How Can I Increase My CrossFit Competitiveness?
Answering a listener's question.
Most Mondays, we revisit one of the listener questions we’ve answered in a previous episode. It’s been edited for clarity & brevity.QUESTION
from Rach:
I’ve been doing CrossFit for 2.5 years, and before that, I taught group fitness for 15 years. I love CrossFit because I believe it’s the best way for me to train at my age.
I entered my first amateur competition last November and finished 3rd in my age group, which I was super happy about.
My question is: Do you have any suggestions for improving competitiveness in amateur competitions?
My gym follows CompTrain, and I train religiously six days per week without doing much extra, as I have seen what just following the program has done for me (I am the strongest and fittest I’ve ever been).
Aside from improving my skills in CrossFit, is there anything else you’d recommend?
ANSWER
BEN: Here's my suggestion: continue doing what you're doing. You don't need to do a whole lot more. You've seen the results, and those will continue.
But identifying your weaknesses is particularly important in the sport of CrossFit.
It's different from other sports.
If you were a wide receiver in football and knew that speed was your most significant detriment, but your hands were terrific, spending the entire offseason on your speed might improve it a little — you might go from below average to average. But not working with your hands for an entire season might bring that elite aspect of your skillset closer to average.
So, in typical sports, doubling down on weaknesses doesn't pay off the way it does in CrossFit, and the reason for that is if your weakness pops up in a CrossFit competition, you can't avoid it. You can't overcome it with something else.
Let's say your weakness is double-unders, and the workout is deadlift, double-unders, and rowing. And you're the best in your age group at rowing and deadlifts, but you're very, very below average in double-unders. You don't get to your deadlifts, and double-unders account for zero in that workout because you're completely hamstrung by your limiting factor.
That's why the saying is, "Identify your weaknesses, make friends with them, and then beat them to death."
So, the short answer is to identify your weaknesses, do a little self-assessment, and try to figure out where you are relative to your cohort.
It's not you versus Games athletes — we’ll be weak at everything relative to them. And it's not you versus my grandmother — you're going to be an elite athlete compared to her. But relative to the people you're competing with, which is the people in these local competitions you're going up against.
Because if all of them struggle with double-unders a little bit, and everybody can only do about 35 unbroken, then that's the norm.
Once you've identified the weakness, you want to root out the issue, which means you figure out what's actually holding you up.
Because what a lot of people do with double-unders — just to stay on that thread for a bit — is they work on them after the workout, but it's not a fitness thing. If you're working on double-unders in a fatigued state, you're building fitness there.
But for most people, it's a coordination, timing, or skill problem — neurological issues that should be addressed in a rested state.
So in that case, you do it before the workout.
So what am I talking about? You root it and figure out, is this something that needs better strength or a bigger engine?
If it is, you train it. You keep doing workouts and strength. If it's a skill thing - this is a big one for climbing ropes.
People will just keep climbing ropes, and they do them the really crappy, inefficient way that they do in workouts. That's it. Because they don't take the time to practice it in a rested state, they don’t actually get better at the mechanics of the movement.
So if it's not a fitness or an engine or a strength thing, it's a skill thing. It might be mobility — put that aside for a second — but it's most likely a skill thing.
If it is a skill thing, you need to practice this movement, and the practicing happens before your workout, not after.
It needs to be done at a low heart rate with lots and lots of intentionality. Do that three times a week for.
And we're going to do one at a time, which is what Mat Fraser did as well as anybody. You know, Mat Fraser realized he wasn't good at rowing. So he did rowing intervals.
He did 5,000 meters of rowing intervals, three days a week, on top of his regular training - until it wasn't a weakness anymore.
Then he found out it was GHDs. So he did 150 GHD sit-ups for, like, 50 days straight until they were no longer a weakness.
You identify it, you make friends with it - making friends is like, "Okay, hi, we're going to be hanging out for a little bit." And you beat it to death.