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Scaling Workouts

Hey Vic City,

Our daily class workouts have the option for different types of scaling options. Some of those scaling options let athletes choose to scale down, but sometimes they also give the option to scale up. Almost always the goal of scaling a workout is to achieve the same overall metabolic stimulus as everyone else in the class, regardless if you are straight out of On-Ramp or one of our Regional level athletes. Greg Glassman says, “The needs of Olympic athletes and our grandparents differ by degree, not kind.”

As a coach, when someone is debating what weight they should use for the WOD, I regularly let them know that there is no harm in using a lighter weight, and to just focus on moving the bar faster. If you think about it, performing a 95 pound thruster for many male athletes, or a 65 pound for many females, isn’t super challenging in itself, however, the reason that Fran is so painful is the speed in which the reps are done. The lighter the weight, the more reps we can do without rest and the faster we can move, and that often leads to more pain and ultimately greater fitness.

If you are continually scaling up, and getting stopped by overall strength or skill rather than overall cardiovascular fitness, try some WODs where you scale down and focus on speed of reps. Having said that, there are many benefits to going a bit heavier or slightly slower on some workouts, but those opportunities are often presented in EMOMs, like what we saw for the Friday and Saturday training last week. Training in a more controlled environment, with rest and without a score allows us to push ourselves with heavier weights or high skills, which we typically don’t encounter in daily metcons.

The weekly program at CrossFit Vic City challenges our fitness with vast variety of movements, but often overlooked by many, various time domains. Looking back to the WODs earlier in the month we can see the variance of WOD duration. On June 12th/13th, we had Jackie, a tough benchmark workout with the majority of members finishing in the 7-12 minute range, not an all out sprint, but you had to be steady and move quick. The workout for June 14th/15th was scored on 1 minute of max calories on the Assault Bike. 1 minute is an absolute sprint, no pacing, just go. The week was capped off with Strict Nicole on June 16th/17th, this was a 20 minute AMRAP, which was around double the duration of Jackie. The following week, we had a long partner workout with intervals of high rep wallballs, then Helen, again like Jackie, not a sprint but a quick tempo for the 9 to 13 minutes, capped off with an EMOM of barbell lifts.

You can start to see the picture, planned contrasts from WOD to WOD. If an individual continually up-scales their workouts, which takes them out of the intended intensity, they could be missing some elements of fitness.

I’ll conclude with a quote and quick video from Games’ athlete, Adrian Conway

“You don’t need harder workouts, you need to go harder in your workouts.” – Adrian Conway

Cheers,

Adam

 

Training Wednesday - Thursday

Warm-up: 3 rds - 10 RKBS, 4 Samson lunge, 4 broad jumps

Skill: Hang Power Clean + Push Jerk: 8 x 3 + 2 E90s

Build as you go!

WOD: Felix

This is a great partner rowing workout where your pace should pick up each round you get through!

Rx: Each person rows 1000, 750, 500, 250 each

TG: half distances

FG: 800-600-400-200

Comp: add an extra 500 at the end

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