I’ve, personally, been in the boutique fitness / CrossFit space for coming up on 10 years.
As a gym, our coaching staff has collectively over 50 years of coaching experience.
We’ve been around for a little bit..
Since day one, the most overwhelming noticing that sticks out amongst all the gyms I’ve coached in, communities I’ve been a part of, and athletes I’ve worked with is a lack of robust strength.
I’m not talking about getting someone’s back squat 1RM up. I’m not talking about hitting a new snatch PR. I’m not even talking about getting someone their first strict pull-up.
When I mention a lack of strength, I’m speaking about strength in EVERY position. Another way to frame this would be lack of capacity at the fringes.
If you stick with fitness for long enough, whether you pursue CrossFit, Powerlifting, Hyrox, Marathons, etc. You will experience an injury. You will see setbacks. You will be challenged with coming back from something that you didn’t foresee happening to you.
This is where strength really matters.\
CrossFit prides itself on constantly varied, functional movements performed at relative high intensity.
It’s literally the definition of ‘What Is CrossFit?”
As you start getting more serious in this fitness endeavor / sport, you start picking out little things to work on.
Some will start working on building their engine via more conditioning work. More metcons, more intervals, more sweaty time on ergs.
Others will go the gross strength route. Jumping on an intense squat cycle, hire an oly coach, begin some Wendler 5×5 progression.
Still yet, others will start putting on more volume in gymnastics. Toes to bar progressions, kipping pull-up skill work, ring muscle up drills, etc.
We always chase better times, more rounds, faster reps. We rarely ask ourselves what the common factor amongst all of these pursuits is.
The pattern behind most of these struggles is that it’s rooted in lack of strength. So many people are limited in strength at their end ranges and balance across their gross movement patterns.
It isn’t that you don’t have a big enough engine, that you haven’t found the perfect gymnastics drill for you or that you aren’t doing enough varied styles of metcons.
It’s that you don’t have the foundation of strength to express the capacity in the above mentioned and so much more.
Obviously everyone has their own definition of what strength is.
To get on the same page with what we are talking about, we need to articulate what I am conveying when I discuss strength.
Trust me, I love a 1RM as much as the next person… It’s my background in sport. Olympic Weightlifting and Powerlifting.
But, after 10 years of competing, I’ve outlasted a lot of people that I used to take the platform with.
This isn’t because I was gifted with anything other than a functional body.
It’s because I worked diligently at strengthening end range motion and safeguarding my movement against lower capacity positions.
Strength is about being able to manipulate your body in space or an external object through space in whatever task may be asked of you.
It’s the difference between a movement feeling controlled and feeling like you’re just doing it and surviving the thing.
When technique falls apart in a workout, it usually isn’t because the athlete doesn’t care. It’s because they haven’t built the capacity require at the point at which the movement is falling apart.
A lot of those little aches and pains that we experience as athletes aren’t random at all. They show up when we exceed our bodies ability to handle the task being asked of it. It could be a range of motion we aren’t ready for yet. It could be a load we haven’t earned the right to lift. It could be a repetition or volume that we are ill prepared for. It could be a time under tension that is beyond what we can tolerate. Whatever the factor is, we’ve put too much demand on our system and it’s sending off a warning sign that you need to stop and reassess.
We talk a lot about mobility, but the issue isn’t just access to range of motion. It’s the ability to control your body or the external load at that end range.
Even conditioning problems come back to strength. You strength bucket is directly related to the amount of stress you can tolerate with repetitive tasks. If your quads and hamstrings are 10% stronger, your system can handle 10+% more running volume. It can express 10+% more speed due to contraction.
Hopefully you can see how this compounds…
If your goal is to do this for a long time, this starts to matter even more.
Strength is what lets you keep showing up. Not just today, but 10 years from now.
Most people focus on stretching, smashing, adding volume, etc. We already discussed this.
What need to happen is you need to isolate and pinpoint your weak areas. Whether it’s a movement pattern, a specific range of motion, a tempo, a volume, density issue, etc…
This is where a coach can help you cut through the noise and figure out exactly why you keep getting injured. Why you can’t get your pull-up. Why you can’t hit that PR you’ve been chasing.
Strength doesn’t fix EVERYTHING.
But, strength fixes quite a bit…
Don’t write it off if you’ve tried a strength cycle and nothing changed. You might just need to get stronger in the right places.
