CFUM PROGRAMMING – WHAT’S NEXT?

>> for those of you who care:

After a couple weeks of debates, and nearly eight hours of back-and-forth discussions today, we’ve decided on the upcoming cycle.

First, we want you to keep a few things in mind:

– Strength is VITAL to CrossFit and to health and wellness in general; without strength as a foundation, all else will suffer. We can go on and on with this topic, but we will leave that for another post.

– We have prioritized strength since we started at CFUM in 2012, completing multiple Wendler, linear, organic and Olympic lifting cycles, with testing, measuring and proving our approach, and with you seeing and documenting results

– CrossFit seeks to prepare us for the unknown and unknowable

– Year-round training requires periodization, in our humble opinion

– The CrossFit Games Open is right around the corner

– The Open incorporates about a dozen movements, and historically the workouts have contained a conditioning bias

Which leaves us at our conclusion: This next cycle will focus primarily on your conditioning engines, and your strength will take a very close second. For some of you seriously considering the Open, your strength may even decrease a little, as you rev up your aerobic capacity. The approach is a little tough for us to swallow, since we love to get you strong, but we believe in periodization and in the benefit of switching things up. Not to mention, taking mental breaks from the barbell, numbers, calculations, assessments, etc., are also good. Overall, we would like to prepare you for the Open workouts, which prides itself on the unknown.

So, we’re ditching organized lifts and programming according to the following:

MONDAY

1. Strength – lower body / anterior emphasis

2. Shorter metcon that echoes lower body

TUESDAY

1. Olympic lifting – technique based (you will lift no more than 95/65, but we would prefer you to choose an empty bar)

2. Longer conditioning metcon with bodyweight emphasis

WEDNESDAY

1. Strength – upper body emphasis

2. Shorter metcon that echoes upper body

THURSDAY

Make up / open gym / mobility

FRIDAY

1. Strength – lower body / posterior emphasis

2. Longer metcon that echoes lower body

SATURDAY

1. Longer metcon with bodyweight emphasis

Get ready to see anything and everything come up: From the bread-and-butter lifts, to EMOMs, to gymnastics movements, to Bulgarian split squats with dumbbells. It’s going to be an exciting time as we head into open season. Don’t know what the Open is? Check it out here