I’ve spent a lot of time considering the most productive and beneficial ways to scale workouts for individual athletes. I talk about the danger of ‘over scaling’ in The Perils of Scaling.
At first glance, scaling for an individual would seem the logical approach. But are there situations where scaling could jeopardise the rate of improvement of an individual?
First, let’s define some terms:
Training ‘for’ your abilities would involve scaling a training session so it has the exact desired effect of the programming. Often involves reducing the difficulty of the movements/elements that limit your performance. In my opinion, the only way to train ‘for’ your abilities is to base lifts off a percentage of your max dependant on the number of repetition being completed. Sessions are carefully designed to have a certain effect. A set weight may cause one athlete to complete a workout in three minutes, while another takes 20 minutes. If the session were intended to be completed in three minutes, the stimulus would have been completely lost for the 20 minute athlete. We manage this by always programming percentages based on the number of repetitions called upon by the workout. This retains the desired stimulus and maximises the training effect. 21, 15, 9 reps of thrusters and pull-ups may be a strength session for some, and a highly intense cardio-respiratory session for others.
In this way, a session that has been designed to improve conditioning would have conditioning as the limiting factor. If you want to improve something, that ‘thing’ must be the limiting factor in your training. For example, if you want to improve strength, it must be the weight of the load you’re lifting that causes you to stop. If you have to stop because you’re breathing hard, you will not reach the limits of your strength. To improve any element, that element must be the limiting factor in your session.
Training ‘above’ your abilities involves performing a session where certain elements fall above your current perceived levels.
There are a few situations where I would program for an athlete to train ‘above’ their abilities. An example of this was in the 2013 CrossFit Open. Our team had almost 100 athletes, ranging from rank beginners to Regionals qualifiers and top 25 worldwide masters competitors. Our skill and ability set was broad. In this competition, there was no scaling. If you could not do a movement you were stuck. If you could do just one rep you would leap frog the thousands of people who weren’t able to perform that skill. Our training for this competition involved many of our athletes training ‘above’ their abilities (with an immediate red flag with any loss of technique).
As soon as people are not given the option to scale movements, they have no choice but to persist, adapt and overcome. The struggle to achieve the previously unachievable, and the journey they must make to overcome the previously insurmountable is often more valuable in the long run than the alternative. The result, more often than expected, is a virgin performance – a PB’d lift, a first pull-up/toes to bar/muscle-up/handstand push-up/double under.
It all comes down to the intent of a session. For effective programming to work, the sessions must challenge the components of an athlete’s fitness that they are designed to.
With the above in mind, here are my thoughts:
- Components of fitness should be trained in isolation. I discuss this in How to Eradicate Your Weaknesses in CrossFit. By isolating your weaknesses, you can improve them, meaning that they will no longer be the limiting factors in session that have been programmed with a different intent.
- By isolating weakness, your ability to perform in standard CrossFit style ‘WODs’ will increase. To this end, programming percentages for weighted conditioning pieces is a must. As you progress, so do your loads, and you retain the programmed emphasis of the session.
- There is a place for training ‘above’ your abilities (with a non-negotiable ’emergency stop’ for a loss of safe movement). For competitive CrossFitters (who see CF as their sport), competition makes certain demands. Training above your abilities replicates these demands in training – train as you play.
Different methods have their place. Careful and intelligent programming, tailored for the individual will ensure a constant upward trend in performance.
