Simple vs. Easy & Cooking vs. Baking
Sometimes in CrossFit people tend to confuse "simple" with being "easy." In the context of Thursday's AMRAP I would ask some of those people to show us 8+ rounds as prescribed to see if they truly felt the workout was "easy."
In a somewhat related line of thinking -- when we write programming we generally start with ideas organized by movement pattern, loading, time domain, and intended stimulus. As you can imagine this can sometimes get a bit messy and over-complicated (if we don't constantly edit along the way) as we attempt to keep constant variance, intentional practice, and opportunities for intensity front of mind. In many ways writing a periodized program for Olympic weightlifting or a sport-specific strength athlete can be much easier than doing so for CrossFit as the frequency, volume, repetition, and percentages are much more exact and logical. For building General Physical Preparedness (GPP) and enabling stronger, faster, better humans to improve at nearly everything (i.e. a "broad" fitness) without specializing in any one thing, programming can be much more of an art than a science.
Sometimes I liken the art versus science in programming to cooking versus baking. When programming an athlete's training leading up to Nationals in weightlifting we "bake" much more than we "cook" (via exact measurements, exact volume requirements, exact percentages, exact timing of it all) -- but when training athletes not to suck at life we often "cook" much more than we "bake." Yes, there's obviously some very intentional guiding principles, a focus on a set of priorities at any given time, and a close & methodical regulation of the stimulus for each day's/week's/month's workouts -- thus the astute programming geeks among you have picked-up on the patterns over the years at Arena Ready -- but the "art" and fun of "cooking" CrossFit will always remain. And I would argue that the cooking has been quite successful based on the performance of any regularly-training athlete at AR (from multiple-time Regional competitors to those who simply want to be fit and healthy).
On Thursday we present to you a 10-minute AMRAP that is very simple, but certainly not easy. It's some of the best ingredients in "cooking" distilled down to an elegant (if I must say so myself) set menu -- no over-seasoning needed... no desire to put 17 movements in there to make it seem fancy... no aspirations to make it 30 minutes long to try and kill everyone. Just simple, quality, demanding fitness in three little movements. This workout started as something completely different (but closely related in terms of movement patterns and systemic demand), and was edited down and revised 3-4 times before it made its way onto Thursday's plate. We "tasted" and "re-tasted" -- we've tested and re-tested the ingredients in other contexts over and over again.
Constant variance, but not random. Simple but not easy. Cooking and not so much baking.
Bon Appetit!
WOD For 08-09-18:
3 Rounds For Quality (NOT For Time):
12/9 Calorie Assault Bike, Ski, or Row (easy, medium, fast)
12 KB Goblet Cossack Squats @ pick load (6 R / 6 L)
6 Inchworms to Plank
6 KB Turkish Get-ups @ pick load (3 R / 3 L)
-then-
AMRAP 10 Minutes:
30 ft Handstand Walk (15 ft down & back)
10 Burpees