@FitnessHeroics.

If you happened to watch the CrossFit games you might notice the different events that took place. CrossFit is now branching out into different domains of fitness to make it more challenging to athletes to complete events. Many of the events are hard to prepare for like the peg board game that threw off many athletes in the Games. So why the change ? CrossFit is built on the idea that we need to move large loads over long distances, quickly. For CrossFitters, the key word here is carry-over. There is now the carry over from Strongman into CrossFit training.

If you look at a CrossFit program verse the strongman program, they aren’t nearly as disparate as their physical statures would suggest. Both athletes have an insatiable desire for functional strength. For example CrossFitters have to be ready to haul their bodies up a rope or flip some crazily shaped piece of metal across a field, and strongman athletes have to lift other awkwardly shaped objects like heavy Atlas stones and huge tires and carry them a certain distance. Doing this requires not only raw strength in the lower body, lower back, shoulders and arms but also an incredible amount of grip strength.

Along with carry over there is also prioritization of the structure of the workouts. Doing a heavy leg day before a strongman day is going to be difficult. You need to have a plan when incorporating strongman into your program. Keep time intervals short and rest periods generous. Heavy strongman exercises should be done as strength workouts, not lung-bursting met-cons. It’s not the classic 21-15-9, three rounds for time or AMRAPs you should be doing with strongman moves.Longer rest periods aren’t bad when you’re training strongman. You don’t want to be picking up heavy weights when you’re breathing so heavy you can’t move. You want to keep the domains short and let athletes recover to minimize the risk of injury. I would never put strongman lifts in a longer WOD or high-rep or high-time-domain workout.

Check out these 3 cross over exercises that are evolving in the CrossFit community!

Atlas stone

-Stones demand strength, skill, agility, balance, coordination, and guts like no other movement.Nothing challenges every single ancillary muscle fiber, right down to your fingertips, like a stone.

Backwards roll to support (right because we all have muscle ups )

-Greg Glassman was teaching the HQ staff how to do these in 2013. Then CrossFit issued a challenge for the community at large to submit their videos. But it was Tony Budding who brought them to the masses when he introduced them into GRID at the first combine in Las Vegas. Within one year, there was scarcely a GRID athlete who could not do a backward roll to support with proficiency. CrossFit has stayed away from this movement, until now. It’s an extremely technical movement, and entertaining to watch.

Rope Muscle Up’s

-Standard ring muscle ups, once the holy grail of every CrossFitter’s repertoire and a staple at the Games, are as routine as air squats now. Everyone can do muscle ups, so why not take it up a notch and separate out the elite athletes with high-level bodyweight movements?Using a rope takes muscle ups to the extreme and tests something that rarely gets tested in its truest form: grip strength.

There is always the need for balance between entertainment and testing for fitness. Of course, testing for fitness supersedes entertainment value, which is why we have rowing for calories, assault bikes, and the TrueForm treadmill. Keep an eye out for these movements in the very near future !