089 Researched Training Principles

Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we're going to go through some research training principles. These are things that have been demonstrated in research, shown in various studies, some long-term, some short-term studies, and we're going to go through them and how they apply to CrossFit. So this is one of the knowledge gaps that I see inside of CrossFit. It is something that kind of gets pushed to the side because of the constantly very hard slogan because of the methodology and basically the very high-minded view of the methodology of CrossFit and how it is exempt from previous things that have been demonstrated in research. I see that as a knowledge gap for coaches. I see it as a failure to value evidence, scientific evidence, as well as we could inside of CrossFit. It is something that is certainly going to be part of the intensive next week. Are these principles? Yeah, so I'm going to share them with you and talk about how they apply to CrossFit. Principle number one is the Strength Muscle and Durance relationship. This was demonstrated in a study where they took firefighters and they had the max out of bench press and then they had those same firefighters do a max rep test with 40 kilos in 40 seconds. What they found was if 40 kilos was above 40% of your 1 RM, then the strongest person did more reps, the stronger person did more reps. Whereas if it was below 40% of your 1 RM, some weaker people beat stronger people in the muscle endurance test. So their conclusion was if you're trying to improve your muscle endurance, if the load is over 40% of 1 RM, then the best way to improve your muscle endurance is just to get stronger. That was their conclusion. Now, this is just one study, so it is preliminary and it is a single pattern pushing and it was a single style of test, max reps with 40 kilos in 40 seconds. I do think that when we look at clinical evidence and personal experience inside a CrossFit, outside of the lab, this gets confirmed in a lot of how we experience CrossFit. If something is over 40% or 50% of my 1 RM and I'm going against somebody who's stronger than me, then it's very hard for me to keep up with that person, regardless of how many reps there are. There's lots of anecdotes to support that and lots of clinical evidence to support that. The other lab evidence that we have is that the maximum voluntary contraction force, you can reduce it by 20% when you're doing maximum voluntary contractions to exhaustion. This is where they strap you into a leg extension machine, they have you do leg extensions to failure, you can still keep contracting and doing leg extensions at 80% of that maximum voluntary contractions. It is something that degrades, but when we take the muscle fiber and we isolate it, so we take the perception of effort, we take the psychology out of the equation, just look at the physiology, and you stimulate that muscle fiber to exhaustion, you can get it down to 50% of maximum voluntary contraction. There again, we see that 40% to 50% number loss in muscle force as sort of a landmark. You can place CrossFit tests anywhere along that spectrum from basically 0% 1RM and 180 reps per minute if you're running a 5K, and 100% 1RM and 1 rep per minute in the case of a max lift. All of CrossFit exists somewhere along that spectrum, whether it's a sulfide and kettlebell swings or 2K row or 135 squat cleans and ring muscle ups, you're landing somewhere on that spectrum. A really good reference point is that 40% or 50% of 1RM. If you're constantly encountering competitors who are significantly stronger than you, or you're constantly encountering loads and workouts that are over 40% or 50% of your 1RM, then getting stronger might be the best, most efficient way for you to improve competitively in CrossFit. That's the insight there, and it's a pretty simple one. It's just the higher the percentage of 1RM, the harder the contraction is to repeat. I see a lot of CrossFiters, especially beginners and intermediates in some advanced athletes too, who are working really, really hard to endure contractions that are 50, 60, 70, 80% of their 1RM. They're doing lots of kipping handstand pushups, but they don't do any gym mass exchange training. They do lots of Metcons with moderate load Olympic lifts, but they're not actually getting stronger in their Olympic lifts. A lot of CrossFiters find themselves in this place, and they're looking up at the elite CrossFiters who are working at lower percentage of 1RM all the time in every single workout. When you get stronger, the percentage of 1RM in most CrossFit workouts goes down. The only exceptions are purely monostructural modalities, which at the lower levels of competition, we don't see that very often. It's more often the patterns, it's squatting, bending, lunging, pushing, pulling. When you get stronger, the percentage of 1RM in every workout goes down. Prioritizing strength, especially important for beginners and intermediates, but also many advanced elite athletes, depending on your training age or set point and your training ability in strength. Principle number one is the strength muscle endurance relationship. Principle number two. Muscle growth is highly correlated with long-term strength gains. There's two mechanisms by which we become stronger. There's neural effects, and there's morphological effects. Maintain the coordination of muscle mass, whatever muscle mass you already have, and then morphological effects refer primarily to muscle growth. There are other morphological effects like bone density and connective tissue thickness and things like that, but the main morphological effect is muscle growth. Neural effects have very big quick effects on your strength in the short term. Long-term strength gains are highly correlated with muscle growth. That's why in a lot of these studies on power lifters and weight lifters, they get them on a dexa and they see what their lean body mass is. If their squat 1RM is going up, if their snatch 1RM is going up, their lean body mass is almost certainly in every case going up with it proportionally. This principle often gets violated in CrossFit because we like variety and intensity a lot. When you train with lots of variety, you don't take advantage of something called the repeated out effect, which is another principle and kind of gets placed inside of this. It basically just means that when you repeat the same exercise multiple weeks in a row, markers of muscle damage go down, but you get a similar or better muscle growth stimulus. When you train with lots of variety, you fail to take advantage of that. You end up causing significantly more muscle damage by training with lots of variety and exercise selection than if you had just done the same exercise and what often comes with muscle damage is muscle soreness. Neither of those things are correlated at all with muscle growth. That's a common misunderstanding is that the more I damage the muscle and the more soreness I experience, the more muscle I'm growing. That's not the case at all. Muscle growth is you achieve it through mechanical tension mainly and you can achieve some through metabolic stress. When you lift loads between 1 and 30 RM, you signal mechanical receptors in the muscle, which signal gene expression and muscle growth, to varying degrees depending on your genetics. It's pretty solid that if you train in the 1 to 30 RM, that's the best practice for signaling those mechanical receptors and triggering muscle growth. It has nothing to do with how much you damage the muscle or how sore you get. That's a really common misconception about the mechanisms of muscle growth and how muscle growth works. That is the problem with variety is that you're not taking advantage of this repeated bout effect and you're often getting really sore but not really growing any muscle. A lot of crossfiters experience that. The second way this principle gets violated in crossfit is prioritizing too much intensity. Not only are we doing lots of different lifts all the time but we're doing them in the 1 to 4 RM range. 1 to 4 RM is fine. It is enough mechanical tension to signal those mechanical receptors in trigger muscle growth but it also comes along with a lot of joint and connective tissue stress. You often end up not being able to do enough volume if you're training in the 1 to 4 RM range to get the muscle growth stimulus that would be optimal if you were training with 5 to 10 RM as an example. Instead of training lots of different lifts in the 1 to 4 RM range and crossfit, what we need for long term strength gains, what we need for muscle growth is more sets in the 5 to 10 RM range, more top sets with reduced intensities. That means if you're training with your 1 to 4 RM, that's probably too heavy. More accessories and proper execution of those accessories. A lot of crosstators don't know how to write accessory programming, a lot of cross-couches don't know how to write accessory programming effectively with a rep range, with a tempo, with a proximity failure. And it's often just not prescribed enough for those who need meaningful gains in their muscle growth. And then we need less variety and exercise selection. So if you do those things, that is going to promote more muscle growth and better long-term strength gains over time. I have a client who started the season at 140, 145. And he's pushing 170 now in one off season. Because he did all these things. He trained with lots of 5 to 10 RM, lots of top sets with reduced intensity, more accessories, and less variety. And he also reduced his conditioning volume significantly in order to be in a positive energy environment and have the right molecular pathways being signaled to promote muscle growth. So those training practices promote meaningful muscle growth. And so there are lots of crosstators who are doing lots of variety and lots of intensity and not growing any muscle and not in the competitive weight class, don't have enough lean body mass and aren't strong enough. And so when you understand that, well, in order to get stronger in the long term, if I need to really make meaningful gains in this thing, then I'm going to have to grow muscle. And in order to grow muscle, I want to be taking advantage of the repeated bout effect. And I want to train with less variety and more less intensity in order to achieve that. So yeah, that's principle number two. Muscle growth is highly correlated with long term strength gains. A recent study out of Norway found that elite CrossFit athletes males weigh 177 to 12, females weigh 137 to 161. And that's at 11.8% body fat on average for males and 15 and 1/2% body fat on average for females. So that means on average, a male CrossFit elite athlete has 165 pounds of lean mass. And the females have 120 pounds of lean mass. And now this is elite-- so this is international level in Norway. This is very good CrossFit competitors. But if you took the games field and you got them all in a DexA, I am almost positive that the lean body mass numbers would be even higher than that. 165-- you're weighing 195 at that amount of lean mass as a male. And that's-- you're one of the smaller guys out there nowadays. So yeah. And then those are correlated with what they can express as strength wise. So yeah, guys, if you need to make meaningful gains in your muscle mass or in your strength, those are often one and the same. And they get sort of put next to each other. And they get put forth as if they're like opposing goals. Like, I'm not trying to gain muscle. I'm trying to get stronger. Or I'm not trying to get stronger. I'm trying to gain muscle. And that really only applies if you're in a bodybuilding gym and you're standing by easy and flies and stuff on cables and stuff on machines. It's like-- it's one and the same. If you're squatting and you're doing single leg squats and you're doing it already else, the muscle has to grow at some point in order for you to get stronger. So those things get put side by side as like, oh, they're so different. Muscle growth is not strength. And strength is not muscle growth. And it's like you have to understand what is really being said there. And yes, the strength adaptations are specific to the exercise selection, to the skill-- the movement skill being performed. But as long as you select exercises that have good transference to the contractions inside a crossfit, back squat, front squat, wedge squat, SSB squat, single leg squat, if you're picking those things, then your muscle growth is going to directly affect your strength in the Olympic lifts and in the lifts that matter for crossfit. And so we need to start seeing these things, especially for individuals who are training in crossfit gyms with the equipment that's available in crossfit gyms. We need to better understand exercise selection to promote muscle growth because a lot of times, there's just no muscle growth happening inside a crossfit gyms because of the availability of equipment, the scarcity of equipment. And people don't know how to use a six squat bar. They don't know how to use wedges. They don't know how to use pauses. They don't know how to train in the 5 to 10 RM range. They don't know what it feels like. They don't know how to write it. And that's why we have a lot of crossfiters who are not gaining the muscle that they need. And that certainly doesn't apply in most cases to elite crossfiters. Elite crossfiters are often genetically set up to have an exceptional amount of lean body mass, an exceptional amount of muscle mass. And so it doesn't matter if they train with a lot of writing, a lot of intensity because they're actually not trying to grow any more muscle than they already have in some cases. But you do have exceptions to that. Watch Bramphikowski's training. Follow him on Instagram, get in his story and see what he's doing. Most of the time, what he's doing is trying to get stronger. And that has to do with his trainability and strength versus his trainability and set point in aerobic training. So just because you're big and strong doesn't necessarily mean that you don't need to keep growing muscle. He's cited-- he grows about 2 pounds of muscle per year and has continued that throughout his entire career. And he's obviously been very, very successful. And elite athletes are getting bigger. That is something that you can just see when you go to these big competitions. You're like, I feel like five years ago, not everybody was this big and everybody is big now. And it applies to the female side as well. So there's lots of reasons that muscle growth is really, really important. For Crossfitters, it serves strength gains. And it serves long-term strength gains in all individuals. It would seem in all humans, even elite athletes, in sports like powerlifting and weightlifting. But it's especially important in Crossfit. And so this is something that we, I really emphasize, and that we need to better understand that muscle growth is highly correlated with long-term strength gains. OK. Final principle for today is the concurrent training effect. So what this means is that above a certain volume of conditioning, you will slow down your strength gains if you keep doing more. And you can actually make yourself weaker if you do enough conditioning. And that's been demonstrated in research. And this is probably the one that is most frequently violated inside of Crossfit. The other two, definitely. But this one is why so many Crossfitters struggle to get stronger because they're doing five to 10 mechons a week and finding it very difficult to get stronger at all. Let alone make meaningful year over your gains in your strength. They're just looking for a little improvement. And they're just leaving a lot of strength and muscle mass gains on the table because they're conditioning so much. They're energy expenditure is so high. They're getting into a glycogen depleted state every day the week. And they may even be an chronic energy deficit, just not an oposive energy environment that's conducive physiologically to muscle mass and strength gains. And so this is one that just needs to get talked about more in Crossfit. A lot of Crossfitters, if you need to make meaningful gains in your muscle mass and strength, then you need to reduce your conditioning volume enough. Doesn't need to be zero, but you need to reduce it enough so that you can make meaningful strength gains. And specifically what this looks like is generally no more than one to two high intensity sessions per week. And for low intensity, you're keeping it to 45 minutes or less. This makes a glycogen depleted state much less likely. And that's just something that you want to avoid when you're trying to get stronger. Because it signals molecular pathways that inhibit M-tore. And that seems to be the molecular pathway by which muscle growth and strength gains occur. And so that dose of conditioning is typically enough to maintain and sometimes even improve your performance in high intensity conditioning. And so it's just getting overdone so much. And it goes to the dosing of intensity. And you can compare that to how elite endurance athletes dose intensity or elite pentath leads. And it's not even-- we're doing way too frequent high intensity in Crossfit. And when you don't have to be good at five or six different modalities and all the patterns like a game's athlete, then you don't have to dose intensity as often. Part of the reason that games athletes get away with that is one, they're professionals. So they have all of the incentive and all the environment and all the resources to dedicate to the recovery so that they can tolerate more training. And then also, they're doing lots of different modalities. It's like, I'm doing a row. And then I'm doing a ski. And it's like, yeah, OK. That's fine. But as a quarter final athlete or even as a semi final's athlete, you don't need to do ski progressions. Just don't need to do that. And even at the games, it's one-- event. It's one event out of 12 to 15. So that stuff is really sexy and it's really fun to train because of the variety piece but we need to again reduce the variety not just for muscle growth but in our conditioning as well. So taking it back to the concurrent training effect, this is one that if I could only preach one, if I had to emphasize one, if I could only have one message to crossfitters, it would be this. It would be the concurrent training effect. It would be, you've got to understand this, you've got to understand how it works, at least your coach does, you need to understand that your strength gains will get attenuated. They will slow down above a certain dose and so you have to find what that dose is for that individual but it is almost certainly not five to ten mechons a week. It's almost certainly not that in the vast majority of cases and so your nutrition also plays a part in this. You need to train yourself to eat more food, you need to push more food through the system so that you can tolerate more and more training. That's certainly part of it but just in general if you leave with nothing else just remember that above a certain volume of conditioning you will slow down your strength gains. Okay guys, so those are the three principles we started with the strength muscle endurance relationship. We talked about how muscle growth is highly correlated with long-term strength gains and training with less variety and less intensity in the repeated bad effect and we talked about the concurrent training effect as well which would be the one that I would emphasize to crossfitters is that one. These principles really inform how I train athletes for the sport and next week on Thursday I'm going to go through my whole process from evaluation of the sport to assessment of the athlete, both physical and performance characteristics and then how do you train for each of those characteristics, how do we train for muscle growth, how do we train for strength, how do we train for gymnastics, how do we train for conditioning and then based upon assessment of the individual how do we prioritize these things decide on a frequency, develop a training schedule, develop a training split and then develop training sessions from that with example programs for a couple of my clients, you know, programs that actual people are doing and then yeah that's what we're going to do next week. So if you want to have a better understanding of maybe you're an athlete and you do your own programming and you want to have a better understanding of how to train yourself or you're a coach and you work with athletes on an individual basis and you want to learn how to do individualized program design, this would be a great start for you to get you thinking as a coach okay what do I think about evaluation of the sport, how do I assess athletes, how do I think about this problem and I'm passionate about this because I think that crossfit is in its early years right now and the future of the sport is going to be technology professionalization and individualization just like every other sport and so we're behind in that not by anybody's fault it's just we're in the early years of this thing and the future is those three things it's technology professionalization and individualization and so we need as coaches to you know start seeing ourselves as professionals and to be taking this thing seriously and you know rather than going to a weekend seminar and learning how to instruct group fitness that's great and that's that's a wonderful thing for its own reasons but it has nothing to do with training athletes coaching athletes it has nothing to do with that and so we need to get out of this thinking that oh what's the methodology what is the crossfit methodology what is Paul's methodology it's not about a methodology it's about a process that leads to individualization individualization is the beacon professionalization is the beacon using more technology to gather more data and have a better understanding is the beacon and that is where the future of the sport is so we need to you know lean into that so that's what I see a need for that's why we're doing the intensive I kind of went through an outline of what is going to be covered it's next Thursday 1 p.m. mountain time I'll put the link in the show now it's for you guys to sign up if you haven't already if you sign up ahead of time I've gotten this question a lot especially for my folks in Europe you're going to get permanent access to the recording if you sign up so that's just a question that I've got a lot and then another question I've gotten is when does the early bird pricing go away it goes away on Sunday so Sunday is your last day to get the early bird pricing which is $47 after that it'll go up to 97 and so make sure that if you want permanent access to the recording that you get in there and sign up I look forward to seeing you guys there lots of you guys have already signed up we have over 60 sign ups already which is freaking so awesome and I really look forward to continuing to do stuff like this to serve athletes ultimately that's what it comes down to is how do we best serve athletes and what is best for the athletes that is literally what I care about is doing what's best for the athletes and individualization is that individualization leads to fewer injuries it leads to better training adaptations it leads to better performances it leads to all of that and we've seen that in every other sport so in CrossFit we just need to recognize that that's where the future of our sport is and continue to lean into that so thanks for listening guys I'll put the link to sign up for the intensive next week in the show notes below thanks for being here and I'll see you guys in the next episode.