Legion Strength & Conditioning Podcast

What's up with the programming at the Sanctional events? Are events doing a good job of selecting and testing the athletes that are going to be moving on to the CrossFit Games? Should HQ step in and create specific standards surrounding how they want the testing to run? Now that we've seen a few of these Sanctionals - and Jon and I were at Wodapalooza in person soaking it all in and jostling for position to be able to see our athletes compete - it's time to break down some initial thoughts on how these things are going.

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Phil Mansfield is a multi-disciplinary coach with a history competing and/or coaching in rugby, cycling, swimming, triathlon and more. In the CrossFit world, he is best known as the coach to multi-time CrossFit Games podium finisher Sara Sigmundsdottir. We got up early - well, early for me (Phil’s internal clock was still on Denmark time) - after Wodapalooza to have a quick chat before Phil did a postmortem on the competition with Sara.

Check out more from Phil and RedPill Training

• Instagram:

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Show Notes

• [00:14] A proper coffee
• [01:34] What are the consequences of fast tracking an athlete - and having someone who is very good in sport but who has skipped steps during athletic development?
• [06:04] Almost all training can be broken down to either working on skill acquisition or threshold training.
• [09:51] How to find the appropriate amount of variation in skill acquisition training. “Once we say ‘for time’ everything changes.”
• [20:49] How do you convince an athlete to potentially back off and focus on rebuilding if they’ve “skipped steps” in their development?
• [33:18] The value of mindset coaching in competitive sport - and where a lot of people go wrong with their approach to mental toughness.
• [44:04] How do you help athletes create organization and structure for their thoughts? And how do you translate practicing meta-cognition into training and competing?

Links and Resources Mentioned

• Dunning–Kruger Effect
• James Jowsey
• Gary Gray
• Sara Sigmundsdóttir
• Dubai Crossfit Championship
• Wodapalooza

As soon as someone training in CrossFit gets past that initial hump and starts to see some improvements in their training results, a common question starts to haunt their thoughts.

A question vocalized by Peter Steele in Type O Negative's 1996 classic "Love You to Death."

"Am I good enough?"

And...."How long until I get good?"

Like most of these kinds of questions, there's not a clear cut answer. But there are some lessons to be learned from the typical trajectory of development observed for thousands of athletes over time.

There are also some psychological quirks involved that can trick athletes and give them a distorted perspective on their improvement and what their maximum potential may be - and these tricks function in both the positive and negative direction.

In this conversation, Jon, Luke and Todd discuss:

• The hedonic treadmill - or Assault runner - of adaptation, and why it feels like you're always just short of being at the level that you want to compete at
• The fast feedback loop of the internet and social media and why this may be great for elevating performance...but terrible for fulfillment and sense of well-being
• A disagreement in how long it typically will take for an athlete to be able to transition from beginning CrossFit into doing full fledged "competitive" training
• And finally...Jon's philosophy of coaching based upon disappointment, regret & shame

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You've probably heard of the 10,000 hour rule.

And it probably sounded really good.

Put in 10,000 hours of work and become a world class expert at anything!

Problem is, the common explanations of the 10,000 hour rule miss the mark.

The rule originally came from some of Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice and world class performers - then gained notoriety through Malcolm Gladwell's distillation of the rule in his book "Outliers."

Now, we've got all kinds of goofballs throwing around the "10,000" number in CrossFit like it's the secret to success.

Not only do they not understand the true discomfort of the deliberate practice concept (meaning that you have to spend an inordinate amount of time deeply focused and right on the edge of your ability with constant feedback and correction), but they're also improperly applying a concept related to skill acquisition to a sport that is more determined by physiological adaptation (ie how quickly can you recover between a heavy set of power cleans, how much oxygen can you transfer in and out of your muscle cells while doing chest-to-bar pull-ups and burpees, etc.).

We've had enough!

In this conversation, Jon, Luke and Todd discuss:

• Why the amount of data available on the performance of elite CrossFit athletes is both a blessing and a curse - and how people use this data to confuse themselves about where they sit relative to the elite


• What are the true key performance indicators for CrossFit performance


• Why adaptation to training over time isn't linear - and why the rate of adaptation is true "talent"


• And finally...why everyone should quit talking about 10,000 hours



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Andy Edwards is one of the CrossFit OGs on the British Islands. He’s been on the CrossFit Level One seminar staff for years, and he’s also coached Jamie Greene to an 8th place finish at the CrossFit Games in 2017, an 11th place finish in 2018, and a nail-biter of a second place finish at the Dubai CrossFit Championship last week.

• Why some athletes can put up crazy numbers in training...but struggle to have success on competition day
• How Andy structures a week of training for his elite athletes...including how often he has his athletes touch high intensity training throughout the week
• Why Andy prefers prescribing specific paces in conditioning workouts instead of using an RPE scale (rate of perceived exertion)
• How Andy figures out what Jamie is capable of...given that she is one of the best competitors in the world and doesn't have many athletes with whom she can compare her scores

The training of many elite athletes involves seemingly endless intervals suffering on the assault bike and the erg.
While there seems to be a general understanding now that the flashy 1RM PRs clogging up our Instagram feeds don't necessarily translate into improve performance in the sport of CrossFit - what about the long hours of grunt work spent rowing, running, biking and skiing?

Are you wasting your time sweatin' to the oldies on the assault bike? Does hard work actually pay off here?

There is certainly value in putting in work in cyclical modalities, and we use running, rowing, biking, etc. regularly in the training programs for our clients.
However, the link between improving aerobic capacity in something like a 5k row and getting better at twenty minutes of burpee box jumps and DB snatches is a bit more tenuous than one might think.

So, how should we think about integrating running and rowing into our programming?
Is it enough to do some "CrossFit metcons" and layer an interval-based endurance program on top of that?
What is the relationship between improving scores on tests of cyclical aerobic capacity (like a 2k row, 3k run or 10 min assault bike test) and improving mixed modal tests (like Open workout 18.1, 17.1, or named workouts like Kelly or Eva)?

Jon and I both worked with Kristin during the NPGL's amateur GRID tournament - remember GRID? We put together a team of misfits and went out to LA to compete, and we actually did pretty well. We took second overall, which meant that we got an automatic bid to the next year's tournament. Still waiting for that invite...

Kristin has gone on to make two CrossFit Games appearances with OC3 Black (in 2017) and CrossFit Mayhem Independence (in 2018). She will compete with CrossFit Mayhem Freedom in the 2019 season - which is shaping up to have quite the interesting structure.

Show Notes

• [0:14] How did Kristin end up at CrossFit Mayhem? And the anxiety of “trying out.”


• [7:03] Commuting several hours to compete with OC3 in 2016


• [13:19] Kristin’s dietary restrictions


• [19:44] Getting started with competing in CrossFit


• [23:42] What actually happens at Mayhem on a daily basis (There are no schedules)


• [34:53] Mayhem athletes mostly train individually - so how do they develop the team communication skills necessary to compete?


• [46:36] How is Mayhem approaching the changes to the 2019 CrossFit Games season?


• [52:21] How do Mayhem athletes work on their own individual weaknesses while still training as a group?

In competitive CrossFit, most people tend to either consistently go out too hot on every workout (and have a melt down a few minutes in), or they tend to overpace everything and always feel like they had more in the tank to give.

Based upon this, a coach needs to be able to understand what kind of prescription will give each athlete what he or she needs in order to improve understanding of the appropriate effort for a given situation.

So, is the best way to do this by giving athletes freedom to feel things out? Or is it to give them prescribed paces and weights so that they have to learn how the feel when tasked with accomplishing a specific prescription.

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When it comes to "effort" in skill training, it seems that less is more.

Athletes who compete in CrossFit often thrive on giving full effort. They enjoy the process of pushing themselves - and they also believe that, unless they've given everything they had in a session - that they did not maximize their time on the gym floor.

In skill acquisition, however, full effort is not necessarily full victory.

In fact, many athletes need to learn to relax as they perform skills like muscle-ups, handstand push-ups, and barbell cycling. Being too tense during workouts with high volumes of these kinds of movements is one of the easiest ways to get really, really tired.

It can be challenging for folks to take a step back and work on improving the quality of their movement through consistent, low intensity practice - and it can also be difficult for them to work on movement in an unstructured "play" type environment without prescribed reps and sets.

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Todd and Luke continue to talk through the changes to the 2019 CrossFit Games season.

The incentives for people to participate in the different competitions will change significantly - and we will see people having to put much more thought into their training as they decide which competitions to truly peak for.

No longer is everyone on roughly the same schedule in terms of shooting to make it through the Open to Regionals, then shooting to make it through Regionals to the Games.

Now, we will see some gamesmanship as far as attempting to schedule the season in a way that makes sense.

We will also see variation in athletes between those who actually have a plan for how to approach multiple events in a season compared to those who just want to throw down all year.

Todd and Luke break down:

• What will the toll of repeated online qualifiers be on athletes?


• Is it possible to create a points structure that allows athletes to bypass the typical qualifying process?


• Is there an opportunity for a crowdsourced peer review process to cut down on the amount of dishonesty in online qualifiers?


• How many teams can an athlete peak in a season? And how will athletes game which events and which qualifiers they choose to do?