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For everyone in the CrossFit community you have 2 things on your mind: Rx’ing workouts and lifting heavy ! Of course there are those days that come by that your ego slaps you down a few notches because you “thought” you could handle the WOD and then boom your on your butt gasping for air ! All you want to do is be a WOD ninja workout after workout, posting your score to the whiteboard and seeing your strength, mobility and endurance on the uprise!!! BUT then there’s a few people cutting corners or going overboard with his training and risking injury  in the process. Mistakes are prevalent in every training discipline, and CrossFit is no exception. Here are some major ones to try to avoid !

Kipping WITHOUT a foundation of strict skills ! Of course kipping is faster and more efficient especially when doing the Fran WOD however if you don’t have a strict pullup you are just trying to create a movement pattern based on muscles that are not fully developed yet. By learning the kip before a strict movement you are risking injury because your muscles are not fully ready for the workload that you are trying to place on them. You should be able to do at least five strict pull-ups before doing kipping pull-ups or muscle-ups as part of a workout THEN learn how to kip !

Stop cherry picking the WOD’s ! Part of the reason CrossFit works is because its varied. With that being said, if you chose what you like, chances are your working the same movements because you like them. Sure no one likes to struggle through a workout but those are the ones that you NEED to be going to! Consistency is key and picking workouts that you like all the time and not working movements that need help is the opposite of being consistent!

Don’t just show up, you need to be there 100%! Part of the reason results are not as fast as people want them to be are because they are just showing up to class and not fully going at it 100%!! If you’re just going through the motions, you’re not really doing CrossFit. We teach you how to move better, how to get stronger and how to be a more mobile human being so that you can do things outside of the gym for a long time. You need to be ready and prepared, bottom line. Biggest thing is showing up on time, getting mobilized and ready for class.If you’re rushing the workout and rushing to leave, you’re going to get hurt. You need to be ready and prepared, bottom line, or you’re never going to be successful.

Over-training occurs in every discipline, from powerlifting to bodybuilding, as well as training for sport or endurance. But the results are pretty much all the same: decreased performance and increased injury risk. Your training is as only as good as your recovery!So how much is too much? Unfortunately, there’s no black-and-white answer to that question; what constitutes over=training varies from person to person.Very few people have a fitness level to do that, however. For some athletes, it’s perfectly appropriate to train three times a day, six days a week. You need to recognize the signs of over-training: increased muscle soreness following a workout; a general feeling of extreme fatigue during the day; mood swings and irritability; not hitting your usual marks on WODs (decreased performance); and elevated resting heart rate first thing in the morning, which is an indicator typically monitored more by more experienced athletes.

Too much competition can be a bad thing, you need to be training as well! Competition is at the very heart of CrossFit. Pushing yourself to beat a personal record on a benchmark WOD or simply wanting to “hold your own” with others training alongside you at your gym produces results that would be next to impossible to achieve in a noncompetitive environment. But when every workout is a competition in which the only goal is to do X amount of work in less time or more work in X minutes, you’re missing out on some key training adaptations. You need to be doing accessory.work. Slow down a little. focus on form, it’s the only way to improve movements in terms of flexibility, skill level and mastering proper form, especially in areas of weakness.

No rep yourself if your form is bad or you didn’t go the full range of motion! Hold yourself to a higher standard and be accountable for your workout. Sure you might have to get a lower score but in the end you are working on YOU and not for the distinction on the whiteboard.  Also, don’t be a prisoner to the whiteboard; understand its purpose, its there to track progress!!

Last but not least, scale the WOD appropriately ! When deciding whether to scale down on a particular workout, determine what an appropriate time or work output should be.Don’t just finish the workout finish it while achieving the type of response you’re supposed to get out of it.As you build strength and power output, you can work your way up. It takes maturity to take a step back, but you really need to check your ego at the door.

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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 !