I recently finished reading the book, ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear, which I highly recommend. In the book, he brings up a conversation he had with an olympic level weightlifting coach. He asks the coach, “What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” The coach mentions genetics, luck, talent but then says, “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.” I bring this up because I’ve had clients ask why the body shop does the same movements over and over. This is because of the principle of progressive overload and if we bring that up we have to also talk about the principle of accommodation. Both of the programs, CrossFit & Harry’s Body Shop (HBS), at our gym utilize these principles just slightly differently.
The principle of progressive overload is the act of increasing weight, reps, or sets week after week to overload your muscles and drive muscular adaptations. Our CrossFit gym is a bit unique in that we always have a strength circuit. Every week, for six weeks, it is the exact same strength movements while only the sets, reps, or weight is modified to ensure we are overloading your muscles. It takes time for your body to make muscular adaptations to a given stimulus which is why we hold the same strength movements for six weeks. After the strength session we do a CrossFit WoD or conditioning element. The main goal of the WoD is conditioning, not strengthening. However, let us relate it to the principle of overload to give you an example. If you haven’t noticed, our WoDs are not completely random. For instance, in this new cycle every back squat day the WoD will have some variation of the step up. Some days it will be high volume over a long duration, other days low volume with weight, and other days it will be medium reps done as fast as possible. In theory, it is possible to overload your muscles in this manner but because it is constantly varied it is hard to truly know if we are achieving overload compared to if we only modified one element of the movement such as the weight. This is one of the reasons we started HBS. Both programs are on the same strength program, but where crossfit does a WoD (conditioning), HBS continues to build strength through an accessory circuit. Our crossfit program is a strength and conditioning program while HBS is a strength and hypertrophy program. Doing the same accessory circuit week after week while only modulating the weight allows us to ensure we are progressively overloading your muscles to build back stronger and bigger.
The principle of accommodation states that at some point your body will adapt to a given stimulus, essentially making the movement insufficient to drive any more muscular gains. The time it takes to reach this state varies from one athlete to another, but typically a novice athlete can go much longer doing the same movement over and over than a veteran athlete before hitting a plateau. We stick with a six week cycle for both crossfit and HBS to address this principle. Since I know many of you on the HBS side come from a crossfit background, the monotony of doing the same thing over and over can get boring, so I’ve decided to give you a new strength accessory circuit at the halfway point. This means you need to aggressively attack the weight making sure to get the most out of those movements before they cycle to the new circuit.
While I know doing the same thing over and over can be boring, your body needs time to make the adaptations necessary for you to get stronger, faster, and more coordinated. Eventually the stimulus will decrease or even fail to continue driving adaptations which will result in needing to change how the movement is performed or switch to a new movement. We highly recommend you mix and match your days. Two to three days of crossfit mixed in with two to three days of HBS is a great way to make sure you get a mix of high intensity sprint and threshold training, low intensity aerobic conditioning, and strength/hypertrophy training. You can always start your workout on the CrossFit side to do the barbell strength circuit and then opt to skip the wod and head over the HBS side for the strength accessory circuit. This is why it is important to have a routine doing the same thing over and over again, and even more important to make sure that when you plateau, you switch to a new stimulus.
-Enrique Calderon
B.S Nutrition, Block One Coach, USAW1