What Am I Doing?

I understand some of you may be curious what my aims are with my programming and rightly so. Some of you could care less and will just do whatever workout is posted. Both are fine. But for those interested/curious/skeptical, I feel obligated to give you a brief overview of my thoughts on programming for this project.

While the stuff coming from CrossFit.com appears totally random (excuse me, IS totally random), I'm a firm believer that variance, while fun and sometimes effective, is not the best way to attain one's goals, especially if there is a specific goal in mind. So rather than throw together a slew of idiotic workouts, I've put a lot of thought in all of this (sometimes too much). Regardless, I am no expert and this is my first time programming for an entire group of people, so bear with me.

Before you read any further, I stand firmly by Greg Everett's quote: "Of course, this is all speculation and because CrossFit is by design unpredictable, there’s always a chance we could be, come game day, totally fucked."


Immediate Goals:
1) Strength Development - Of all characteristics of fitness, strength is easily the most transferable to everything else. We want to build a bigger engine.
2) Skill Development - Improving on the necessary skills CrossFit utilizes (double-unders, ring work, HSPU, wall balls) is obviously essential if one wishes to excel in the "sport" of CrossFit.
3) Olympic Lifting Proficiency - Easily the most technical aspect of CrossFit. It will simultaneously improve strength, power, focus, flexibility, and even mental toughness. In other words, it takes guts to drop your ass under a crapload of weight.
4) Metabolic Conditioning - The majority of CrossFit WODs fall into this realm. We will be addressing this lightly at first and increasing frequency as Regionals approach. Again, the stronger you are, the easier metcon work is.

Tentative Program Schedule:
02/08 - 03/07: Olympic Lifting Phase
03/08 - 04/10: Strength Endurance / Power Endurance Phase
04/11: Team Tryout
04/12 - 05/02: Continue SE/PE Phase, incorporating more team-based workouts
05/03 - 05/07: Taper Week
05/08 - 05/09: Regionals

OL Phase: Metcons will be sparse through this segment, likely no more than two per week. This phase will be geared towards strength increases and the proper development of technique.

SE/PE Phase: In this phase we will begin adding significantly more metcon work. Strength will still be an essential component, but it will not be the principle aspect. Metcons will range different time domains and energy pathways. For instance, you may do max thrusters in 90 seconds, rest 2 minutes, and quickly do an AMRAP in 15 minutes. Other days, we may have a 35 minute ball-buster. The goal is to increase metabolic capacity and, really, build mental toughness.

Taper Week: We will decrease our workload before Regionals to ensure proper recovery and maximum potential/power output i.e. we're trying to "peak" come Regionals.


Well, that's the basic essence of it. If anyone has any questions, just ask. If you're genuinely uninterested in any of this, then please just ignore this post. I basically just wanted to make sure everyone knew I wasn't using a Jump To Conclusions Mat to figure all of this out...