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BRUTISH DAISY
Obj: Strength
Warm up: 3 Rounds
7x Burpees
1x Rope Climb
Training:
(1) Work up to 1RM Bench Press
(2) 5 Rounds
3x Bench Press @ 85% 1RM
8x Dead Lift @ 60% 1RM
10x Weighted Situp @ 55#
(3) 5 Rounds
5x 1-arm Bench Press @ 55#
8x Romanian Dead lift @ 32kg
30m Farmer Carry
(4) 5 Rounds
5x Jumping Goblet Squat @ 24kg
15m Rope Pull (light and fast)
20m Kettlebell/Dumbbell Crawl
Comments:
I received the following e-mail from Alex:
Hi Rob,
I have some thoughts on your post today. I think this out-loud second-guessing of your own programming is very
healthy. First,some quotes from your post that caught my eye, and that are at the heart of the matter:
" Any goon of a strength coach can put together a crushing, killer workout. Making people sore for days or throw
up is easy."
" I've realized that judging a workout or training program based on its difficulty is a dead end."
..." the part of my ego which was propped up by completing the hardest workout in the gym that day seemed to lose
interest."
"Transferability..."
It's the transferability that's hardest to nail,and the hardest to judge with an open mind. Coaches get known
for something, a signature style ,certain movements, or just plain difficulty, and then don't evolve. You seem aware and wary
of this tendency, and you also draw on the writings and experiences of others and take what is useful, discard what's not.
For example you recently mentioned some exercises you have discarded/set aside for now because, while they might be fine exercises,
they were time consuming to teach or correct and took away from training time. You weren't sure that snatch and OHS did any
more for your athletes than they were getting from cleans and push presses, and you stopped trying to teach deck squats. Fine
and good examples of your open-minded flexiblity, but with respect to what you do to yourself in the course of a week, and
how your athletes select workouts to attend/overall workload, I have some questions. (As an aside, I think transferability
will always be an open question based on the anecdotal evidence of you and your particular group of athletes. And we're always
going to struggle with the workload thing, because we LIKE the challenge, the 'good pain'.)
A little while ago you divulged your current personal schedule- six days of alternating gym days and rock gym/running
/ weighted hiking or running- type days, with one day of rest. How the hell do you do it without overtraining? I know your
work capacity is very high, but still...
When your athletes are planning their activities for the week, do you give them the week's plan in advance? Do they know
in advance whether a certain day of the week will be strength or endurance oriented? Or do they just show up and do what they're
told, whatever's on the white board? This question of choice/flexibility seems important- I often wonder how a coach with
a facility like yours keeps everyone happy, because if it were me, and I was an industrial athlete at the Village or a mountain
guide, especially in season, I'd need to integrate my gym time carefully with my sport so as not to completely trash myself.
I'm going to guess that you're ahead of this one by offering two different options each day, or coming up with custom workouts
on the spot for people who are still too sore from the last one- you've mentioned doing this for certain athletes in the past.
Your thoughts on this would be very interesting to me.
The coaches who dislike the Crossfit-style metabolic workout method (example: Boyle) seem to be the same guys who segregate
strength and conditioning into seperate workouts-or at the very least perform them at two different times of day. . Not as
much fun, not as interesting and varied as blurring the lines between the two as you do and Twight does and Crossfit does.
To sort of answer my own question, I'm sure some of their dislike of the multi-modal approach has to do with what kind of
athletes they are coaching , the need to avoid injuries and the conservatism that requirement breeds, and the need to keep
things short and simple for athletes who have a lot else going on- all things you've alluded to in the past in various posts.
I think Steve Maxwell RKC said there's nothing new, it's how you put it together. Could this be an example of getting , I
don't know, emotionally attached to a certain type of training / suffering being counter-productive? I think back to certain
training maxims that have stuck in my head, most from before I ever heard of Crossfit or anything like it: 1. Strength training
needs to be brief, infrequent, and intense to be most effective.2. Supercompensation can only occur with adequate rest, and
what's adequate will vary with the individual, his age,etc. If you train again before you are recovered, you've blown it.
3. You risk overtraining if you do too much high-intensity interval training. 4. Your goal in the weight room is to stimulate,
not annihilate, your muscles and endocrine system. Too much, and recovery is compromised, you've set yourself back by doing
too much.
I realize these bromides fly in the face of some of the new-school, hybrid strength and conditioning ideas of what
works. It's the whole idea of 'the research' and how that relates to what works.
I apologize for the lengthy multi-part e-mail , and would be grateful for any feedback, at least with respect to the
parts that interest you and that you have been thinking about also.
-Alex
ANSWER/COMMENT -
I don't discount the idea that overtraining is an issue, but it's mostly put forth by coaches working with competing athletes.
But I'm more in the Glassman/Pavel camp who question the whole idea. For many mountain athletes, and especially tactical and
industrial athletes like my guides or loggers, or soildiers - the volume of activity they can put in the course of their occupations
can be incredible - to the disgust of any team sport coach. These type of athletes can't stop because of "overtraining"
- they've got a job to do - and the fact that they do it, and survive I feel really raises the bar about how much physical
stress the human body can take and recover from.
I believe that some of the old school thoughts about overtraining are outdated, especially as it pertains to these types
of athletes. Also - because these athletes can face incredible amounts of volume in their work or on the mountain - shouldn't
their training program reflect that? Train long to go long, right? Sometimes I'll get a new athlete who gets really sore,
and calls asking if they should let all the soreness subside before training again. My response is a question back to them?
"Let's say you're halfway up the mountain, have limited food and weather window - are you really going to wait until
soreness subsides before continuing up?" - see my point?
Generally, depending upon the number of athletes in a session, everyone does that day's workout. Understand that for the
guides, their guiding is a lot of volume, but not especially physically challenging for them. Many lose fitness during the
course of the guiding season, and come to the gym in an effort to retain/enhance some of it. Practically, I do design sessions
on the spot for certain athletes, but this depends on the athlete's experience, injuries, etc. Also, if a guide or someone
has a big day the next day, I'll change stuff up. But I'm not a personal trainer who designs individual workout programs based
on what the athlete wants. All my athletes understand that when they come to my gym, they will be expected to do that days'
session.
Recovery is still important, but the old school strength coaches were interested in maximal strength for team sports
and had more control over their athletes.
I'm only interested in relative strength - in other words, I'm not trying to get my athletes to lift as much as they can,
I'm trying to get them "functionally" strong. A 1.5x bodyweight front squat is not "strong" in the broader
weightlifting/power lifting world - in fact it's quite weak, but right now, this is my strength goal for my male athletes.
To get more, I'd have to stop the strength endurance, metcon/power endurance stuff we do, and they do themselves outside the
gym - and just lift heavy. The breathing/cardio we do works against maximal strength gains - but you wouldn't be much of a
mountain guide if you couldn't walk uphill without gasping for air - even if you could front squat 3x your bodyweight.
In terms of Hybrid training, CrossFit is down to 3 days on, 1 day off, with just short, intense sessions - and is having
great success. Our sessions are much longer, but instead of 5-6 days a week, I limit my athletes to 3-days a week max, and
our weights are going up and times decreasing. But unlike CrossFit, our gym accomplishments are secondary to the training's
effects outside the gym.
I can't control what my athletes do outside the gym on their non-training days. Sometimes they'll come into the session
sore and tired from guiding/climbing, etc. - and perhaps won't have the best session, but that's life. We do the best we can.
With my own non-gym training, I try to go long and slow, in an effort to mimic what my athlete's, especially the guides, are
doing - which helps me understand how our training sessions and overall programming is working or not working. But I know
my non-gym sessions are just a fraction of the volume many of my athletes are doing outside.
About "Brutish Daisy" - We leave the legs alone today and hammer a little upper body strength and a lot of core
strength. The dead lifts reps drill form/movement, while really working the mid-section, esp. the lower back. RDLs get the
lower posterior chain, farmer carries and kettlebell/dumbbell crawl - midsection and shoulders. Work briskly, but don't race.
This is a long grind.
- Rob Shaul
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| Bench press. |
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| Weighted situp. |
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| Farmers Carry |
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