How To Beat Rich Froning: Part 4

Yes, we’ve skipped around a bit in our beat Froning series. (Where we’ve been so far: steps 8, 7, 6, 5 & 3.) Last Thursday I wrote what seemed to be a defense of the role strength training in preparing for the sport of fitness. And it was. And I will elaborate on that in a future post. Which may make this post seem a little contradictory. But here goes.

4. Posses A Baseline Aerobic Capacity It’s Endurance Stupid

To say the sport of fitness is an endurance event seems completely obvious. In fact, it used to be training for the sport typically consisted of doing the Filthy Fifty and Murph over and over again. This soon proved a faulty strategy when the competitive element called for progressive deadlift ladder with weights over 500# or a thruster of 295#. So training programs evolved. CrossFit Football became all the rage and Louie Simmons started writing articles for the CrossFit Journal. Olympic lifting was officially recognized as an important cog in the athlete’s preparation. Studies like this one, underscored how strength training is important for endurance athletes.

None of what I’m going to say is based on any real scientific study. Just based on a general observation of what has suddently become popular in the sport of fitness. Things like block bench presses, banded deadlifts, box squats, Russian squat cycles and the like have become super popular in the training programs of would be competitors. Folks used to post videos of their “Fran” PR. Now, the only videos it seems worth posting are snatch PRs. Hashtags like #snatchwars and #smolov and #klokov proliferate the interwebz. A #2milerunPR hashtag would hardly get a click.

Coaches and athletes have rightly shifted some of their training focus to gaining strength. But too much of a good thing can be detrimental. HQ has designed events over the last two years that have lasted anywhere from 2 minutes to 3 hours and coaches and athletes need to be prepared for all of those domains. Incorporating Westwide protocols might get you stronger, but you must do more than that to get you better at CrossFit. All things being equal, the 5k runner who can power clean heavy weight is going to better faster than the 5k runner who can’t clean. But only if the power cleaning 5k runner has converted his strength into a functional tool he can use to increase his endurance performance.

We use Westide principles in this program. But we never lose sight of the fact that we are not powerlifters. (We don’t use bands, or chains or wide legged low bar box squats.) Just as we never lose sight that we are not Olympic weightlifters. Our objective is not to get strong in a bubble. Our strength must be functional to our sport. I believe a lot of the programs I’ve seen have lost sight of that.

That’s a nice segue into talking about how we make the conversion of strength into endurance performance. Which I hope to do over the next few posts.

rest day