More work does not equal better.
What do I mean by that? We as CrossFitters tend to be hard workers. We put in the effort, and we want to be successful. The tendency is to want to do more and more and more work in order to achieve your goals faster.
In actuality, that can hinder your progress.
You see, the point of a training session is to create a specific response. When we write workouts, those workouts are designed to create a specific, hormonal and physical response from you. It’s designed to break you down enough, not too much, in order to create the response from the body.
Most people don’t understand that during training you’re supposed to get break down in a specific way. Then it’s during your rest and recovery, without physical stress, when you actually build muscle, lose fat, and become more fit. Constantly training with no recovery, or doing way to much work in a training session causes issues.
If you do too much work, it can have the opposite effect. It can create a hormonal stress that is what’s called catabolic. Catabolic means your body begins to destroy itself and it views itself in a state of emergency or survival mode. This creates all kinds of problems and completely negates what we are trying to do.
This is mostly due to increased Cortisol levels. If you want to see what high cortisol levels will do to the body, google elite marathon runners, or watch the marathon in the olympics this year. Those athletes create huge cortisol stresses all the time performing long slow distance activity, and that’s the response cortisol levels do to your body. For comparison, also google elite sprinters. Notice the difference? Notice how muscular they are? This is specifically a hormonal difference in their training.
In our opinion which is shared by millions or researchers, it’s much healthier for the body to have a body closer to the elite sprinters. I know some of you will think they are too muscular, we aren’t going for that either. Remember they are elite athletes. What we are going for is a good muscle tone, adequate strength, and low body fat. AKA- you’ll look better naked.
So your goal should be this….
Follow the gym programming. Show up consistently. Go as hard as you can during the workouts. Rest and recover properly. Follow good nutrition, and repeat.
I love enthusiasm for training, but I want to encourage you to follow the program it will get you where you need to go.
8-4-16
Strength:
Deadlift, while resting complete sets of auxiliary work
MetCon:
Row x 3 min (all out)
Rest x 3 min
3 rounds