Sunday 5.02.10

Kyle finally learns the "false grip" and gets a strict muscle up. Something to continue working for once you get your muscle up. There is always more to learn.

Linear Progression and Variety

In concurrence with our aim of providing you the best General Physical Preparedness (GPP), we use functional movements performed at high intensity to simulate the demands placed on us in everyday life. Or as CrossFit states, "constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity." The loads, distances, times, intensity, and programming can be scaled, and our program is designed to meet the needs of anyone at all levels of training advancement.

Many mistakenly look at the programming we do at the Compound and believe “constantly varied” means completely random, just throwing a large number of exercises together for loads of reps and calling it a workout. That is far from the truth. While we don’t adhere to the conventional model of “chest and tri’s, back and bi’s, legs and shoulders days” for a set number of reps and work sets, never repeating the same muscle group for 36 to 48 hours, etc; we do understand the limitations to each of these muscle groups. Were the program completely random, we could potentially be doing the same movement day in and day out for the entire week.

Our belief is if you train your muscles separately they gain strengths separately, not as a whole, and you will inevitably overlook certain muscle groups in your body. If you strengthen the body as a whole using compound movements and add variance to the workouts, you will most certainly strengthen every muscle group in time and as nature intended. The Olympic Weightlifters spend their training lives trying to perfect two lifts, the Clean and Jerk and the Snatch. They work at those lifts day in and day out, but change up the workouts for variance, allow muscle repair, and to root out weak areas.

Coach Charles Poliquin, one of the world's premier strength coaches, stated, an athlete adapts to a particular exercise in as short as six workouts. Alwyn Cosgrove, also a renowned strength coach, believes that athletes adapt faster to rep brackets than to exercises. Without variety, your body adapts to the demands of the exercises and weight you put on it and your progression slowly begins to plateau.

However, as it is important to retain variance in the program, we can also add conventional training models to our training. One such way is Periodization Models. In the article “Overview of Periodization Methods for Resistance Training”by Mladen Jovanović for EliteFTS.com, he stated: “’pure’ forms of periodization methods are situations that don’t happen very often in real life. Real life periodization is a combination of periodization methods. You train your athletes for skill, endurance, strength, flexibility, or (you name it). You can combine different periodization methods for different components of your system, thus using one periodization method for strength work and another for speed work. When you examine the whole, it is hard to distinguish what method of periodization is used. The system as a whole is always bigger than the sum of its components, and one component will affect another and vice versa. Everything is interconnected so plan your training accordingly!”

And as there is no perfect method, we will try many of them because they all have advantages. We started last week doing several lifts for 3 sets of 5 reps. We are going to continue with those lifts this week in what is call a Linear Sequential Method. What this means, is that for 2-4 weeks, we will work these same lifts, adding 5 to 10 lbs each week as our progression continues. After that time we will either move on to different lifts, different rep schemes and work sets, or a different model entirely. The enjoyment is in the variation of the program and seeing your constantly improved strength and GPP. cc