CrossFit South Bay | Hermosa Beach, CA

Simon shows off his CrossFit conditioning on the field.

Remember the first time you watched Star Wars and you were amazed by the special effects and you wondered how they could even film something so awesome. Flash forward to present time and compare those special effects with a movie like Avatar¹. Now compare some of your best WODs today with when you first started doing CrossFit. On paper, they look totally different, but if you remember back to your first WOD, it was just as hard (if not harder) than your workouts today.

This is because we program our workouts by a concept of relative intensity. The basic concept is to scale the weights and reps for the workout according to the intent of the workout. CrossFit by definition is functional movements performed at high intensity across broad time and modal domains. Broken down that means:

Functional Movement – You’re not strapped into a machine. You must use your entire body and every ounce of coordination to accomplish the movement. Think of a double under vs. the elliptical machine or a power clean vs. a preacher curl.

Mark's first PR on the split jerk

High Intensity – We all know what high intensity means. There are different levels of intensity that we train for some short and very intense (Fran) and some longer but less intense (Filthy Fifty)

Broad Time – Kind of redundant with the intensity part, but it plays a more important role in setting up a time variable in our power output equation (don’t worry there won’t be a test).

Modal Domain – What the F is a modal domain? I’ve totally pretended to know what that meant before just because everyone else at my cert was pretending to know the same thing. Modal domain is basically whatever it is you are doing for that time period. Is it a gymnastic movement (pull-up), Olympic weightlifting (clean & jerk) or monostructural cardio (fancy word for running/biking/swimming)? Or it could be all three.

Ok now that we know what the definition of fitness is, we can go a little bit in to scaling. The goal of Fran isn’t for it to take you 25 minutes to complete nor is it to take you 30 seconds to complete (although that would be kinda awesome). The goal of Fran is to engage that phosphagen and glycolic metabolic pathways (see Slaughter’s post). Translated, it means that it’s designed to be a short and intense workout so that your body can experience the shorter end of the spectrum of those broad times that we mentioned earlier. Like if I asked you to all out sprint 100M 10 times with 20 seconds of rest in between opposed to walking 100M 10 times and resting as much as you wanted. Same amount of work but two totally different workouts.

Work = Force x Distance

Power = Work / Time

Big Matt Prosser shows us that a 6'7" guy can still snatch.

Now this brings me to the point of scaling. Let’s take Athlete A who has a Fran time of 3:30 at the prescribed weight of 95 lbs. How do we scale him? We don’t. We tell him good job and go faster next time. Athlete B who has a 1 rep max (1RM) thruster weight of 95 lbs. and never gotten a kipping pull-up. How do we scale athlete B? We would either give them the 45 lbs. or 55 lbs barbell and put them on the bands for pull-ups. If the bands aren’t enough, then we would drop the number of pull-ups down or switch to jumping pull-ups. The goal isn’t for athlete B to do the same amount of work as athlete A, the goal is for athlete B to experience the same amount of intensity as athlete A by scaling the workout accordingly. Are we letting athlete B off easy? Hell no. That workout is still going to be very difficult for athlete B and they will both be spent by the end of it.

Let’s take the same scenario, but instead of scaling it we let athlete B use the 95 lbs thruster weight and no band for the pull-ups. Athlete B finishes the workout although it took an hour and a half and he threw out his back in the process. With relative intensity out the window, all the athlete can do is write Rx next to his name and hobble home to his couch. On the flip side, if Athlete B sandbags it and does jumping pull-ups and pvc thrusters and finishes in 45 seconds, then he also doesn’t benefit from the intent of the workout, but damn that’s a fast Fran time.

Relative intensity gives way to how we go about scaling workouts. In some future posts, we will cover how to scale benchmarks, Olympic lifts, gymnastics and cardio movements. In future posts we will discuss how to scale gymnastics, olympic lifts, cardio and plyometric movements.

¹For girls the way we would scale this analogy is by subbing Dirty Dancing for Star Wars and The Notebook for Avatar.

WOD 3/8/2010

A. Press 4-4-4

B. 4 Rounds
AMRAP 4 1 Min Rest
7 Push Press
7 Box Jumps
7 Pull-Up
* Continue from previous round

On-Ramp WOD

A. 500M Row Max Effort

B.10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1
Deadlift
Kettlebell Swings
Box Jumps