Post Open Strength Cycle

After the Open every year, it’s always a great time to assess ourselves and our fitness. One of the beauties of the Open is that it tests us in many different ways that we may not have even thought of before. So we learn a lot from this experience year to year.

It’s probably of no surprise to anyone that knows me, but I keep track of everyone’s Open scores and rankings every single year. I look at things like: who improves, who doesn’t, did the gym on average improve, was there a glaring weakness across the board like strength or pull-ups, etc. Then I take that analysis and it’s what helps curb and influence our class workouts throughout the year. Last year, I had felt like our greatest area to improve was our gymnastics and long workouts (12+ minutes), so we spent did a lot of workouts more geared towards those items specifically.

This year, I can definitely say we improved in both areas! Actually, across the board, the gym was very even. There were no particular workouts that averaged significantly better or worse, which is a very good thing. That means we are even and not imbalanced.

So if we’re not imbalanced, then what do we work on? Everything! My plan for the next 4-6 months as we approach the 2020 CrossFit Open in October is to give everyone as much opportunity to get very specific on fine tuning movements. We had our Olympic Weightlifting Clinic in January which went very well, we are going to have a Gymnastics Clinic for 4 weeks in April, a Nutrition Challenge in the works for the month of May, and we definitely have some other ideas of clinics or topics we can cover to help dive into some of the specifics!

But as for group class. Starting the week after the Open ends (which was actually yesterday!), we are going to be diving into a 6 week strength cycle. During the months of January, February, and most of March, we didn’t do a lot of specific strength training, just a lot of touch up to make sure we were ready for whatever came at us for the Open. So now that it’s over and we are in the CrossFit Open “off-season,” it’s a great time to to build our strength back up and over what we had before. Here’s what it’s going to look like:

Mondays - Back Squat Strength + Squat Accessory Work
Tuesday - Gymnastics Focus + Metcon
Wednesday - Long, Monostructural Metcon
Thursday - Back Squat Strength + Deadlift Accessory Work
Friday - Olympic Weightlifting Focus + Metcon
Saturday - Long, Monostructural Team/Partner Metcon

This isn’t set in stone but we’ll follow it for 95% of the days in this 6 week cycle. Class will still feel normal, these are just the things we will be focusing on in class by day of the week. The design is that we can Squat heavy + Accessory work on Mondays & Thursdays which gives our legs enough time to recover (mostly) between. On Tuesdays, we’ll take a Gymnastics focus, that way it’s far enough away from the Friday Night Gymnastics Clinic so our hands and upper body muscles can recover! Fridays in group class we will focus on Olympic Weightlifting because, how can you get stronger if you don’t focus on speed, amiright? Then Wednesday and Saturdays will be designed to be more “cardio” and less strength based so that your muscles have a chance to recover while your body still gets a good workout with a lot of blood pumping, sweat, deep breathing, and calories burning to get your body ready for summer!

We wrote the workouts in a way that you can come every day in a week or come your regular 4-5x/week and still be exposed to everything.

On behalf of the staff here at CrossFit Eta, we are extremely excited for these next 6 weeks and all the PRs and strength that will be gained! Don’t miss out on Week 1 (3/25 - 3/30) and Week 6 (4/29 - 5/4) which will be our testing and re-testing weeks for our strength.

I hope everyone’s legs are feeling great today after all those squats yesterday and I can’t wait to see everyone’s improve over the next 6 weeks!

Coach Mike