I’d like to be the first to congratulate each of you on completing another CrossFit Open. This has been a great year with many advancements made in our fitness endeavors. This next year will be another great year of training with a few tweaks in the training for some and major changes for others. I welcome you to the REBUILD period.
The Rebuild period is all about developing strength, maximizing mobility, and sometimes focusing on adding the necessary tissue that we may have needed but lacked in the previous year. The metcons will focus on maintaining the strength gains that each of us are trying to develop during this training period. It is very important that if we as athletes decide to do extra conditioning, that we we either fortify our gains with adequate nutrition, or rest approximately 4 hours in between training sessions. We get stronger when we allow ourselves to adequately rest. Often, there is more to gain in focusing on moving better than there is in simply performing more reps of a specific movement.
New to everyone will be the introduction to the concept of Tempo. Training at a specific tempo allows for a control measure to be placed upon the specific response we are seeking from a movement. Tempo work allows for increased time under tension and allows our muscles to start developing increased muscular endurance. Have you ever been stuck in the bottom of a squat clean? Do you ever find yourself folding like a taco and losing the weight forward during the front squat? Do you ever find yourself cramping during high rep sit-ups? If you answered yes to any of these questions you can most certainly benefit from using tempo work. There are many more benefits to using tempo work, however, the most crucial point is, it doesn’t matter how strong we are if we aren’t able to use that strength repeatedly.