Those of you that know me may find it hard to believe I am about to write an article about plans, but hold your tongue for a couple minutes and listen to what I have to say.

In CrossFit and any other randomized program, the results are driven by the variability and ability to maximize individual power output. In the future I will take a global view on the goals of a good program, but for now I will stick with the micro (day to day) view on planning workouts.

When I program for myself and my clients, I try to have a goal in mind. This goal is either time related or power related. In CrossFit there are two ways to create a workout. The first way is to leave the amount of work up to the athlete and set the amount of time they are to work. The simplest example of this is how far you can run in twenty minutes.
The second type of workout is a task priority where your workload is set and the time depends on the athlete. An example of this would be a 2-mile run for time. I like to take it a step further and try to put my finger on how long it will take a firebreather to run the 2 miles and try give everyone else that same experience.

I have been a Crossfitter for over four years now and have seen some really good programming as well as some really terrible programs (programs that don’t maximize power). There is a lot of leeway when creating workouts for CrossFit. Many terrible workouts can be written off with the excuse that you have to be ready for anything and that life is constantly varied. I will admit there is value in these workouts, but that value is limited and should therefore limit the frequency of these ineffective workouts.

What do I suggest? I recommend at least 70% of conditioning should be between 5 and 20 minutes. This does not include your strength work. Notice also that I said at least. After a great conversation with James Fitzgerald and observing other amazing CrossFitters, I have come to the conclusion that different time domains work better for each athlete. James tends to thrive in the 10-15 minute range while I thrive at anything under 8 minutes. I think it would be ideal to keep 85-90% of your training below 20 minutes. Be sure to experience about 15-20% of your training 5 minutes and under. These are just guidelines so experiment with yourself to find out where you thrive. When you take your conditioning past 20 minutes you tend to change pathways and allow yourself to become more aerobic. This is a bad thing when your goal is high intensity (high power output).

Here is how I would recommend making sure you and your clients training is maximized: First experiment on yourself. Get to know your body and its limitations. Try to get a feeling for how long it takes you to do certain exercises. For example, I can do 100 squats in around 1:30. Knowing this allows you to estimate time domains for workouts you make up. You will get better at it with time.

A quick test would be to create a workout then try to estimate your time before you start the workout. Don’t look at the clock again till you are done with the workout and see how close you were. Notice if some exercises took longer than expected or if some were shorter. This will give you a better handle on your capacity as well as a better understanding of your ability to gage workouts.

Now is the complicated part. How do you make this work for clients of different capacities? Simple, you scale it. There is a little more to it than that. As a trainer there are a couple ways this can go.

First, you lay a great foundation and each and every one of your clients knows exactly how to scale each workout. This foundation can be laid either with years of training with you and a deep understanding of their own capacity. Another simpler way would be to give them a metric. For example when they see 135lbs come up in a workout, they know automatically that they are to use 95 lbs. You then have to keep a close eye on them. When that load is too easy and you notice they are finishing workouts way ahead of others you may have to check them. This is way over simplifying but you get the point.

The second way I have seen work is not posting loads on any workout and encouraging your clients to explore their ability. They will make mistakes both too heavy (harder) and too light (easier). With your guidance they will come to a point where they know their abilities. This frees you from checking up on them and has made them more independent during a class. They can also assist others by sharing their experiences with selected loads. A key point here is that you as the trainer should have an idea of what you would have prescribed the load to be. Without that you would not know what to base peoples performance on.

An important point to understand is that scaling goes beyond loads. To name a few, you can scale reps, rounds, and movements (pull-ups with a band, dips with a band, distance on a run or row, height on a box jump).

When you are scaling a workout, in my opinion, you are trying to give that person the same effect everyone else is getting. Think about doing a 10-minute Fran.... then think about doing it in 2 minutes. Think there will be a difference in the stimulus?

I saw a great example of this yesterday. The workout was:

Walking lunge 100 ft.
21 Pull-ups
21 Sit-ups
Walking lunge 100 ft.
18 Pull-ups
18 Sit-ups
Walking lunge 100 ft.
15 Pull-ups
15 Sit-ups
Walking lunge 100 ft.
12 Pull-ups
12 Sit-ups
Walking lunge 100 ft.
9 Pull-ups
9 Sit-ups
Walking Lunge 100 ft.
6 Pull-ups
6 Sit-ups

It took the person I was watching 25+ minutes (let’s call them athlete 1). If you check the comments on Crossfit.com you will see the fastest time was Chris Spealer at 6:07. Oddly enough I witnessed that one as well. To say the least there was a big difference in the two workouts. For athlete 1 the pull-ups were heavily broken up while everything else went off without a hitch. When athlete 1 finished the only thing that was apparent was that they were upset. Athlete 1 was not winded nor did they look like they had just done a crossfit workout. Obviously Chris’s workout was not broken up at all but when he finished he was heavily winded.

My point here is that athlete 1 got tons of work on pull-ups which they probably needed but if you look at the workout and what Chris did to it you would realize that the goal wasn’t to work on pull-ups, it was to get some metabolic conditioning. Athlete 1 could have scaled this back a bit and gotten more out of the workout. If they still feel that they need work on pull-ups, before and after the workout is a great time for this. Increasing individual power is the goal. I bet the power output of a scaled version would have been much higher than what athlete 1 put out in the workout as prescribed.

The last thing i have to say about this is no matter what you have created as a workout, have a clear goal in your head about the response and time domain you are looking for. Then give this stimulus to everyone. Your goal here is to make everyone’s time look identical, or at least within 2-3 minutes of each other.