Top 10 Mistakes CrossFitters Make by Talayna Fortunato
- Not Warming Up Properly
Everyday it takes me around 30 minutes to warm-up. I start with easy cardio for 5-10 min. then do some light foam rolling
and stretching, leg swings, lunges, rotator cuff exercises, and finally
movements specific to the workout I’m about to do. My warm-up has
gotten more extensive (and longer) with each year I do CrossFit®. Almost
to the point that it started to annoy me, and then I remembered back to
my gymnastics days. Ever since I was on team at age 8, I remember our
warm-ups taking us at least 30 minutes with all of the stretching and
other calisthenics we did. Even though we were young and healthy I
believe the gymnastics coaches knew what they were doing to keep us that
way. With the intensity of competitive CrossFit® it’s imperative to put
in the time for an adequate warm-up and mobility work. If you don’t put
in the time now you’ll put it in later when you have an injury.
- Eating too Strict of a Paleo Diet
If you are a recreational CrossFitter
following a Paleo lifestyle is probably nutritionally adequate and a
good way of maintaining longevity and health. However, if you are a
competitive level athlete and training intensely more than an hour a day
your main source of energy is carbohydrates and strict paleo simply
does not provide enough sources of them. Now I’m not saying to go out
and carb load on pasta, bread, or sugar. That’s just an inflammatory
insulin bomb. I am saying look for complex sources of carbohydrates from
plants and low glycemic grains to add into your diet, especially when
training is at its peak. During an interview at the Games every
individual athlete was asked who follows a paleo diet, and not a single
one raised their hand.
- Sacrificing Technique and Movement Efficiency for Intensity and Eventual Technical Breakdown.
CrossFit gets results due to the
intensity of the workouts, but that doesn't mean throw all good form out
the window. For example if your back starts rounding when you’re
pulling from the ground or you’re chasing wildly after snatches, it’s
time to put the bar down until you can regain efficiency. Your back and
other body parts will thank you later! Also if you’re compromising range
of motion enough to miss consecutive reps, take a quick rest before you
go again. Otherwise you’re ingraining poor habits and when you reach
that place of pain and fatigue again in competition guess what’ll
happen… No Rep!
- Doing Volume for Volume’s Sake without Intent.
CrossFitters are notorious for thinking
that when they’re getting ready to compete more is better. This mindset
leads to the performance of multiple hero WoDs in a day with the intent
of “loading”, when what it really does is break the athlete down with
laborious repetition and impede lasting gains. More is not better,
better is better. Having a purpose, i.e. knowing the energy system and
muscular groups you’re trying to tax during a workout allows you to work
smart and hard, not just hard. Again, your body will also thank you
later!
- Cherry Picking Workouts and/or Jumping Around Programs
This is for the CrossFitter that walks
into the gym and decides when they get there what workout they’re going
to do based on what their gym posts and which one of the blogs they
follow appears best that day. Blogs are written for a reason, with
progressive intent to allow your workouts to build upon themselves for
measurable improvements in your numbers. If you jump from program to
program, weekly or even daily, that progress is completely
short-circuited. Not to mention you’re probably doing mostly what you’re
good at and not working your weaknesses enough.
- Following a Strength Progression that Doesn't Makes Sense or One Without Any Progression at All.
The body adapts to load by responding to
meet the load in the form of muscular hypertrophy. There have been many
studies showing the best percentages of max load, sets, reps, and
frequency to produce optimal gains without under or overloading the
athlete. These studies have produced named strength progression tables,
squat cycles, and the like. You can reinvent the wheel and use yourself
as a guinea pig to do your own research, or you can find a viable
progression and just follow it. I’ll give you one guess what most
long-term successful athletes do. One other thought to keep in mind is
how much loading your conditioning work is providing. An example would
be making your conditioning heavy on the weights during the heaviest
week of a strength loading cycle (no bueno).
- Forgetting to Supplement Your Program with Basics, Strict Strength, and Supplemental Work.
Just because you can kip almost any
movement in CrossFit, doesn’t mean it’s in your best interest to do so
all of the time. Working strict strength with things like dumbbell press
or tempo bench press can do wonders for the strength of your jerk or
stamina of kipping handstand push-ups. Sometimes to get better at a
complex movement you need better strength with the basics as well. Think
along the lines how important the hollow position is during kipping in
general and you’ll see why doing hollow rocks would have carry over into
almost all gymnastics movements. Basic skills and strict strength also
overlap with supplemental work, which can be a great way to address
muscular imbalances and push past plateaus. Supplemental work is also a
staple in the work of some of the strongest people on the planet who
employ Loui Simmon’s conjugate method.
- Waiting >90min. to Replenish After a Hard Training Session or Only Replenishing Protein.
The fact is the majority of CrossFitters
do not need a liquid protein shake post-workout. If you are just doing
CrossFit as part of a healthy lifestyle or you are trying to decrease
body fat, then a meal consisting of lean protein, nutrient-dense carbs
(vegetables) and healthy fat is best post-workout. However, if you are
participating in CrossFit as a competitive athlete and are completing
multiple grueling and taxing workouts several days per week (and many
times twice per day), your post-workout nutrition becomes vital to your
success. Although this is a very individualized thing, there are some
constants; the first being that you need more than just protein after
each session. Protein combined with carbohydrates is essential
immediately following a workout - it's just a matter of how much of each
based on the individual. The ideal ratio of carbs:protein can typically
run anywhere from 2:1 to 4:1 depending on the athlete's body
composition and type of training session just completed. The source of
carbohydrates should be something that will work quickly with minimal
interference. Some examples would be maltodextrin or sugar. The priority
is timing and you want to make sure this liquid shake is taken
immediately after the session is completed in order to replenish your
glycogen stores decreased from training and spark muscle protein
synthesis. Approximately one hour after drinking this shake, you should
then consume a whole foods meal consisting of lean protein and
carbohydrates. A great example of that would be some grilled chicken and
a sweet potato. Again, the amounts of protein and carbs are extremely
individualized. It doesn’t have to be the size of a traditional dinner,
and each athlete must find their ideal ratio, but the constant is timing
and the combining of the two macronutrients.
- Skimping on Sleep and Skipping Rest Days
Nearly as important as what you’re doing
in the gym is what you’re doing outside of the gym. The ability to
recover is instrumental to seeing consistent gains in athletic
performance. Growth Hormone (GH) is an essential part of that recovery.
It allows the body’s ability to repair itself after intense exercise
through muscular hypertrophy and plays a significant role in the
maintenance of lean body mass. Nearly 50% of GH secretion occurs during
the third and fourth NREM sleep stages. If you are regularly skimping on
sleep by 2 or more hours you are missing the body’s prime production
time of GH, and thereby not recovering as you could or should be.
Basically all the effort you put into your squat cycle was just thwarted
by a significant percentage if you were sleep deprived during it.
Another important aspect of recovery is taking needed rest days.
Continuing to workout through a certain level of fatigue or soreness can
actually be counterproductive long term.
See 1-9
This post was originally published on the WODSuperStore site as Top 10 Mistakes CrossFitters Make.
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