"Programming" is a word that's thrown around left and right in the world of CrossFit and fitness, but it's not always used the correct way. A program is usu
Feb 15, 2016 by Armen Hammer
"Programming" is a word that's thrown around left and right in the world of CrossFit and fitness, but it's not always used the correct way. A program is usually written for a specific individual, for a specific time frame, aimed at a specific result; it's not just a collection of random workouts viewed over time. That said, most of us are just looking for a good workout most of the time. So how do you write a good workout?
Understand what came before
If you don't know what you just did, you may end up unnecessarily repeating yourself and putting more stress on one part of your body than you need to in order to get a good workout and improve your fitness.
Understanding the basics and having a method of analyzing and categorizing what kinds of workouts you've done recently will help greatly. You should be able to answer most of the following questions about your most recent workouts:
how long did that workout take?
about how many reps were involved?
was it heavy or light or somewhere in between?
which body parts were mostly used?
what types of movement patterns were involved?
Understand what you want to get out of your workout
When you're trying to put together a good workout for yourself, you should have an idea of what you want to get out of it. Are you trying to get stronger? Are you looking to work on your cardio? Maybe you want to develop or master a specific skill or practice a certain pacing. For the general fitness enthusiast, your "constantly varied" approach will encourage you to do things differently, so if you recently have done a bunch of strength stuff, maybe try something more on the cardio or muscle endurance side of things.
As far as skills development, practicing positioning, or just working small weaknesses or imbalances, you can pretty much do that every day without many issues. For example, mobility, stability, fixing imbalances, and positioning can all be used as a general warm up or cool down all the time. You can work on your handstands, do light snatch balances, core work, or improve your mobility every day before or after your workout.
Pick appropriate movements, reps, and loads for your goal
So now you know what you've done recently and what you want to do today. Here's the fun part: plug in movements that work.
Let's say you want to do something more along the lines of pacing a CrossFit Open workout. You may pick a couple of common movements from the Open: bar facing burpees and thrusters for example. You'll pick a load similar to what you may see in the open, so maybe 95/65. Working pacing is all about consistent, sustained, and conscious effort so you'll want to do something like:
5 rounds of: 12 thrusters 12 bar facing burpees *rest 1:1 (so rest however long it took to do that round before starting the next round)
Your goal there would be to keep the pace equivalent across all 5 rounds and in that way develop a better understanding of what your pacing should actually feel like.
Maybe you want to go heavy, get some strength work in but keep the pacing high enough to get a good sweat. Pick something you can get heavy in that'll benefit you a bunch, like a front squat. You can do something like:
Every 3 minutes for 6 rounds: 3 front squats *work up to a heavy triple by the third round, and repeat that same weight across the last rounds
Or you want to go long and aerobic. Pick movements that are relatively easy to cycle, things that won't slow you down as you move from one movement to the next. How about rowing, Russian kettlebell swings, and light overhead squats?
These are all pretty different types of stimulus with different movements and different rep schemes and each one will be tough if you do it right. You could very easily start your session with muscle up posititoning practice, a double under tabata, or finish your session with some back extensions on the GHD and you've got yourself a pretty rad workout that'll leave you feeling good and wasn't super tough to put together.
