The Met Con: The Strength-Endurance Continuum, Part 1

As I will show in a subsequent post, success in the CrossFit Games series, particularly the Open, greatly depends on athlete’s ability to continue performing repetitive movements over and over again. In other words, muscular endurance is of paramount importance in the sport. Although there is no definitive rep range that develops either pure strength or pure muscular endurance on the “strength-endurance continuum”, studies suggest in order to develop muscle endurance the athlete should implement high rep weighted protocols in their training. According to Campos, et al (2002) in which they studied 32 untrained men:

Although all three training regimens (low rep = 3-5, intermediate rep = 9-11, high rep = 20-28) resulted in similar fiber-type transformations (IIB to IIA), the low to intermediate repetition resistance-training programs induced a greater hypertrophic effect compared to the high repetition regimen. The High Rep group, however, appeared better adapted for submaximal, prolonged contractions, with significant increases after training in aerobic power and time to exhaustion.

Other studies show similar adaptations in muscular endurance in well trained athletes as well.

Like I said, I will post very soon and attempt to show how important muscular endurance is to success in our sport. I know I’ve promised to talk about what we’ll be doing leading up to the Open. I swear it will happen. But one thing you will notice is a shift toward increasing our aerobic threshold with longer single modality conditioning efforts and high rep met-cons (like today). In the meantime revisit this post, as I use it as the template to create many of the conditioning efforts for this program.

Olympic
1) 7 x 1 snatch pull + 1 hang snatch (below knee), as heavy as possible, rest 60 seconds

rest < 15 minutes

Strength
2) weighted pull-up or chin-up: 10 minutes to max for day

rest < 15 minutes

Conditioning
EMOM for 8 minutes
1 hang snatch + 1 snatch
minutes 1 & 2 @ 75% of #1
minutes 3 & 4 @ 80%
minutes 5 & 6 @ 85%
minutes 7 & 8 @ 90%

rest 4 minutes

For time:
100 double unders
50 db thrusters @ 35/25#
50 pull-ups
50 box jump overs @ 24/20″
50 alternating db snatch 70/50#