CrossFit is probably the biggest thing to ever emerge in the fitness world. And whether you love it or hate it, you can’t deny its impact on the fitness world. One of the positive things of CrossFit is that it has been a major force in exposing a wide variety of people to the barbell – playing a huge role in raising the profile of barbell strength training and Olympic weightlifting and making them popular.
Because of all the attention, more people now know what us lifters have always known: barbells are extremely effective in getting you strong, and strength is very important in life.
Another positive thing that came out of CrossFit was that it taught people that training is and has to be hard. However, this can be a double edged sword. While it did teach people that training is and has to be hard, some people took it that it has to be hard all the time.
They think that every single workout has to feel like getting their face punched in or they’ll feel like the workout wasn’t effective. Sure, training is tough and will frequently push you to your limit, but it doesn’t have to be a brutal grind all the time.
Training hard the right way
The majority of ‘normal’ people prefer to take it easy, and will happily welcome a lighter training session. This article isn’t for them.
This article is for the very small group of people who always push themselves hard. You know who you are. You pride yourself on embracing discomfort. You push harder than you should, and if you don’t, you think you’re not doing it right.
I’m not sure what the situation is like now, but it’s common in the past that crossfitters puked during a session, were sore all the time, or even got rhabdomyolysis.
Some even wear it as a badge of honour, which, honestly, is stupid and detrimental. Effective training is hard, but it doesn’t need to be balls to the wall all the time. Understanding how to balance training stress and recovery is the key to long-term progress.
Let’s be clear – effective training is hard. But not all training that is hard is effective. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s a useful training stress. Hard for hard’s sake is not only useless, it’s detrimental.
Let’s check out some scenarios where training shouldn’t be pushing your limits.
When you’re just starting out: lay a solid foundation
On your first day of training, the goal is to learn the movements correctly and establish a starting weight, which will be a weight that’s slightly challenging that you do with good technique.
As you embark on your Novice Linear Progression (NLP) and add weight to the barbell every session, you might initially feel that it’s too light and you’re capable of going heavier; you feel like you’re not working out or doing anything productive. You might get tempted to throw on more weight on the bar than is programmed for. Don’t do it.
Why manageable weights to start with? The initial phase is about learning proper form and practising the movement patterns of the lifts. If the weight is too heavy, I guarantee your mind only focuses on the heavy bar and you’ll try to lift it up in any way you can. Not ideal when you’re trying to focus on technique and ingrain a new movement pattern.
We don’t want new lifters building bad habits that are hard to unlearn and fix. There’s plenty of time to go heavy in the future. So use a manageable weight and focus on technique. As you progress on your NLP, your weights will increase session on session. In the process, you’ll have practised maintaining the movement pattern as the weight gets heavier and the set gets harder.
When your program calls for a lighter day
As you progress on your NLP, you’ll eventually hit a point where you can’t add weight to the bar every single session. When that happens, your coach will make minor adjustments to your programming.
The lift that has run its course of the NLP will switch to either a top set (heavy) with back off sets (lighter), or alternating between a heavy day and a lighter day (e.g. squat heavy on Monday, have a lighter session on Wednesday, and then heavy again on Friday).
As you progress on your lifting career and eventually move to more advanced programming, you’ll have lighter days and heavier days, either within a week or throughout the course of the program. For example, having a heavy day and a lighter day within the week in a concurrent style of programming, or starting lighter and gradually getting heavier in a periodised/block style of programming.
Lighter days serve several purposes – to allow for recovery, to accumulate volume, or to practice technique, among others. Some lifters get frustrated when they don’t feel like they “worked out” during a lighter day. But this is a mistaken “exercise vs. training” mentality.
If you go super hard on all your lifts, on all your sets, all the time, you’re not going to last very long before you burn out even if all your recovery strategies are on point. It’s not about going hard every single time you get under the bar; it’s about doing what’s needed on that workout that’s part of the program to achieve your end goal.
When you’re injured: doing too much too soon
This part should be self-explanatory. If you’re dealing with an injury, it’s important to be conservative. The key is to know when to scale back and when to push forward. When you’re injured, one of the biggest mistakes is doing too much too soon.
Most people won’t push hard when the injury is in its acute phase and the pain is intense.
As you make progress on your rehab and the acute pain subsides, there’s a tendency to want to get back to your routine and hit those heavy weights ASAP.
I see this happen from time to time. Hell, I used to do it myself in the past. But I’ve wised up and hope you’ll learn from my experience. While training helps the recovery process, take it slow and conservative. It’s very easy to add more weight to the bar if you go too light as a result of being conservative. But if you overshoot and piss the injury off, it often leads to re-injury, which will set you back even more. You can’t control-Z this situation if you go heavier than the injured site is ready for.
Train hard but know when going lighter is necessary
I’m not saying that training isn’t hard. Training is hard, and has to be hard to be effective. But to make long-term progress, it shouldn’t be balls to the wall all the time.
