Transcribed from video:
– What I’ve done is I’ve created a checklist you guys can go through. So this is obviously there in your notes. This is the checklist that you guys can go through when you’re about to go into an event and say, alright, these are the things that have to be happening to be able to maximise my performance. Use this in training. These are my 10 laws of strategy. My first law of strategy, determine and protect against the limiting factor. You guys will remember that whatever the limiting factor is on the session, is what that session will train. If you can’t lift the weight ’cause it’s too heavy, you’ll train absolute strength. If you’re breathing really fast, it will train cardiorespiratory endurance. So find what the limiting factor of an event is. If it’s your pull up stamina, you need to protect against that. You need to do smaller sets of pull-ups. If it’s your breathing, that you’re so out of breath, then you need to go at a lower intensity. If it’s your ability to lift that heavy deadlift over and over again, you need to break it up more. So you look at an event, and you go, what is my limiting factor there? Protect against it. Don’t let that limiting factor become a limiting factor until this goes exponential at the end. Alright, you fail the last rep in the last second, you’ve paced it perfectly. Second thing, which we’ve really talked about, find a maximum sustainable pace and maintain that until near the end. Near the end, because you can take advantage of the higher yield energy systems. Don’t hit the wall, ’cause if you do, you’re in trouble. Short sets with short rests. Now this is obvious for someone who’s a long distance runner. You’re not going to start off sprinting. You aren’t going to , okay. You shouldn’t start off sprinting. You may be a little faster for the first couple of hundred metres, as people jockey and fight for position. But if I said to you guys, we’re going to run a 5K, you’re not going to sprint at the start, are you? Let’s say that 5K’s going to take you 25 minutes to run. If I was to say to you, let’s do a 25 minute AMRAP of burpees and wall ball, you’re probably going to start off really fast. Because we get confused by these multiple exercise elements that are working together. But if it’s just a mono structural thing, we tend to get the idea that we should start off and pace well. So take those same strategies. If I was running for this length of time, what intensity, what rate of perceived exertion should I be working at. Same thing applies to cycling a barbell. If you’ve got to do 30 clean and jerk, if you do big sets, you’re going to hit that threshold. And remember, once we hit a threshold, here’s your threshold, once you hit it, you’ve got to hang out above that threshold for ages before you can drop down and start working again. However, if you do, this is with one big set. If you do lots of small sets, or singles, you can hang out just below it. Cycling a barbell is aerobic, or at least it should be aerobic. As soon as you make it anaerobic, you’re in danger of hitting a wall, hitting the threshold. Singles. Singles are super, super, super effective. Unless you really need to go short amount of time. The longer it goes for, the more important the singles are. And that brings us to point five. You want to base the cycle rate on the length of the workout. So the longer your workout goes for, the less important the cycle rate is. But the more important the amount of rest is. So you’re going to have more endurance doing single, three second rest, single, three second rest, than doing 10 reps, and then having a 30 second rest. So you guys will know in the past, there have been crossfit open events where there’s a certain amount of work to do in a certain amount of time, and if you successfully do that, you graduate to the next three minutes. Try and do a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time. Then you graduate to the next three minutes. So there was one a few years ago, and it was overhead squats and chest to bar pull ups. And for a lot of decent athletes, it was easier to start, to get these chest to bar pull ups, maybe it was 10 chest to bar, 10 overhead squats for two rounds, something like that. And a lot of people went, okay I’ve got three minutes to do that, I want to go really fast so I get a good long rest. But what that meant is that they weren’t doing short sets with short rests, they were doing a big set, and then resting. Then the three minutes would come around, they’d start again, fast as they could and then rest. But what happens, because they’re flooding their body with these hydrogen ions, they don’t get cleared from the body, so it doesn’t work. So what I had my athletes do, and what I did, is people were getting it done in a minute and a half, and then they got a minute and a half rest. What I had my guys do was take two minutes and 58 seconds to do it. So take as long as you can to do that. Because it’s better for you to be working at a moderate pace all the time then a massively high pace and then nothing. Even though you’ve done the same amount of work in the three minutes. Who’s done like a death by workout? Where you start off, maybe it’s death by shuttle runs. Okay? So let’s use that as an example. So 10 metre shuttle run, yeah, 10 metres up, 10 metres back. In the first minute, you do two. Rest for the remainder. In the second minute, you do four. Rest the remainder. Third minute you do six. Rest the remainder. What’s the best way to strategize that in the first minute, when there are two 10-meter shuttle runs? How long should it take you to do 20 metres? Yeah, if it’s every minute, 59 seconds. Yeah? How long should it take you to do four laps? 59 seconds. Six laps? 59 seconds. That would be the best way to strategize that. Which is counterintuitive, ’cause you sort of think, ah, I need to get a lot of rest. I’m going to work really hard and have rest. Don’t do that. Absolutely doesn’t work, ’cause you hit the wall. Stay away from those thresholds. Number six, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. So many people look at the individual pieces of a workout in isolation. Yes, I can do 10 power cleaning jerks of 40 kilos unbroken. Sure, cool, you can do that, though that doesn’t mean you should. Because you’re also going to be doing some wall ball and some pull ups and some burpees and a row and a run with this as well. They tend to look at this in isolation. Yes, I can do this. Not considering the impact that has on other stuff. Good example, Crossfit Games a few years ago, there was an event that was a, I think it was a prowler push, and then a handstand walk. And what people thought with this was, okay, well the prowler push is all legs, or maybe it was like a sled drag. It wasn’t using the arms at all. It was all legs. So they would sprint that, then it was a very short amount of time and they had to handstand walk back, and that was a separate event. Something like that. And if you look at the muscle recruitment patterns, which we’ll come to in a moment on point seven here, yeah, well the prowler push isn’t going to impact the handstand walk, so I can go real hard on this, and still be okay for this bit. But the hydrogen ions aren’t selective. They don’t choose which part of your body they go to. They go everywhere. So if you fatigued your lower body, even though you haven’t touched the arms, you’ve got this acid circulating the body, you go to handstand walk, now why are my arms like jelly? I haven’t used them. But it’s a systemic thing. So just because you can go super fast on that one element doesn’t mean you should. Consider the impact it has on other exercises. And consider the impact of muscle recruitment patterns. What did we learn about blood shunting yesterday? It hurts. If we’re doing thrusters, which use a lot of anterior chain, a lot of lower body, a lot of pressing, all the blood goes to our thrust muscles. We then go to do pull ups, all the blood goes to our pull up muscles. We’re shunting blood between the two areas. So in this case, we need to understand this combination of movements, this combination of muscle recruitment patterns, is going to make what the limiting factor? Yeah, our cardiorespiratory endurance, our work capacity. Probably not localised muscular stamina or strength. What if the movement were, what if it was thrusters, and instead of doing the pull ups, we did burpees? Thrusters and burpees. Is there a difference? So let’s look at the thruster. Quad anterior chain dominant, leg dominant, and pressing. How about a burpee? Is it quite lower body dominant? Is it pressing? Yeah? So I would put those in the same category. Or a wall ball. A wall ball is just a thruster with a round bundle. Yeah, it’s the same thing. So if you’ve got a combination of thrusters and burpees, yeah, you’re going to be breathing super hard, but the issue here is not that your cardiorespiratory endurance isn’t good, you’re probably going to reach a level of localised muscular fatigue. Because your burpee muscles, AKA your thruster muscles, are hitting the wall. So try and consider these overlaps, these effects here. What effect is exercise A going to have on B? Either from a systemic point of view, flooding your body with hydrogen ions, or from a localised point of view, because there’s an overlap of muscle recruitment patterns. Handstand push ups and dips and push ups, are you going to stop because you’re out of breath? No, you’re going to stop because you do not have the stamina to be able to straighten the arms anymore. So look at how those movements overlap and interact. Overlap your rest motives. Why might you need to stop and have a rest? So you’re going, it’s getting hard, you need to rest because…
– [Student] Muscle fatigue?
– Yeah, your muscles are fatigued. You’re breathing really heavy. Yep, so you’re burning.
– [Student] Just regrouping mentally.
– Yep, cool, yeah, you need to stop and compose, go , okay, what’s the plan? And what some people will do is they’ll do something that’s quite cardiovascular, maybe they’re doing burpees. So they’re doing their burpees, they’re go go go burpees, they’re breathing relatively hard because you may get oscillations in rate of perceived exertion throughout the rounds, as you go to different exercises. They’re doing burpees, they’re breathing really hard, then they have to get up and do pull ups. Now because it’s a very different muscle recruitment pattern, burpees being more press dominant and pull ups being more pull dominant, there’s some blood shunting there. But you should be able to get up and do pull ups straight away, because you’re not going to be limited in your pull ups by your breathing rate, really, are you? Who has to stop a set of unbroken pull ups ’cause they’re out of breath? It’s a muscle stamina thing. Yeah, you can’t do it anymore. So what a lot of people do is they’ll finish their burpees, and they’ll go, man, I’m really out of breath. I need to have a rest. I need to have a rest, I need to have a rest, now I’m going to go and do my pull ups, which they didn’t need their breathing for anyway. Then they do some pull ups, and their arms start to get tired, and they go, okay, now I need to have a rest, ’cause my arms are tired. No longer out of breath, ’cause pull ups don’t really make me out of breath. What they should’ve done is overlap the rest motives. Motives for rest. I’m out of breath. I’m getting close to hitting a threshold. Motives for rest. Localised muscular stamina. So do your burpees, get straight to that pull up bar, hit out a set of 10, a set of five, a set of two, whatever the case may be. You have to rest your arms then, because you’re limited by localised muscular stamina. And while your arms are resting you get to catch your breath as well. So instead of having a 10-second rest here to catch your breath, and a 10-second rest to regenerate your arms, you just have one 10-second rest where both things happen. And at the same time, you regroup, refocus, yeah. So overlap those rest motives. So try and, if you’ve got different reasons for needing a rest, put them at the same time. Don’t rest ’cause your legs are tired, and then rest ’cause your arms are tired, and then rest ’cause you’re out of breath, and then rest because you need to mentally regroup. Put them together. Doesn’t mean it becomes a longer rest. Four 10-second rests turns into a 10-second rest, not into a 40-second rest. You got to minimise your lowering and eccentrics. So most of the movements we do have a start point and an end point. A pull up is starting from hanging from the bar, and ending with your chest, for example, touching the bar. There’s no stipulation that you then have to lower it. Toes to bar start with your heels behind the bar, end with the toes touching the bar. There’s no stipulation that you have to bring them back down again. A power clean begins with the bar on the ground, ends with the bar on the shoulders in the front rack. There’s no stipulation that you need to lower it down again. So if every you’re given an opportunity to avoid the lowering, remember the eccentric is that slow breaking action. If you’re given an opportunity to do that, like a power clean, you should almost always go singles. Drop it, drop it, drop it. Even pull ups. Toes to bar. I’ve done a hundred toes to bar in five minutes doing singles, just to prove that it’s possible. One rep, one rep, one rep, one rep, 20 per minute, for five minutes. Which is more than I’d get if I was doing in sets of five or sets of 10. Maybe someone who’s going against me to do 30 unbroken at the start, then they hit the wall, they’re miles ahead of me, but I don’t care, ’cause all I care is what happens at five minutes. I don’t care what happens at 299 seconds. So minimise your lowering and eccentrics. Because it takes energy but you don’t get any points for it. You’re expending energy without actually getting any return. There are no reps on the board. Finally, have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C, and we’ve touched on this already this weekend. Plan A is this is what we want to happen, plan B if something goes slightly wrong, plan C if it all falls apart. This checklist, guys, these 10 laws of strategy, you can go through and make sure, okay I’m about to do an event, I’m about to do a workout, make sure you’re ticking those boxes.
