I attended a seminar over the weekend on weightlifting for crossfitters. The seminar was given by Laura Mäntylä of Speedsters Coaching.
My key takeaways came from the lecture part of the seminar.
I should walk 6 hours per week
According to Laura, most Crossfit enthusiasts don’t do enough training for basic endurance. If I understood her point correctly, Crossfit WODs deplete our capacity for recovery.
To counterbalance this effect, we should do more low-intensity workouts. An example of a low-intensity workout was brisk walking.
One of Laura’s coachees was a guy with skateboarding background. She told us that thanks to walking around 8-10 hours per day, this guy has insane capacity for aerobic training. Whereas other athletes get to anaerobic levels of heart rate, he can still operate aerobically.
If my resting morning heartbeat is 5-6 beats above average, I will skip WODs
Another tip from Laura was to check your morning resting heartbeat. My normal resting heartbeat is 49 bpm. So, if I am over 55 bpm, this indicates that I have not recovered properly. If this is the case, I will only due light cardiovascular work. I will probably be fully recovered with 1-2 days of extra rest. At the end, this should allow me to have more volume for my workouts.
I should fix my weak quads with extra bodybuilding exercises
From looking at my body position with clean / snatch, Laura was able to tell that my quads are too weak in relation to my other muscles.
To fix this, she recommended some basic bodybuilding type of exercises for my quads. I could also consider testing my muscle balance and doing more maintenance work.
The first thing I did was to book a full-body massage. This is actually where I am going right now. The time I have is for 14:00 and it is already 13:44.
Markus Ossi 