The Living Superhuman Fitness Podcast

Why do we need them?

Mental reset. Critical for the mental aspect. Never want training to feel like a chore.

Physical reset. You may not be hitting workouts as hard as you can because you haven't let your body rebuild to get you ready for the next wod.

Take a rest day before you know you need a rest day.  It's almost too late if you wait to use a rest day when your body really needs it.

Longer term approach to CrossFit and avoids burnout.

Avoiding injury. Letting nagging injuries heal and rebuild. Don't let the little tweaks or strains become big problems.

Listen to your body and learn your body. It's an invaluable tool for any athlete.

What are the differences between "Rest" and "Active Recovery" days?

What is a Rest Day?

Do nothing for the whole day. Just relax and stay outside the gym, reset yourself mentally.

What is an Active Recovery Day?

Low intensity aerobic work just to get a sweat, higher heart rate but still easily able to hold a conversation. Will often last 20-40 minutes.

Can be inside or outside the gym. In south Florida we should try to stay outside the gym and find a physical activity we can enjoy in the sun.

Take the gym outside. Grab a rower and kettlebell and take it outside into the sun. Get some vitamin D and a nice sweat on.

Keep your heart rate under 150. Sometimes you can sweat more in an active recovery workout, just keep your heart rate down.

Great opportunity to work on a skill, or take on a weakness. Just remeber to keep overall volume down.

Do some monostructural movements like running, rowing, biking, burpees, jump rope.

Let your CNS, central nervous system, relax and work very little on these days.

Can also be a stretching or yoga session. Do a ROMWOD session.

Downsides to Rest Days:

If you do nothing, you can feel tighter the next day at your workout.

Rest days can lead to more rest days. Where as active recovery days can keep you on top of that daily routine.

Downsides to Active Recovery Days:

You can overdo an active recovery day. Don't let them turn into a training day.  Resist the temptation to join the class WOD.

Programming is often put together with recovery days built in. Athletes like Katrin Davidsdottir, who follows CompTrain programming, knows she will leave Thursday and Sunday as active

Episode 20: Why Strength is Not Your Weakness

It's very common to hear as a CrossFit coach… "If only I was stronger…" or "I'm so weak…"

This is a common misconception on how we can best develop as an athlete.

Let's go back to the basics. The foundational pyramid of athletic development as laid out by Coach Glassman.

This is an excerpt from the CrossFit Journal, 2002.

"A Theoretical Hierarchy of Development: A theoretical hierarchy exists for the development of an athlete. It starts with nutrition and moves to metabolic conditioning, gymnastics, weightlifting, and finally sport. This hierarchy largely reflects foundational dependence, skill, and to some degree, time ordering of development. The logical flow is from molecular foundations, cardiovascular sufficiency, body control, external object control, and ultimately mastery and application. This model has greatest utility in analyzing athletes' shortcomings or difficulties."

It appears strength biased programming is all the rage.

Many CrossFit boxes are following this programming model.

Strength wod + metcon = CrossFit

But where is the building of the foundation of the pyramid?

Gyms are usually missing the gymnastic competency and endurance components.

When it comes to a workout like "Fran", it's common for pull-up strength to catch the blame of a bad wod time, when more likely it was the efficiency of the pull-up, or the efficiency of the kip that was lacking.

In a workout like "Karen", 150 wall balls for time, it's easy to blame your leg strength for giving out on you. Everybodys' legs hurt during "Karen", the main difference is the ease and efficiency of the reps. Better mobility in the hips and ankles can help your wall balls immensely.  Better core strength, and moreso, core activation, to hold the ball high next to your face. And with that is strong lat activation. Sometimes the muscle doesn't need to be stronger, it just needs to be activated better for the task at hand.

You're also not going to notice bad form in 20-30 reps in a workout. When you do 150 reps of a given movement, those small inefficiencies in your form are going to show their ugly head around rep 100.  Strength is not your weakness, it's quality of movement that is your weakness. And everybody, even the best CrossFitters, still work on form and movement patterns. In baseball, we referred to it as muscle memory.  It took tens of thousands of swings to properly ingrain the right movement patterns so we can perform them subconsciously.

Strength is just one of the ten fitness skills that make you a well rounded CrossFit athlete.

Endurance, Stamina, Speed, Flexibility, Strength, Power, Accuracy, Agility, Coordination, and Balance are the ten general physical skills.

Even if you included power with strength, that's only 2 out of 10.

There are no shortcuts.  Being good at CrossFit means being good at high volume reps. The CrossFit Games Open always has workouts with rep counts in the 100s.

If you are focusing on getting better and you are choosing strength as your avenue, you are probably picking the slowest way to get there. It takes a long time to get stronger.  Focusing on mobility and flexibility can improve your Olympic lifts just as much as a good strength program.

Strength is sexy. It's easily Instagram-able. It's easy to measure and concrete. Who doesn't love posting a PR?

If you liked this episode also check out Episode 13: What is Fitness?

Our community, you guys, are what keep this podcast going. If you have a moment please leave us a 5-star review on iTunes.

Keep living superhuman.

"In training you listen to your body, in competition you tell your body to shut up." -Rich Froning.  

In CrossFit, many athletes will treat each class like a competition. This leads to burnout, injury, and more serious health problems if your diet and rest isn't there to supplement your "go hard, or go home" lifestyle. 

Each day should be clarified as a practice, training, or competition day, before you get into it. The pressure of the whiteboard/scoreboard must be removed in order for the athlete to focus on quality over quantity. 

In all other sports, you see competition as a small piece of the program. Take football for example. Each Sunday, they leave everything out there on the field. If every day were like Sunday, careers in football would be way shorter than they already are. Each week football players have a healthy mix of practice and training, studying their competition, watching film, mentally preparing and visualizing their performance. They build the foundation that will hold them up, when the adrenaline and excitement take over on Sunday in front of fifty thousand fans or more. When intensity and fight-or-flight is introduced to your body, you better have the foundations built upon that you don't have to think about. 

If you want to have a long term relationship with CrossFit, it has to be built on solid foundations of practice and training. 

There are a lot of positives of competition too.  Making sure you get yourself into local competitions and signing up for the CrossFit Open to get exposed to the excitement and the rush of pushing your limits, can lead to new PRs and accomplishments you may have never though possible. 

Listen to this episode with Coach Andrew, and two of the hardest working competitors in our gym, Coach Dominic and Coach Whitney. 

If you have a moment, we would love a review from you in iTunes. Thank you. 

Keep Living Superhuman. 

The first year of CrossFit is filled with unique challenges that most people don't really expect.  Lots of people come into CrossFit with a ton of motivation, but can become discouraged if they don't have a good understanding of the effect CrossFit can have on their body, and the results they can expect to achieve from it.  Each step along the way presents requires a different mindset and approach in order to be successful.  In this episode, we show you what you can expect from your first day, week, month, and year of CrossFit so you can better overcome challenges and maximize your experience inside and outside the gym.  

In this episode, we introduce the concept of a fixed vs growth mindset, and explain the key differences of each.  We show how adopting a growth mindset can benefit you in an endless amount of ways inside and outside CrossFit Palm Beach.  

Some of the key attributes of a growth mindset include:

-Embrace challenges vs avoid challenges

-Persist in the face of setbacks vs give up easily

-See effort as a path to mastery vs see effort as fruitless

-Learn from criticism vs ignore useful negative feedback

-Find inspiration from the success of others vs feel threatened by the success of others

-Keep reaching higher and achieving more vs plateau early or quit altogether or give up. 

While most people have an understanding of what fitness is, very few exercise programs have a clear definition for what it means to be fit.  CrossFit founder Greg Glassman was one of the first people in the world to articulate what fitness is, and he did so in a pioneering article titled "what is fitness?".  In today's podcast, we discuss some of the frameworks and models Coach Glassman introduced in that article, and why CrossFit is so effective at creating some of the fitness humans on earth.  

In this episode, we address the most common reason people who are interested in trying CrossFit, never actually step foot in the doors and get started.  Even though CrossFit is scalable to all ages and ability levels, many people believe that CrossFit is only for people who are already in shape.  This couldn't be further from the truth.  You don't have to be in shape to do CrossFit, you just have to be willing to show up with an open mind and be willing to challenge yourself.  We will take care of the rest!

In this episode, we discuss what we consider to be the most essential CrossFit gear and what gear you could do without.  We talk about all kinds of equipment from shoes, tape, weightlifting belts, chalk, and everything in between.  

In this episode, we cover the obvious, and not so obvious, benefits of signing up for a CrossFit membership.  While most people compare CrossFit to regular gyms like Gold's, LA Fitness, or Planet Fitness, and say it's too expensive, we explain why you can't compare the two.  We detail all of the additional benefits you get with a CrossFit gym that you wouldn't get at a standard Globo gym, as well as some of the intangible benefits of being a part of the CrossFit community.  

Our CrossFit Palm Beach coaches get together and give their best practices for avoiding CrossFit injury and getting back in the game quickly. Nobody is immune to injury, especially your more competitive athletes, but we know how to minimize risk of injury, specialize warm-ups and cool downs accordingly, train smarter when it comes to feeling "something wrong", and getting stronger while injured by focusing on other areas of performance. Many injuries occur outside the gym, but athletes still want to get a workout in and we can help them do that. Don't miss this episode or you risk missing weeks or months of CrossFit due to injury.