Qualifiers can be a stressful experience for athletes. The online leaderboard and the doubt created by not seeing other athletes perform all make for potentially neurotic self-comparison.    With quarter-finals being much easier to qualify for, the open has less weight than in previous years. And now you're starting to see athletes say they are not interested in peaking for the open, who then get upset when they perform not to where they expected.    Managing the psychology and framing...

Often, when someone comes through the ranks of class workouts and starts to contemplate competing in CrossFit, they conjure up an image of their training having to dramatically change to "take it to the next level". In reality, they need to get more exposure to the sport and develop experience. Telling someone to do more of the sport can seem like a cop-out answer, but there is so much to work on and develop in CrossFit; it can take a few years to see where you need to focus your training....

After a competition, athletes are usually keen to get to work and train for potential weaknesses highlighted in the competition. But often, this is too hasty, and it's wise to have a process figured out on how to approach the review and planning post-competition period. This week, we discuss some of our processes for reviewing an athlete's performance after a competition, reducing the noise, and clarifying what needs work. Do you follow what the leaderboard says or go off of the subjective...

Since Adrian Bozman has led the programming for the CrossFit Games, each season has seen more variety in the skills and movements involved. From the max sandbag to shoulder event at the games to learning cross-over single unders in class, everyone in the sport has felt this inclusion of new skills in some way. This shift in the programming pays homage to the roots of CrossFit, and acts as another variable to progressing the sport, as you can only increase weights and volume to a certain...

In a data-heavy sport like CrossFit, it can be pretty easy for athletes to get overwhelmed when setting goals. You have your placings in the open and other competitions and your training numbers. We don't have much control over leaderboards and tend to overestimate what we can achieve in our training when increasing numbers. In this episode, we talk about goal setting for CrossFit, how it can be easy to get overly invested in the open and why competing can help you enjoy your training and...

Recently, CrossFit announced a price increase for the yearly affiliation fee and that you must also hold a CrossFit Level 2 qualification to open an affiliate. This episode is a topical one, where we talk about the value of the CrossFit name now, whether the price increase is warranted and whether this is acting as a filter to elevate the brand name of CrossFit. If you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, head over to www.legionsc.com to get a weekly selection of training tips and...

Since the first CrossFit Games, there have been certain trends that athletes have adopted to excel in the sport. There have always been those athletes who do well under the direction of a coach and others who might be more independent or even train with a group of fellow competitors. But as the sport grows and coaching businesses grow with it, you're starting to see a lot of athletes training under a training camp model. You're even finding that many of the best athletes from years past are...

Team competition back in the earlier days of CrossFit consisted of relay-style workouts, where the total score was the sum of individual efforts. This style of workout meant that the training could primarily be individual, and often you would see a broader range of abilities in team, maybe with one athlete always getting bottlenecked by a certain weight or skill. Now we see elements like the worm, synchronised reps and different workout structures that make team competition more about the...

CrossFit recently announced another round of season changes to the CrossFit Games, most notably increasing the field for quarter-finals qualification and decreasing the available games spots at semi-finals in some of the strongest regions. With frequent changes to the season structure in the last five years, who has been the most affected by this, and how does it impact the sport for some competitors? This week, we talk about how the bubble athlete usually gets affected the most and how this...

This week, we look at Flux Training intervals again and how a coach might programme that for a CrossFit athlete. We also touch on some different, less tangible KPIs to look at when measuring an athlete's performance or improvement, mainly an athlete's ability to recover while doing work and how Flux Training can help build the fitness and pacing skills to do that. If you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, head over to www.legionsc.com to get a weekly selection of training tips and...

Zone two training has done the rounds and is gaining much attention from the competitive scene. CrossFit, being an “endurance sport”, is an idea that is gaining popularity, and big names like Mat Fraser and Chris Hinshaw talking about the importance of low-intensity endurance work has made this training type of training pretty popular recently. But is it effective for improving someone’s endurance for metcons and typical CrossFit? It could be what a powerful and fast twitch athlete needs, but...

In this episode, Jon shares his experience at the CrossFit Games, coaching CrossFit Omnia to another top-ten finish in the team division. We talk a lot about balancing the weight and order of the events with cuts at the games. This year saw the cuts happening after two days of a heavy engine focus in the programming, which would have affected a lot of teams and athletes that might be more suited to typical CrossFit style events. Is this something to be expected at the CrossFit Games, or could...

Is a testing phase of training a reliable assessment for a new athlete coming on board? It's practical, but it's essentially condensing the things you'll find out in training and competition into 1-2 weeks. Many athletes don't want to do it as well. They are usually more eager to start training and stay productive through that initial stage. One direction all of our coaching styles has moved towards more is creating an initial training phase, where testing might be a part of that, but the...

What makes training difficult isn't the challenge of getting someone fitter and stronger. It's understanding how to keep athletes improving for a long time What happens when it feels like you stop improving? In a sport where you get punished more for your weaknesses than you do rewarded for your strengths, finding ways to progress long-term is essential. But maybe our framing of improvement needs to evolve with time spent in sport. We might need to look more granularly at our skills and...

There are a lot of subtleties in coaching that you can't pick up in textbooks and from theory. We all probably know a coach that doesn't have all the qualifications, but they grasp the craft better than others who might have always had their head in a textbook. Tacit knowledge is what you pick up from doing the activity, and it's something that can be tremendously valuable in a dynamic field where you're working with people, like coaching. You'll often go to a course and start learning...

Have you ever returned after doing a course with your brain frazzled and unsure of what to do on Monday? Well...that is part of the journey in upgrading your knowledge and coaching model, but how can you extract the helpful information to make it workable with the people you coach. If you're working with people in person, maybe you can experiment with things immediately. But if you coach athletes online, you don't have that luxury, and you need to make sure that the things you include in...

Curiosity is what gets a lot of coaches into training and eventually becoming coaches, and usually, these people continue to digest a lot of information, content and education about training. But being able to apply this information in a practical setting can be challenging. Especially when much of the information out there isn't delivered in a way that makes this transition easy. In this episode, we share our background in continuing education, going into detail about the courses we've...

With the changes in the structure of the CrossFit Games in the past few seasons, the stakes of the open have changed, with many athletes not needing to take it as seriously. But what happens when CrossFitters see a leaderboard...well they approach it like any leaderboard. Misaligning expectations with the open like this is detrimental, especially if their training is not preparing them specifically for the open. Although qualification to quarter-finals might be a lot easier for some folk, we...

Ever had a very structured training plan that you were almost certain would come together, but when you did the competition or the qualifier, it didn't go as well as you'd hoped? Relying on very structured approaches of preparation for CrossFit is a standard failure mode we find in the sport, coming from athletes and coaches that are pretty analytical. The problem with this approach is that it can mean you lose a connection to the real world and the sport and not be exposed sufficiently to...

We're a week away from Quarter Finals, and the qualified athletes have already had three workouts to sharpen the competing sword with the open. But as the workouts become more high stakes going into the next round, how do we support athletes? Some athletes need encouragement and a good luck message, and they are good! Others will require a warm-up, a detailed plan and potentially some video review. Although we might set boundaries on communication, and we tried to set our athletes up to be...

Ever found yourself or one of your athletes having a block in increasing the cycle speed with specific movements? You do 100+ burpees in a long workout, and it's the same 'step down, step up' style you do in a shorter sprint-style workout. Is it that burpees are just hard, is there a particular technique you should use, or is it that you have a strong distaste for burpees regardless of the workout? It's probably going to be a combination of all three. It's not as clear-cut as following a...

With a week to go until the open, there are probably a lot of athletes on the bubble of quarter-finals putting in those final touches to their training. But is it too late to work on those training progressions? Many of the athletes on the bubble likely have one thing that prevents them from being more certain about being in the top 10%. They are either not strong enough, don't have the skills or need to work on their engine. It might be heavy deadlifts in a workout or getting multiple...

Do CrossFit athletes need to train more in the transverse plane? It definitely sounds nice to those interested in programming, but if we look at the demands of the sport, we don't see movements challenging the transverse or frontal plane much. It's not always clear what level of variability in movement we should include in a CrossFit athlete's training. Giving someone more options in their movement can offset repetitive training and help with longevity, but it often doesn't directly affect...

Is working on your mindset all it's hyped up to be? Is it actually what people need to maximise their potential, or can it misalign expectations and cause a lot of wasted time? In this week's episode, Todd talks about 'Collective Teacher Efficacy', presented to him in his rationality group. We draw on some of the parallels found in fitness. Collective Teacher Efficacy claims that teachers having a belief in making an impact is what helps teachers be effective educators when the evidence...