have hair follicles there, and you're actually like just full on taking the fucking brunt of the cold to that spot. Lowering core temperature is one of the one of the ones that I think people miss a lot. And you doing all of this work to get your body out of that catabolic state, if you're really hot, which a lot of times you are either because of the workout or wherever you are isn't cooled, you're gonna do significantly worse over the course of the competition if you can't figure out how to lower your core temperature.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah, I think my only thing to add on just general cooling down is is kind of a framework of like as an athlete, you have to think about cooling down as like almost like a warm-up for your next event, or you know, even like the, you know, especially at the end of a day, the last thing you want to do is stay in the athlete area and fucking hang out. Like you want to go home, you want to get food, you want to go to sleep. That cool down is what is going to set you up for success in the next event before you before you warm back up. And I think you're gonna touch on like the refueling aspect, depending on, you know, hey, I got another event here in another 90 minutes. That's a different protocol than like, hey, it's the end of the day, I need to go home and get refueled. Sure. But you have to frame the cooldown in your head after every event as like preparation for the next event. It can't be just like, yep, yep, that event's gone. Like this cooldown doesn't matter. It's like, no, you this cooldown serves the next event, the next day, the next two days if it's a multi-day competition.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So general refueling guidelines, if you're doing a one-day competition, you're gonna think that you don't need to deal with this as much. And your actual like how many calories you consume over the course of that day are so fucking important because you don't get like another, you don't get another go round, right? If you keep depleting, if you keep sweating out all of your water and sodium and burning up all of your glycogen, which will tank significantly faster because of your stress levels as well, then you're gonna have an event where you think it's just, oh man, this is the volume from the competition, and it's not. You did not refuel, you didn't hydrate, you didn't top off your electrolytes, and you didn't top off your glycogen. So that is incredibly important. One quick reference to a study that they did athletes who were doing a multi-day competition that got, so they made sure that both groups got the same amount of carbohydrates, but one group was allowed to do them in larger batches less frequently, and one group had to get 40 to 60 grams of carbs per hour for each hour one through three after an event. So you finish your event at 12 p.m. Between 12 and 1, they had to get 40 to 60 grams, one and two, they had to get 40 to 60 grams, two and three, they had to get 40 to 60 grams, and they went and retested the athletes, and there was a significant difference in the athletes who did it on the per hour basis versus the lump sum. So technically, we are getting the same amount of carbohydrates into the muscle cell. But part of what's going on here is like, again, if you're in that catabolic state, your body's going to be using things very differently than if it feels like you're in recovery mode. And one of the ways to signal to your body that you are in rest and digest is by eating. It's also probably has something to do with like, it was actually pretty easy to eat those things and to digest them versus like that car, you know, that whatever your 300 gram carb meal was, you know, really challenging to kind of get down, that sort of thing. So we are thinking about that through the course of the day. If you are going to perform better later in the day or better the next day by having kind of that steady stream, that's something to keep in mind as you're refueling. And again, you get to test these things and practice them over the course of the entire prep and most importantly during those weeks where the volume gets super high.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think these, those like very specific things, the refueling between events or before and you know, in the week leading up, refueling between training pieces is where you can really one, you like like you said, kind of learn how you feel and operate after doing that sort of thing, but also like again, like what are you gonna eat? Like you, you, you know, if it's like I train and then I go home and I make this thing versus like I'm kind of antsy, like my hotel's too far away, I can't get an Uber, it's gonna be a pain in the ass. I might as well hang out in the athlete area. It's like, well, are you now eating something that you've never eaten in training before? And you're just like, well, I'm trying to get my carbs, but the only thing I have is the fucking bugles in the in the vending machine. It's like you're gonna have a bad time. So learning, like again, kind of thinking ahead to what in training, thinking ahead to what the event is going to be like from just a logistical perspective. perspective and then like you know have have some back have a backup plan. It's like okay turns out I couldn't fucking make it home and tell Athletic in my Airbnb or hotel.
SPEAKER_00:For in between even if they think they get to go home. Because sometimes you don't.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah for sure. Love hope hope we can go home but plan on plan on being here all day. Bring everything you need, that sort of thing. Yeah. No know what you're gonna be doing for in that situation before you get to the competition.
SPEAKER_00:So my final thoughts will just be that there are key details that are left out here for the sole purpose of the fact that this was one hour, 42 minutes and 27 seconds of us talking and there's a whole nother world and rabbit hole to go down on each topic. But my end goal for this is for you to wrap your mind around best practices and then learn how to personalize them for yourself because it is October and it's not quarterfinal season yet and it's not semifinal season yet and it's not game season yet or even time for you know say Watapalooza, that kind of thing. So you can start to figure these things out for yourself, talk about them in Telegram, shoot me an email, shoot me a DM, we'll kind of talk through them. But setting yourself up to succeed um and not, you know, being like fucking everybody else and let yourself self-sabotage so once the comp is over you can say I told you I didn't care. No one believes that you don't care um if you've got 16 different types of grips and you go to the gym 19 times a week. Like let's let's get past that. Let's let's increase that maturity meter a little bit and figure out what works best for us so that we can use all of the hard work that we've put in when it's time for the showcase.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah my final thoughts are just I kind of think back to across the podcast and we didn't really talk much about like well what's the right set rep and percentage on my lifts in order to prepare for this competition. Like there's pretty much no athlete is who savvies themselves as a competitor who is not going to put the work in in the gym. Like that's basically never the limiting factor for anybody's potential in this in this sport or frankly like even somebody who wants to come in and improve their health and wellness. Like the idea to come in and work out for whether it's one hour a day in a class or do two two training sessions spread out over a couple hours, like the willingness to do the work is almost never in question. There are a whole shitload of additional variables outside of your training that become part of what is necessary to perform at a high level as a competitor. And that's kind of what we talked about today. And the other you know 50 some odd weeks of the year is your lab for learning exactly what those exact combination of things and what scenarios create the optimal performing version of you. And it's just your job to put those together so that when it is you know game day, when it is time to actually compete as few of those variables as possible are unknown. Because there's always there's always going to be a whole bunch of them but just honestly just the the reprieve and stress of knowing like yeah this is like what I've been eating in between events all year or I know that this works well with my digestion and my stomach like just that even small things that remove stress from your head space your mindset because like imagine you go into the first event and you drop 30th out of 30 and it's like you thought every and then like fuck what am I supposed to eat? You're already fired you're already keyed up because you're frustrated about performance and then you've got a whole bunch of other completely ancillary things that have nothing to do with your physical capacity or the event that you just because you didn't plan through or think about or work on in the offseason are now going to like have now just compounded significantly on your ability to perform when when they didn't have to. So I think it's important to understand that this whole podcast is essentially like you know this is us pointing out the the myriad of variables that can contribute to the optimal version of you or the 70% version of you. And it's just your job to find the right combination of things that get you as close to that hundred percent version for game day.
SPEAKER_00:True. We do it thank you for tuning into another episode of the Misfit podcast head to the link in bio on our Instagram to get signed up for training camp at CrossFit Roots in Boulder, Colorado January 30th through February 1st phase two gets started on Monday November 3rd you can also find the link in bio on Instagram for Fitter or strivey if you're looking for our affiliate programming we just got started today on the Montezuma phase you can get signed up for that two weeks for free heading to Team Mistfits not too late dot com clicking on sign up now and getting two weeks for free at SugarWaz Stream Fit or Push Press and if by some miracle you are still listening to me talk right now feel free to email me coach at misfitathletics.com and I will send you the first two weeks for free. See you next week.
SPEAKER_04:Later all right you think bunch of misfits biggest bunch of misfits I