How to Develop Your Skills for CrossFit

Understanding Skill Progression and Athlete Bottlenecks All right, guys, welcome back to another episode of the Stimulus Matters podcast. This is episode 18, I believe might be messing that up, but it's close enough. And today we are going to kind of do a little bit of a different format and talk through how we go through our skill progression. So developing a skill, refining a skill and then integrating it into a capacity format. This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately because I've gotten a few more clients recently who have very specific skill bottlenecks. And we've always had that in the sport, but now it's kind of having two skills that really inhibit an athlete's ability to express their capacity. So I kind of wanted to pick Kyle's brain and talk through my process as well. Speaker 2 Yeah, I, you know, we already did a podcast where we talked about movement limitations and in that podcast we kind of like touched on skill limiters as a component, right? So a great example would be I'm coaching an athlete exactly like this right now that because of their overhead position, they have handstand and like single arm dumbbell or double arm dumbbell overhead skill limiters. But that's a movement limitation, not necessarily a skill limitation, because if they had open shoulder positions, then they could do those skills. Well, what we're talking about, I think more so at least where I'm I'm going to at least start the conversation, is someone who has the strength necessary to complete the movement. They have the movement capacity necessary like this, like we're if we're talking about a muscle up, like they can touch all the positions safely and have the requisite strength to get in there. But they lack the the skill of effectively, whether it's transfer their momentum from the swing into the turnover or leverage their legs in the bottom of the dip to swing up and drive them out of the the bottom of of the muscle up. We're talking about more of the skill limitation versus someone who's movement limited or someone who doesn't have the requisite strength to do movement XY or Z. Diving Deep into Movement Mechanics and Key Positions So that's really where I think we'll we'll focus our conversation. Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's it's funny. So for me as an Ath or as a coach rather, that journey began. I guess it began with skill work with class members when I was in 2012 time frame. But when I started individual coaching, one of the very first athletes that I coached had a £100 weighted pull up at a body weight of like 190 lbs. Could do a £120 weighted ring dip. Like these are full range like appropriate metrics. Could do 8 strict chest of our pull ups and could do 0 ring muscle UPS. Getting straight. It was, it was the wildest thing. And I spent so much time diving into technical videos and there just wasn't a lot of stuff out there. So it was a lot of. Speaker 2 Playing. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 So there was a lot of me playing around with some things and I figured out some things that were really good for other people. But the act of actually teaching that athlete to get their first ring muscle up was inhibited by kind of the lack of resources and my inability to be as creative as I needed to be to get him to express his hips and to actively turn over a little bit faster. 13 years later, I like to think that I'm a little bit better at that, but. Speaker 2 Part of that comes as a coach. Part of your ability to coach a skill comes from your understanding of the mechanics of the skill. And in 2012, you were not very deep into the sport. And while you could do muscle UPS, I know you and you probably learned them very quickly. Like you're a strong, high skill acquisition type athlete. And so you probably watched a couple muscle UPS, tried a couple muscle UPS, and then did a couple muscle UPS. Pretty accurate. Speaker 1 Yep, nailed it. Speaker 2 Yeah. So you don't have to have a, a good cognitive understanding of a movement from a coaching perspective to do a movement. If you're an athlete, if you're someone who has a, you know, a good athletic background, most of the time you watch something and it's intuitive, right. I think expressing a motor pattern and understanding a motor pattern are two separate things. One is driven from like the motor cortex and the other is like your conceptual or philosophical understanding of how the body's moving through space. And in order to coach the skill, you have to have an understanding of how the body's moving through space. And I think it helps to have that kind of intuitive athlete side because then you're like, well, it feels like this. And so you can communicate that well to the athlete. But if you lack that kind of understanding of, of the movement and, and what are the like? I like to think about it as, as like key points. I've heard them referred to as KPIs, like is this person hitting the key points in the movement? You need to understand what those are for the movement 1st. And then you can start to be creative and use your kind of athletic intuition to help guide people in a movement. And so I think if we were to zoom way back and like talk about this from, you know, like a 50,000 foot view, the first step in effect in creating effective skill, skill progressions is to understand what the KPIs are, the key positions. I, I think I like key positions more than KPI, but understand exactly what those are for the movement. And that comes from, like you had said, doing research and video review and, and things like that and really looking at like what are the best in the sport doing? What are the common things that the best in the sport are doing? Breaking Down Skills for Safe and Effective Practice Yeah, I try as much as possible to break things down into what is necessary and what is nice to have. And then how much of what we're trying to teach or what certain people are trying to teach in the space is superfluous, right. So like the amount of people who are like, oh, when you do this ring muscle up, your feet need to stay perfectly together and like this needs to happen. And you look at like the very best athletes in the sport and their feet are like apart a little bit or slightly staggered. You're like, OK, so that's not actually necessary. It might be nice to have, but this is down like the list of importance. We're not going to prioritize swinging with your feet perfectly together and turning over with your feet perfectly together. But what you do see in every athlete who does ring muscle UPS at a high level is that they create massive amounts of hip speed as. Speaker 2 Both on the both on the swing. Like the actual upswing of the movement and the hip pop of the movement. Speaker 1 Yes. And so when we're looking at an athlete, if they don't have that, that's like, OK, we need to target this and utilize whatever drills we have to make sure that they're actively hitting this. Otherwise even if they start to get the movement, it's probably always going to have a low ceiling compared to their Physiology just based on a skill, A lack of skill. Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think when you're, when you're reviewing this video is, is your best friend. It's even better than watching someone do it in person because with video, you can take the, the, the, the video and stop it. You can pause it, you can slow it down. You can really see positions, you know, we're talking about a muscle. So I'm going to keep running with the example. And when I'm analyzing a muscle, if I look at a couple, like I say, in key positions that are, they're all tied to generating hip speed, at least in the turnover phase, right? So it's like, what does the backswing look like? Are they in a position where they've got a decent arch and they're able to maintain some tension and carry that tension forward into the upswing? Then during the upswing, are they hitting this sort of, I don't want to call it an L because it's not an Li, don't want to call it a hollow because it's not a hollow, but are they hitting this point where their toes are up above their hip, right? You know, they're they're like in this position where where they're getting horizontal enough that their toes can actually rise up above their hip. And then from there, are they actually hitting a hip hop? And is that timed with the pull right? Because those are the key components of the actual swing. What is your arch position look like? What is this hollow L position during the forward swing look like? And are they hitting it? And then is the hip hop aggressive enough and tied to an actual pull? And you know, there's other layers of that, like where are they pulling? Are they pulling towards the face? Are they pulling towards the shoulder? We're getting into like the little details there. But in general, key positions, are they hitting those? And if someone has all the the strength, like if like you had said, 100 LB weighted pull up, £120 weighted dip, they're hitting those positions, the chances are they're going to turn over a muscle. Speaker 1 And then, you know, when we're looking at once we kind of get through that position or like through those indicators, those common points, we what I like to do is build out as many drills or things that I know will help people create that. So anytime I can replicate that feeling in a safe environment. And what I mean by safe is it's scary, especially if you have had an athlete who's fallen through the rings and gone into like a German hang or something like that, Like that's terrifying. And so doing it in a lower stakes environment where people can practice the sensations is really important. And that's where having the intuition as an athlete, like I still know what ring muscle UPS feel like, so I can just go practice these lower stakes drills and then give them to athletes based on the limitations that I'm seeing for them specifically. Utilizing Effective Drills and Learning from Skill Masters And when you're referring to lower states drills, that's things like low rings, turnovers, low ring like so if you were trying to work on the turnover, you might have them like put their feet on a box or put their feet on the floor where the rings are low. And so the risk is lower. The other advantage of that is that it allows you to or allows them to repeat the drill way more frequently because unless they're, you know, already a fairly high level athlete, doing volume of ring muscle UPS beyond like 30 or 40 reps in a session is just too much. It's too many reps. But if you're down on the low rings and part your body weight's partially supported by your legs, you can accumulate a lot of repetitions. And there's a, a lot of research that motor learning happens really effectively by repeating a movement pattern through the, the positions that you want over and over and over and over and creating that. It's almost a feel like you had said, it's like creating that the correct feeling of what it feels like to throw your head through the ring. So what it feels like to get some speed from the hip and, and time the pop with that. And I've actually seen you bring drills. I remember working with with Ellie one time at the gym and we were really struggling with just one, one component of her turnover and you came in and had a drill that I'd actually never seen. It was like a low, low rings drill that connected the hip hop to the turnover and she did it a couple times. She was such an intuitive learner that she was able to take that feeling and immediately take it up to the high ranks. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you have an athlete that's that gifted from a kinesthetic awareness standpoint, it makes your job as a coach super easy. Speaker 2 You always look like a genius when you're working with a with a motor with a high level motor learner. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And, and some coaches are better at coaching different skills. And so that's where one of those things where if you know that you're around somebody, like if you're around Travis and you've never picked his brain on double unders, you just don't have any desire to be a good coach at that skill. Like, I know that that sounds really like a very aggressive statement, but no, I don't know any other person in the CrossFit space who knows the jump rope in and out as much as Travis and that's. Speaker 2 Absolutely true. Speaker 1 Not meant to be offensive to any other coach inside of our organization or anything like that, but like he just has a different level of knowledge. Speaker 2 Well, think about how much time he invested into learning the skill, right? Early on in in his career, he got a chance to work with Molly Mets, who you know from from jumping rope, right? Yeah, she, I mean, the stuff that I've seen, because we have a whole video series that that internally at TTT that we've had an opportunity to leverage and the things that she does with the jump rope are insane, just like, and, and they're so casual too. Like I remember going through, I went through like the Double under Foundation series that we had. I actually have done it twice and she's like casually doing one 80s with the jump rope or three 60s like turning as she's spinning and talking through it. And I'm over here like trip, trip, trip, you know. But that is a great example of of like, think about how much time Travis invested into that. And then so he took from this jump rope specialist, it would be the same thing as working with like a gymnastics specialist or a weightlifting specialist. And then he took that and applied it to sport over. I mean, he's been working, he worked with her originally, I think like 10 years ago and has been applying it to sport for 10 years. So he has the, we talked about pedagogy in a previous podcast about how important it is to have like a learning process or a learning system. He went through a structured learning system. And then and then he, he did like what CrossFit talks about, which is like the mastery, right? Like he took it and mastered it as part of the sport. And so now when you talk to him, he not only understands like what it's like to be a beginner and to go through good learning progressions, but also what how it actually applies to heavy ropes, crossovers, crossover, double unders, drag ropes, like every variation that you can imagine what it feels like to do them after farmer's carries versus what it feels like to do them after sand. He's done it all at this point and went through a good learning process. And I think the whole, the whole point of that is you were talking about how important it is to learn from someone who is a master at their skill. The process of becoming a master at that skill is not just do the skill over and over and over in CrossFit, right in mecons. It's to go through a learning process and then start to apply it in mecons. Adapting Skills for CrossFit's Capacity-Driven Demands Yeah. And, and one of the things that I will say with respect to skills in their transferability to CrossFit is that some of the things that we're taking from other sports don't necessarily apply to our sport. So in gymnastics, gymnastics is an aesthetic sport. So they get penalized when things don't look aesthetically correct. In CrossFit, we are a capacity sport, right. So you think about in swimming like you have to have good technique to thrive and. Speaker 2 Running to be fast. To be fast you have to have good technique. Period. Speaker 1 But some of the skills in CrossFit don't necessarily have that same parameter around them well. Speaker 2 I'm going to push back on that a little bit. So good technique from a gymnastics perspective is an is an aesthetic technique, good technique from a capacity perspective. What's required for CrossFit is still good technique for capacity. It's the technique that's required to move fast and do it efficiently. And they're not always the same thing. It's like you were talking about keeping your feet locked together. That's not a necessary component in the ring muscle up to have capacity in the ring muscle up, right. What's necessary is all all the key point, all the key positions that we talked about, which I mean, a lot of those are not going to be what a what a high level gymnast would would teach or what even like gymnastics pedagogy would would teach. They would not teach that progression to get someone to muscle UPS. But if we want someone to be able to do 30 and still be able to spend the other time necessary to, you know, snatch 255 and clean and jerk 325 and do all of those things oh also and run a sub 22 minute 5K, then it turns out you you have to take, I don't want to call them shortcuts, but they're shortcuts from like the sport of gymnastics perspective to get someone to that capacity. Speaker 1 Yeah. So one of the things that's interesting is I think that there is such thing in this sport as too much of A deep dive and mastery of certain skills and everything is context dependent. So it depends on your level. If you're a games athlete, you have more time to invest in those deep dives most likely, right? Most of them have 468 hours at their disposal to spend 60 minutes in deep practice working on refining their ring muscle UPS or their handstand walk positions or their squat mechanics or whatever the case may be. But for a person who is trying to qualify for semi finals for the as an individual athlete but also has a full time job, we need to be OK with a little bit less of those technical refinements. And how do we create the most efficient pattern possible with the least time investment possible? And those are two completely different programs that we're creating for those athletes. Speaker 2 Yeah. And we, we've, you know, we, we started this conversation talking about sort of like skill progressions and how it's about, you know, skill acquisition and learning skills at, at, you know, more of a rudimentary or like intermediate level. But those same skill progressions I give to games athletes because like you said, they do have the time to take the skill from, and, and it's, it's worth it for them to be able to go mid mecon if they're hitting 12 ring muscle ups. And if, if they have the capacity, if we can build the capacity to go 15 in the middle of, of that mecon, the amount of time that's saved is worth it at that level. And so they do spend that kind of time on skill refinement and capacity development because they can do all of it in a session versus someone, like you said, who has, who has limited time where our goal is to be as efficient and effective as possible at changing a skill. And So what I, I, I wanted to shift gears just a little bit to talk about what that process might look like maybe from a coaching perspective, like what is, what does your skill evaluation and you know, technique change process actually look like? Evaluating Skills and Isolating Technical Limitations Yeah. So the first thing that I'm doing with any skill and we'll just say like I just started with an athlete who shows a little bit with double unders. And so like the first thing that I'm doing is looking at hand positioning shoulder, like I'm looking at the global movement, right. The the how is this looking from like a technical perspective? Are we technical limited or capacity limited in the skills and in in certain cases we're going to have athletes who have like the pipe jumping pattern? Or the heel pull up jumping pattern or just like their hands are all over the place. So that then dictates how we're going to go through our and how we're going to navigate our skilled progression. So if we take an athlete who has a hand limitation, like they're basically they're using arms to spin the rope, their hands are way out wide. Like we're going to use that box drill from jumping rope. Speaker 2 Yeah. So box drill being two boxes stacked close together and you're doing your your double enters in between the boxes, so. Speaker 1 Typically starting out around 4 feet apart. And I actually have started gravitating towards telling people to just do it with the wall so that they don't have to set up four boxes. But whatever works for the athlete. If they have the time and the desire to set up the boxes and they feel less claustrophobic that way, then do what works for you and what feels comfortable. But we're going to spend time doing that. And then I'm going to make them get the speed ball so that they can practice appropriate wrist action and I start them in a seated position. Like we're not doing this and trying to have them integrate this skill, this novel way of moving their wrist while jumping and having their heart rate at 170 beats per minute. Instead, we're going to break it down, isolate the wrist, and you're going to do this for six sets of 30 every time. We do double under skill session for the first six weeks that we work together. Speaker 2 So you start typically. Now obviously this would be dependent upon your video review. So you're going to watch them do double unders. Then you're going to say, all right, this person is capacity limiter technical limited. If they're technical limited, you're going to evaluate Y and then you're going to isolate that technique for a period of time. Speaker 1 Isolate. So I isolate the the variable to start every session. So the first part of every session is your biggest bottleneck isolated. So in the case of the double or this the jump rope, we're isolating the wrist, then we're going to get them up and integrate that into a jump. But it's going to be very low Rep count so that we're always able to do things well, right. So I might take them into the box and have them do 20 total single unders and then rest for a minute. And the reason is that we need to create good habits. And in order to create good habits, we need to make sure that the bad habits that are your compensation patterns don't come back as we're going through this skill progression. Speaker 2 There's also, you know, plenty of research that shows that people learn skills faster when they're in a more relaxed state. And if you're doing single learners to the point that you're accumulating fatigue within the set, then you're going to put yourself in a more stressed state. And so the learning is not going to happen as well. You still need to eventually do them in a stressed state. It's just when you're in the skill acquisition or skill change phase, you need to be doing that skill in an isolated low stress environment in order to be doing it effectively. Speaker 1 The other thing that I prefer to do, and this is this comes in to where we have to make decisions around how much time the athlete has. My preference is that we do small doses 3 to 4 times a week for something that is not mechanically stressful. To me, the jump rope is not a mechanically stressful event like. Speaker 2 Especially seated on a box with the the the Wiffle ball, Yeah. Speaker 1 Seated on the box and then we get up. If you're doing 15 sets of 20 single unders, maybe your Cavs might be a little bit sore after the first day or two, but because it's not dense, you probably won't be. Enhancing Motor Learning Through Play and Observation And so. Speaker 2 I would argue if that person is sore after that, then they also have a capacity limitation. That's that's. Speaker 1 A fairpoint but the the read the learnt. So I many years ago listened to it was a lecture from a professor I don't remember what university but basically was the series. The lecture series was called The Learning Brain, and the brain learns best in small bouts, with spacing between those bouts and more frequency rather than more like intensity and volume. Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree with all of those points, but the the motor learning, the the motor learning classes that I took in Graduate School, we added one more component to that that kind of really emphasizes learning and that's play. Play is probably the fastest learning tool and adults never play. Like it just doesn't happen that much. But when you introduce play, and my favorite example of this is handstand walking pig or handstand walking horse. And I hope everybody's familiar with the game, but basically like pig and horse are game and basketball where you like pick a spot, take a shot. You have to call out what your shot is before you start. At least those are the Indiana rules. And if you make it, then the next person has to match it. The next person has to match it. If they don't, they get a letter. Once they get 3 letters if it's pig or 4 letters if it's horse, they're out. All right, simple game, but it's a a game that allows you to challenge your athletes to learn new skills and do it in a way that's fun. Creates a little bit of pressure, right? Just a tiny bit of pressure, not enough that it's like, you know, they're not betting on the game. At least I hope they're not betting on the game, But it's it's play and they most adults haven't played in a long time. So the first time they do something like that, they're like, wow, that was so much fun and I learned a lot. And because the skills, because it's random practice, that's another component of of skill acquisition that's really important is to have random practice versus structured practice learnings faster with random practice. But good luck as a coach writing random practice in a session. It's impossible. Speaker 1 You can't. Speaker 2 Yeah, but you can create. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. Speaker 1 But you can write the session to be randomized. But the if, especially when you're asking adults who haven't done play in a long time to do something like that, they're going to be like, I don't know what to do. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. So that's why I think creating games that allow people to to kind of self organize inside those skills is, is a great tool for for driving learning. It's just the only really good one that I've come up with at this point is handstand walking pig and and horse. But I've, I've, you know, been involved in these games, had people play these games and they are an incredibly valuable tool and people go way beyond like they're able to perform way beyond their normal handstand walking capacity in this format. Plus it has one other advantage, which is a really important skill acquisition and skill learning tool, which is they see someone else do the skill 1st. And you were talking about the double unders inside the box. It it's much more effective from a learning perspective to have someone watch the video of Molly Metz, do her drill demo in between and then for that person to go try and do it right away. You know, people talk about mirror neurons. Monkey see, monkey do whatever you want to call it. Having watched someone who is an expert at the skill, do the skill and then immediately try to do replicate the skill is a much more effective learning tool than just reading the drill off a paper. Having watched the video, you watch the video the night before, you know, and you're like, so, Oh, I vaguely remember what I'm I'm just supposed to stand in between the boxes and do it. That doesn't capture any of the intention that you as the coach are trying to actually bring into the skill session. Speaker 1 Yeah, you you mentioned basketball is actually funny. So in that research, in that lecture series, they talked about how do you make someone a better free throw shooter. And to your point about the varied skill, you get better at shooting free throws not by doing thousands of shots from the free throw line, but by doing 20 from 2 feet in front, 20 from 2 feet behind, 20 from 2 feet to the left, 20 from in, just like shooting in a varied. And then you self organize into becoming a better free throw shooter. So it's that same kind of concept. Addressing Athlete Resistance and Diverse Learning Styles So what's kind of the athlete starts to get like, OK, now we've got the wrist action that we want, like, OK, can we do this going and jumping forward? Can we do this jumping sideways? Can we do this with other types of little parameters of five forward jumps, 5 jumps in place, 5 forward jumps, 5 jumps in place? Those kinds of things are challenging. One of the things that I do struggle with, and I'm curious if you've run into this, is when athletes are not having success with some of the the stuff that you're asking them to do with the skill. A lot of times I've had athletes just request to drop all skill work from the program in favour of just doing capacity work. And I'm looking at your face and I'm saying that maybe that that's not something you've experienced. Speaker 2 I, I definitely have had people who are like, I don't want to do skill. I think I fall into that to some degree. But, and I'll, I'll talk about that in a second, why I fall into that. But yes, I absolutely have. But the reality is I just have the conversation with them. And you know what the conversation is? It's like, well, look, you're here, you're 497th in, in quarterfinals and you need to be top 100 to achieve the goal that you told me was important to you. So either this goal is important enough to you to do this skill work so that you can actually take these steps to close these gaps, or this goal isn't important enough to you to do this skill work. And you're just going to have to accept that the path to getting there is going to be either a painfully long or impossible. Or maybe you and I aren't the best fit because I think this is the path for you to move forward. Now that's the conversation. So the reason that I tend to push back on skill work is because having come from a swimming background, we have a drill for everything. And I, I, you've seen sort of the, the compiled swim resource drill chart. And, and so I have a spreadsheet that basically has, I think it has 90 plus drills and videos and explanations and demos and descriptions and common faults and all this stuff that I've put together for freestyle swimming, for one stroke, for CrossFit. And it breaks everything down from like Headley kicking all the way to like some pretty high level stroke mechanic drills. And that's just for a freestyle. So I swam for a very long time competitively at a very high level. I had that. I have that same list of drills for butterfly, for breaststroke, for backstroke, for turns, for starts, etcetera. We spent all this time doing breakdown drills. But what I found throughout my career as a swimmer was that I responded best to to suggestions for just make this minor adjustment to your stroke rather than doing this single arm drill over and over and over and doing all this repetition. If you just were able to show me and explain to me what I needed to change and then allowed me to do some video review of myself. And back then we had these cool cameras that would stick in the water and you had a little TiVo system that would replay it 15 seconds on delay. You'd touch the wall, you'd watch it. I could make changes to my stroke so much faster and much more lasting than if I did the drill work over and over and over. I have taken that skill of skill acquisition and brought it into my own CrossFit. So for example, with the rampant stairs, I know Mia has had a ton of success working with my client Brandon to improve his ability to to work on the rampant stairs by doing breakdown drills. But I learned the rampant stairs most effectively by going in in the gym and getting video of myself doing it, watching Alexis do it and how fast she was able and, and reviewing the video of her and then just replicating what she did. So I say that I push back on skill work. What I do often is I personally would push back on like breakdown drills, something that takes a whole movement and breaks it down into its component parts. Because I tend to respond better to watching someone doing it and then replicating it and watching myself do it, watching the other person do it, replicating it over and over and over. But that's I'm, I'm a visual learner like that. And not everybody is, and a lot of people don't have 25 plus years of athletic experience to be able to have the same level of body control that I've got at this point. And so I think there's a ton of value in the breakdown drills. Most people need them. But also when you're working with higher level athletes, they might need touches on them, but they might need more example videos to be able to replicate and use that motor. Motor neuron. Building a Progressive Hierarchy for Skill Acquisition And I think that's one of the things where you and I differ a little bit and that I am, you know, my background in baseball, I'm a feel athlete. Like I like to feel the thing more than like, yes, we're getting cues. But I found, you know, I had the, the core kind of like the core 4 drills that were just like, if I take my batting practice and I do this before every batting practice, my swing is pretty locked in. And all of those were creating positions. So it was like an abbreviated swing, like from a very specific position. So you go through your your load, you go into a stop at like the halfway point and then the whole focus is on blocking up the front leg. And that's all I was trying to feel was blocking up the front leg. Now we did the video review and we knew why this was happening, but I don't need somebody to cue me on something. I know what I'm supposed to do, I just need to feel it. And then the other one was like getting off of a block on the backside. So like making sure that I'm actively creating lateral force rather than spinning myself into the ground. And then I had a very specific like other way thing and one other like single arm thing. But those were it was just those. And then I just hit. And so for me, like I want when I'm creating a lot of drills, if the athlete falls into that category, but I tend to gravitate towards it if they don't know how they fall is I want to create the feeling for like what we're doing with the jump ropes. I want to create the feeling for what we're doing with our ring muscle to what we're doing with our hips. Because I think that if you know what you're trying to, what you're seeking and what you're supposed to feel, then it's easier to go up onto the rings and say, oh, I did not hit hip extension. Because I know based on these other drills, what that's supposed to feel like. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think both. In both instances, what we're doing, the principle is the same and you're trying to get someone to understand how something, how a movement should be executed. There are people who are visual learners who can see it and then they can make their bodies do it. I fall into that category and so I tend to be biased towards those types of drills. There are people who are kinesthetic learners and that's what breakdown drills do such a good job of is they make it so that you can feel positions and then when you go to do the full movement, you can go through those. Also on on that note, and you've I've seen you do this, but doing breakdown drills has limited transfer back to the full skill. But doing breakdown drills as part of a complex where you do partial breakdown drill a little more of the breakdown drill than the full full movement as a complex has more transfer back over to the skill. And so a great example of that might be on like ring muscle UPS, having someone do a, you know, a ring swing, a turnover, a turnover with a partial dip, and then a turnover with a full dip and then come down. And by doing the partial pieces of that, you're connecting the skill to the actual movement in a better way than if you did just the swings, just the turnovers, just the leg swing dips, and then did the full skill. Like that's very intermediate and remedial, but for people who are in the transition trying to build capacity, doing them as complexes is a much more effective learning tool than doing them in isolation. Speaker 1 And some of that is predicated on how much availability we have from a skill capacity standpoint, right? So like what you're talking about is somebody that needs to have at least two to five unbroken ring muscle UPS in order to be able to do that type of drill, probably more like 5 because. Speaker 2 Or more even. Speaker 1 You can't expect an athlete who has a ring muscle up to go turnover, come back, downturn over and do a partial dip, come back. You know, it's like that's beyond their capacity. So a lot of what we're trying to do is matching where our skill program is to the athlete and then scaffolding as we build capacity in the drill and the skill gets better, then we can elevate the complex. And it's funny, you know, you know, one of the things that Max mentioned to me when I first started with him, I think I was an eye opening athlete for him as far as movement restriction is, you know, he's like you're at a point with your movement quality where you can't even get into some of the best stretches and most effective stretches to like create good change. Like you just can't even access the best drills. And that's similar to what you're talking about. Like until you're at a certain level, it's hard to access some of the most effective things because you just don't have the ability to do them. Speaker 2 And that. Speaker 1 That's challenging. Speaker 2 I think so, you know, if, if we were to kind of create a hierarchy of skill acquisition, the the bottom layer of that hierarchy is the isolation breakdown drills, right? It all, it's all to be clear, everything's predicated upon your video review, your analysis of the movement, your understanding as a coach of the KPIs. Once you have that, then you're starting someone. Who lacks a skill with isolation breakdown drill. So they can learn the feel, but it's also important to make sure that in some way they're learning how to connect that back to the skill. So if they're doing low ring transitions for for their muscle up, they've got to be able to connect that back. How is this actually supposed to look? How is this actually supposed to feel? Then our next layer would be complexes where it's mixing breakdown drills with the full skill, so you get a little more transfer over to the skill. And I think the next layer up would be like the video review and queuing. So you have the skill, now you're training it for capacity. Now we're talking about making small changes to a movement while you're doing larger sets. So that's five sets of 10 ring muscle UPS. The layer above that is your play. Now. I wish that I could come up with a way to integrate play into some of the lower drills and maybe you can't. Actually. I thought about this while we were just talking about this. Fukowski posted something on Instagram this past week about his most effective double under development tool was play was he said treat it like you were a boxer, but doing, you know, single leg skips, alternating skips, high knees, turning all of those drills, the same things that Molly Mets includes in in double under program, but turning it into play and making it freestyle and kind of free form. But to even get there, you have to be able to do jump rope singles, which is a skill in itself. But I think, you know, there's there's these layers that that need to be stacked on top, but they all kind of are connected back to either creating, creating an understanding of what it should feel like, what it should look like, your understanding of the movement. And each layer is just a little bit more advanced as you go up. Strategically Integrating Skills into Mixed-Modal Workouts Yeah. It's also one of those things that what Brent is talking about is, you know, really valuable, but also if you're not already in a good hand position and you're talking about doing these skip drills and the boxer playing like your boxer, if your arms are suspended out at your side. Like you can still accomplish some of those skills, but your long term ceiling is still very low without having set up the foundation of where your shoulder should be, how your body line should look. So I think that there's some caveats, like you said, like when he gets that top level of play, a lot of times he'll say something and we'll get the athletes who are just starting. They're like, oh, that's what I need to be doing. But in reality, they still need those breakdown drills. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's where the this whole thing is predicated upon a very effective video review at the beginning. And that requires a coach that understands the movement well enough to be able to say here are here are the missing key positions. Now let's come up with some drills. Let's come up with a pathway to get you to closing that. And I think the higher the level of the athlete, the more complex that pathway can be and the lower the level of the athlete, the more remedial it needs to be. And I think that's really like we, we talked about pedagogy early on or a system or a progression. That's really what the progression needs to look like. Speaker 1 So now we've kind of taken the athlete, we've gotten them to where they're in a level of proficiency with a skill that we deem adequate to perform in the sport. How are you integrating this into their ability to perform them in mech cons? Like, does it change based on the movement? You know, we've kind of spent most of this conversation talking about double unders and ring muscle UPS, which I think are interesting skills to compare and contrast in the sport. And like, what movements kind of limit those when they're in a mixed format? But what does your integration process look like? Speaker 2 Yeah, we'll start with ring muscles because I think that's the the most common one, right. It's the one that we've all kind of dealt with the most as as coaches in this sport because it's a complex skill. I tend to start with muscle UPS one once they've got the skill, then I start with repetition work with with ring muscle ups. And it would typically be an isolation or combined with a non involved earth. So like the echo or concept to bike and it might be something as simple as 3 ring muscle UPS every 90 seconds for five sets. So they're accumulating 15 total match that obviously to their capacity and their target competition level. And then they would just jump back on the erg and they would do recovery work at, you know, like an R1 or R2 recovery zone. So that would be like phase one of bringing it into a mecon where the skill is first and then the act of recovery is second. But then what we're going to do is actually start to increase the intensity of that act of recovery. So they're coming back to the skill with a little more fatigue. So it might be like, OK, now I want you to hold 70% of your 10 minute pace or 80% of your 10 minute pace on the erg after each of those sets. And you're over time, you're using progressive overloads. You're starting with threes, then going to fours, then going to fives. So you're increasing the density because that's really what's tested in the sport for the most part is density. So using a density progression and also increasing the intensity of the erg in between them. But eventually you've got to flip it and you need to do pre fatigue work where it might be you start to do some ski erg. So it might be like 10 Cal ski into 3 ring muscle ups and that is a very different stimulus than three ring muscle UPS recover for, you know, the remainder of the 90 seconds. Those are two very, very different stimuli. So then it would go active recovery to a little more intense active recovery with the density progression then into post fatigue. So there's some pre fatigue work in the post fatigue and then you're starting to integrate them into intervals and then you finally start to integrate them into true metcons at that point. And I think that process has worked extremely well for every group of, of people that I've, I've walked through that. Now it's not quite as straightforward and linear as I just, you know, walked through it. Yeah, yeah, it never is. It's, it's a little more of an undulating progression in there, but that's kind of the, the general flow that I've used. Speaker 1 Yeah. One of the things that I like to do with athletes as they're getting to a point where, you know, now we can do let's just say the three on the 90 seconds with the recovery. And I like to get them up to about 8 sets of that before we start really doing anything more aggressive. But one of the things that I like to do is start to introduce imams where they're doing squat snatches or thrusters or something like that with a little bit of rest. So like 10 unbroken thrusters at 65 lbs for an athlete who is, you know, a pretty high level thruster capacity athlete, not a ton of fatigue, rest 20 seconds and then go do their three, their three ring muscle ups and then have them do active recovery. It's it's kind of intervalized, but it's very structured and that we're still spacing it a lot. But I think that one of the things that I have found when I do exclusively cyclical things with athletes as they're developing capacity is they get into mech cons and they they think that they're still doing sets of three. And they need to have experienced like the thruster or the snatch or overhead squats or whatever, deadlifts even like just to know that when you go to do this skill, your capacity is dampened by the mixed modal component of this. Speaker 2 This is the mastery component of a skill is understanding how much each of the other movements involved in a workout are going to impact your ability to perform the target movement. So it's muscle UPS. A thruster into a muscle up is going to be very different than a deadlift into a muscle up, which is going to be very different than a handstand push up or a handstand walk into a muscle up. And the worst of all is GHD into a muscle up right. Speaker 1 Person dependent, right? So from. Speaker 2 General, the compounding fatigue of those two is the one where people are like, I don't even know how to do a muscle up now. Speaker 1 So you remember they they put that out in 2015 for teams and I was just messing around. I was just coaching at that point. Like I had removed myself. But I went out there and did the 50 GHD sit ups with one of the guys on the team and then just like broke out 15 ring muscle UPS unbroken. And I was like, I don't understand what you guys are complaining about. Speaker 2 Yeah, because I can do the uprise, but this is mastery. This is skill mastery, right? Because I can do an uprise, I can do a muscle up in a way that the ABS are much less involved and so I can do that combo fairly well. The other one that was really interesting is when they released the ruck muscle up because of because I have a unique way of doing bring muscle UPS, the ruck muscle up was not that much harder for me. It was almost like the ruck added to yeah, yeah. It just added to the the turnover to some degree. And so I, I do agree with you, but I think that's part of what mastery is, is starting to get exposure to. I would say that that happens after you go through the URD progression because you really are trying to just figure out how to do them under some fatigue and then eventually do them under all the different kinds of fatigue that you might experience in CrossFit, which is a lot of different kinds of fatigue. And at that point, you know, someone should already have established the ability to do the skill well under a single type of fatigue before you're going to start to integrate them into. And and I don't want to use that in like a gatekeeping way to be like, well, you should never do them in a metcon unless you that's silly. But I do think that, you know, if you're trying to create long term progression for someone that might be a multi week process to get them to the point that you're doing them in in metcons after or multi month process after. They are like, all right, I'm doing consistent sets of three on the minute with no other fatigue and. Speaker 1 Now we're now we're integrating more stuff. But yeah, I don't know. That's that's just my disposition. Tailoring Skill Integration for Sport-Specific Competitions And one of the things that I've come to realize is especially in the current state of our sport, athletes that we're working with are largely if they can do ring muscle UPS, they're probably doing a qualifier or competition every three to six months. So if we never touch anything other than the the herb component of it, then they're fully unprepared where like just a little bit of dosing of it, I think just keeps them a little bit more in touch with what's going to happen when we actually do this in a metcon? Because when, you know, fitness of the coast releases a workout, let's just say that they put ring muscle UPS in this week. I have no idea. I'm going to look like a genius if that comes out. They, you know, like they put ring muscle UPS in. We don't have the choice but to do it with whatever they pair it with. So if they decide that they're doing thruster double under ring muscle up, you have to do it with those movements. You don't get to just be like, I'm going to sub this out and do some active recovery on the C2 bike instead. Speaker 2 I'm going to, hey guys, I'm not going to do 185 deads. Instead I'm going to do 10 cals on the rower because I know how to do 10 cals on the rower and to ring muscle up, right? OK. So, So what you're talking about brings up a much broader and bigger conversation, which is a periodization conversation that if you're going to have someone doing a qualifier that they should be prepared for the qualifier. And we talked about that a little bit in our qualifier episode very briefly about what training might need to look like leading into a qualifier. But that's really, you know, you're going to have a sport specific phase. And all of those progressions that we've talked about, all of the skill acquisition stuff, all of the, you know, the herb progressions and the bridge that takes you into more sports specific stuff. That's all has to be done before you get into your qualifier prep phase. Because once you get into qualifier prep phase, it should look like what a qualifier is going to look like for sure. And that is it's very simple. There's this great resource. I did AI did a, a consult with a coach yesterday. I do these coaching consults and one of the things we were talking about is that he's struggling with creating back cons. I was like, well, you don't have to overthink these things. There's this great website called Apollo. I think it's Apollo Perform and it it has a Bank of every live event workout that I can think of. Like I'm preparing Alexis for Rogue right now. You click on Rogue, you click on events and from 2019 all the way to 2024, it has every workout. It also has a distribution of all of the movements and the frequency that they've shown up in the competition. So if you are preparing an athlete for a competition and you're not using a resource like that and not doing your due diligence, you're not preparing your athlete well for the competition. And that's really what the sport specific phase is. So if you have someone who struggles with muscle UPS, then what you do is you go look at the structure of muscle up workouts for the history of the competition you're preparing for, and you make sure that you address that. Speaker 1 One of the, so one of the things that I think, I don't think it's unique to me as a coach, but I one of the things I've found to be very helpful is to use parameter based intervals for athletes when they get into that early phase or mid phase development. So like, let's say an athlete would go through the the active recovery portion, they're now able to handle sets of three on the minute with like kind of Max recoverable pace or that R3, you know, kind of effort. So what I like to do is then take them into like, let's say 10 rounds for time of we'll keep the movements relatively simple, like 12 calorie echo bike at just above or like right at their 30 minute pace, 15 unbroken wall balls and then two unbroken ring muscle UPS. You're going to just continue on in that metcon until you've accumulated your 10 rounds. And if you can't hold paste where you can't hold the movements unbroken, you rest for three minutes at the R1 effort and then you just come back and finish it. Speaker 2 This is a great structure for like developmental, not not developmental that intermediate stage athlete because it prioritizes what's most important, which is maintaining sport specific speed and movement cadence and movement turnover and does it in a way that they're able to accumulate sport specific volume. So they're getting both ends of the spectrum. They're getting both of the things that an intermediate level athlete needs moving fast or as fast as they can within the sport and accumulating the volume that's necessary. And you've created a structure that allows for that. I think we call it creative, but really it's just we have a problem and we need an athlete to be able to execute this movement, ring muscle UPS, this high skilled movement. We need them to be able to do it under mixed fatigue. What is a way to guarantee that they can get there with mixed fatigue? Moving at, creating, not moving at, but creating the, the kind of internal physiological environment that they're going to encounter in an actual qualifier and do it repeatedly. And that is what drives adaptation and it gives you an easy pathway for progressive overload because the next week you're doing 3 ring muscle UPS in each set. Speaker 1 Yes. The other thing that I really like to do with athletes like let's say we go further in like more advanced athlete, right? So I have an athlete who if you keep the ring muscle UPS, 7 reps or under, they will be competitive across the board because they can handle that. And whatever happens when they're in their transition phase, like they flush the fatigue very quickly. But if you ask them to do 20 straight, the movement breaks down. So what I have started to do is OK, what does your 20 straight look like at the end of a 14.4 or 22.1? I think it was 22, but that the. Speaker 2 Power snatches. Speaker 1 No, this is the chipper of the the calorie row, Toto bar wall ball power, clean ring muscle up that ends with 20 ring muscle ups and then obviously 14 minute AMRAP. So we calculate their pace, their reps per minute. Let's say they get 5. So we know that they need to average one Rep every 12 seconds. So what I'm going to do is have them go slightly above that pace. So I'm going to average them out to doing two reps or one Rep every 10 seconds. And what that will typically look like is you're going to do 2 reps on the 20 seconds until this breaks down, until you fail a Rep and then you're going to get off, do your R1. And then we're going to come back and kind of do that type of parameter based training. But I'm doing a lot of it based on like just barely pushing them above their current capacity. But that's something that I have found to be extremely effective for those athletes because it just teaches them to normalize that slightly faster turnover. Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think there's a, there's a good point right there as well that you can't have someone trained way beyond what they're currently capable of and expect to get the kind of adaptation that you want long term. Like someone might be able to, to operate a lot faster than back Connor or, you know, move a lot faster. But what happens is it's only sustainable for like 2 rounds. And if they're doing a 7A7 round back on or a longer chipper style back on like your example, then they just end up blowing up and the back half of the workout becomes completely wasted training. And so your job as a coach is to come up with tools and strategies that allow them to take these higher skill movements that that are priorities, get there without all this extra accumulated fatigue, but still moving just slightly above what their current capacity is. And that's what the there we can do a whole podcast on interval training and like the value of interval training and what the intentions are. Because it turns out there's so many different ways to use intervals. But one of the primary things that I use intervals for is to get people to move faster than sports specific speeds, take a short rest and then do it again and then take a short rest and do it again. So they're training their body to kind of you. We've talked about neuromuscular adaptations to to adapt to moving slightly faster than they're used to. And I think that right there is part of what good coaching, good training. It's not good coaching, but it's part of good training. The Long Road to Skill Mastery Through Consistency Yeah. Then what? What does your process look like? So we kind of talked about the ring muscle up. Does that change at all for a double under or any other skill? Or have you found that certain skills fall outside of that type of progression? Speaker 2 No, I mean, I even double unders, I've, I've progressed for people myself. My, my format was pretty, was pretty similar like double unders used to be something I really struggled with. It was, if you look back, even, you know, 4-5 or six years ago when Adam and I were first working together, we spent a lot of time working on double enters. I went through Molly Mets program twice. I did all these progressions where it was like 30 seconds of double enters, 30 seconds of easy cyclical and just built volume and capacity and consistency like that first. And then we started to integrate them into, into mecons into into things that truly were, were more challenging. So that the, the pathway was very similar where the, the fatigue was progressive. And then also we tried to identify later on, we tried to identify like what are the movement combinations that seemed to cause the biggest issues for my double unders. Was it grip fatiguing? Was it, you know, was it pressing fatigue, tricep fatigue? What were the things that caused the most issues? And for me, it was just like there was a fatigue threshold above which if, and I don't know if it was heart rate related, if it was some sort of overall fatigue, if it was respiration rate related, but there was a certain threshold that above there, that's where my double unders fell apart. And so we were able to come up with some intervals that recreated that very terrible feeling. And then I just worked on consistency and composure to double lenders in that state over and over and over to the point that they feel they were a competitive advantage at the H Group Games this past year in the handstand, push up echo, double under workout. I had zero trips across that workout and I was like 2, literally 2 double letters away from finishing. I think I took fifth in the workout. Speaker 1 Yeah, that, I mean, that just speaks to the timeline that you have to expect for some of these things to come together, right. So you're. Speaker 2 Talking about seven years. Speaker 1 Seven years. I remember when I first came on site, that was something that, like it was one of the few things that I could do better than you. Speaker 2 Yeah, I was. It wasn't that I was bad at double letters because I could do 300 and broken double letters. It was that there was some sort of great example of a workout and I would think I would still struggle with this open 14.1, which I think was also 12.1. The light power snatch, 75 LB power snatch double under that was 11.111 point one. That workout, that combination, I think it was 30 double under 15 power snatch, 75 lbs. That 10 minute AMRAP, I think maybe 7 minute AMRAP, I don't know. I got a lot of rounds and all I remembers my double letters at some point, 5-6 minutes in, there's a fatigue threshold I'd hit, my double letters would fall apart and it was just consistent. Now I do think at this point now after having it's been a long time, 10 years since that point, but really having focused on them for, you know, six or seven years, they'd be competitive, but that path was very long to get to that point. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's, it's interesting and like how one of the hardest things to do when we're identifying this is identifying the limitation in the bottleneck for the athlete. So in that particular workout, my limitation is purely in light barbell cycling capacity. Like the double unders didn't impact me. I might have tripped once or twice, but that was because the barbell is just blowing me up. Like I I posted, I don't remember what my score was in 2014, but my score was achieved by doing sets of five because I could not handle doing repeat barbell cycling like that. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think the barbell cycling is what, when I remember doing that workout was so long ago. That's definitely what blew me up. But it was once I was blown up, the double unders were just a mess, just complete trash. And that remained a, a major problem for me for a very, very long time as a Crossfitter. And it took years of going back through a lot of the progressions that we've talked about in this podcast. I did the box drill. I did months of the box drill and, you know, all the spins and all the speed steps and all the crossovers and all the crossover singles and double enters and all that stuff and all the drag rope, Tons and tons of drag rope to build tricep endurance and stuff like that. And actually, you know, be able to feel where the rope was. Tons and tons and tons of that. To the point now where I'm like, all right, my double enters are pretty damn good. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think the the warning there is that, you know, just because you have developed a skill that you think is at a high level, you do need to still try to poke and prod and find the things that are going to create the reversion. And then you need to actively train to be resilient to those things. Speaker 2 Right, so. Speaker 1 Like for a lot of squat patterns. Speaker 2 Yeah, it it the, the path is still the same, right. You start with the the remedial drills and you work your way up as you know, as far as you can. And I think one of the things that sets people apart in this sport is their ability to stay consistent with. It's like, OK, we're in this sport where you have all these different things. It's constantly varied in the sport itself when you're competing changes all the time. But the one thing that stays the same is that for you to be successful, you have to be consistent. To improve any skill requires you to work on that skill for extended periods of time. And it's like Crossfitters hate this one trick man. And it's consistency. Speaker 1 Yeah, I I think that's actually a good point to end on, unless you have anything else that you want to dive into. Speaker 2 No, I don't, I don't think so. We've, we've covered skill acquisition at A at a pretty high level and a remedial level. Speaker 1 Right.