Strength Trainer Pavel Tsatsouline on CrossFit Good and Bad

CrossFit, to circle back around to that, what do they do that you feel, you said there's a lot of good things they do, they get people moving, they introduce people to all these different exercise routines, what do you think they do wrong? Joe, I don't want to pick on CrossFit. This so-called metabolic conditioning has been around since 1975 at least when Arthur Jones coined that term, you know the guy from Nautilus. That's when he would, people would go through a circuit of machines going one after the next and I'm sure it's been around even before that. I would just do things totally different. So there's no point in me trying to criticize a different system. I'm just telling you this is what the science says and experience says is how you should be doing it. And I think that there are a lot of great people in CrossFit and I just wish, you know, power to them. You would just do it like what you're talking about with longer rest periods, different sort of training approach. Okay, let's say that you're training for the CrossFit Games. Let's say that's your goal, right? What you would do is name some CrossFit exercise, let's say wall ball, okay? Let's say they throw the ball against the wall, good exercise. You do this thing with this wall ball for 40 minutes like I told you and you can incorporate a second exercise in between, just in between, stick it in there. So let's say you do a wall ball, you throw this a few times, walk around, you do a set of push-ups, let's say 5 to 10 reps and you do this for 40 minutes. Why 40 minutes? It doesn't always have to be 40 minutes but pretty much we know if you can sustain it for 40 minutes it's not going to be overly glycolytic. So we just kind of know that. I'll give you another example, let's say burpees, right? You can do a burpee but time it in a way that you can keep doing burpees for 40 minutes. So you do a rep, walk around, do a rep, walk around or you can break it up. So you do these different CrossFit specific competition, specific exercises in this particular manner where you're able to sustain it again for 40 minutes. Then closer to the competition you start doing what in track is called peaking. So when you're running let's say 400 meters or 800 meters, athletes when they train in the off season they train largely aerobically. Even though their distances are shorter they're still not trying to trash themselves. We do know that even if you develop your mitochondria, if you do it correctly and suddenly you throw yourself in an acid bath your body is going to be unpleasantly surprised. So what you need to do is you need to model that. So what's going to happen is a couple of weeks before the competition once a week you would do it pretty much like something similar to the competition, like a wad or whatever. And this will accomplish several things. One is it will upregulate your buffers. So your body produces baking soda pretty much to cancel out the acid. And it's a very rapid adaptation. It's very easy to get just two weeks you got it. In addition you also upregulate your glycolytic enzymes which you also want for competition. And again they're very quick to develop, very quick to lose as well. So finally there is such a thing as heart and respiration rate modeling. So which pretty much means that you're going to be sucking wind and if you're not used to sucking wind it's not going to feel good. Your diaphragm is going to spasm and not so good. So the purpose of peaking is to get yourself in kind of a simulated competition situation where the acid is high enough to make your body adapt to it, which adapts fast, and to make yourself comfortable with high heart rates and breathing. So that's the summary. That's pretty much how track athletes train. Thanks for watching.