Q) Hi Andy. You partnered with Ben from WODprep.com to make a video course covering nutritional guidelines for CrossFitters, but I see on your coaching application page that you don’t work with people who do CrossFit classes. Why?
Well, the first thing to understand about me is that I’m exceptionally particular. My apartment is spotless (clean, everything has its place), and my days are well organized. As any coaching clients will attest, this personality trait carries through to my work.
It’s not so much that I don’t work with CrossFitters but that I want to be able to control the training inputs.
A lot of fitness classes (all kinds, not just CF classes) are about getting people to work hard, sweat, and feel good afterward because they feel that they did something.
But how much you sweat and how hard you worked is not an indicator of how much fat you will lose by the end of the week, nor how well you’ve done the job of delivering the right training stimulus to the muscles.
The goal of training is to deliver a specific stimulus to elicit the desired result; it’s not to feel tired after a workout.
ยป If you do too much, you risk injury.
I don’t think a competitive environment where people push high-skill, complex lifts, for high reps to failure is a good idea. Especially when combined with a caloric deficit.)
ยป If you do too little, you’ll lose muscle when cutting, or gain an unnecessary amount of fat when bulking.
I understand that CrossFit classes have gotten plenty of people in great shape. However, this isn’t because everything is optimized to them, it’s that they find something they enjoy, go often, and probably push harder than they have before.
When people aren’t all that experienced, there’s a much wider range of stuff that will provide an adaptive stimulus, and so progression comes fairly easily.
However, these aren’t the kinds of people I train.
They are looking to optimize a cut or bulking phase. You can’t do that with random inputs, you’ve got to tailor things, monitor, and adjust based on response.
Now, if someone loves their CrossFit classes and they are making progress, I am all for it.
But when it comes to the 1-on-1 email coaching, I want to get the very best results I can for the client, and that means controlling both the training and nutrition side of things.
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