Furry Murry

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Ice and mixed climbing guru, and all around badass, Will Gadd has been toying with Crossfit as a general training tool for the last year, mostly as a tool to prepare for his recent Endless Ascent at the Ouray Ice Festival (187 pitches of WI4+ in 24 hours, say whaaaaa). If you’re a nerd with too much free time like myself interested in analyzing training modalities etc. then you should check out his recent posts about Crossfit and his experience at a Crossfit Level I Cert.

Since I’ve been playing with the Crossfit game for a few years as a training tool I shot Will a reply email with some of my own thoughts, and we had a nice little back and forth about the whole deal. For posterity’s sake, I figured I would post the relevant portions here.

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Me:

Let me say first and foremost: Yes, FORGED T-shirts and the like are overly compensatory and machismo, and anyone who wears them should be shunned by regular society and forced to subsist on rice and vegetables until they learn some humility and the value of a life lived free of douchebaggery.

Anywho, some of my thoughts on the methodology and things I’ve learned with regards to climbing:

1. Specific Programming – Absolutely necessary. Although I would never recommend someone off the street without a good knowledge base program for themselves, somebody other than HQ needs to tailor your training a bit. It’s easy to avoid your weaknesses, so if programming for yourself you have to be conscious not to do so.

Crossfit focuses on developing GPP, and that is great and not to be neglected. However, as climbers we have specific needs. I, for example, have to do my ring dips or risk my elbow tendonitis flaring up. Also, while I don’t avoid pullups, I worry less about incorporating them because I’m typically getting plenty of that in the climbing gym. Most importantly though, this focus on “GPP” has a little bit of a strength bias, this strength bias = heavy. Last year I got a little lazy and stopped programming for myself as much and just followed mainsite (I also love Oly lifting, so that was easy to do). The result? Ballooning from my optimal climbing weight of about 175# to nearly 185#. While this body composition may be best for facing “the unknown and unknowable” it is not efficient for what we do in the mountains. So what if I can pull nearly 500# off the floor? That relatively high deadlift is pretty useless when I’m hanging on a 5.13 pitch with 5-10 extra pounds of muscle to carry.

Strength development is vital, but I think its important to realize that as climbers just a few pounds of bodyweight, even muscle, can be a liability. That strength development has to be tempered with high intensity, lighter/bodyweight metcons to promote a leaner composition than what might triumph at the Crossfit Games. I can be just as fit and prepared for longevity with a slightly leaner approach than the mainsite WODs will develop.

2. The Zone – I agree with you, the Zone is pretty silly. It does have some good things; at the very least it helps people realize fat is good for you and just fueling on carbs is stupid. I eat (mostly) paleo. I think that’s the way to go and clearly supported by science (evolutionary biology and contemporary research). My favorite nutrition blogs are robbwolf.com and marksdailyapple.com. Eating cleanly first, and then paying attention to portion and ratios second makes much more sense to me. Which brings me to the next point.

3. Believing their own bullshit – Crossfit has slowly been going this way of late, sadly. I still think they’re largely on point, but as they’re grown they have in some ways not been entirely loyal to their open-source profession of faith. Paleo vs. Zone is a clear example of this. They say they are open to anything effective, and I think this is still mostly true, but there have been small signposts that the evolution is being stifled a bit. Just because Greg Glassman didn’t come up with it or adopt it doesn’t make it a bad idea. Worst about this are the thousands of loyalists around the globe (most of which can be identified by their “FORGED” shirts and board shorts).

4. Long term time domains – Crossfit hates cardio, and I do too for the most part. They do a great job of laying out the pros and cons of aerobic versus anaerobic training. We also talked about this a lot at the Endurance cert. I pretty much agree with them from a fitness perspective. However, I think it’s a mistake for an athlete who engages in lengthy events (such as ourselves in the mountains) to neglect that long term, low intensity domain entirely. For example, if someone is training for a marathon, running long slow distance every day is dumb and they should focus primarily on Mainsite type and CF Endurance WODs. But they NEED to mix in some (read: very sparing) long term output days where they run 10-15+ miles; not for the fitness benefit, but from a broader training perspective. Their body needs to know what its like to go for hours, joints need to become accustomed, and nutrition/other intangibles need to be dialed in.

These are mostly critiques, but like you I think Crossfit for the most part has it right. They use functional movements, full ROM, and produce clear results. The high intensity met-cons are invaluable both for physical and mental training. The above are just caveats are a system I otherwise am a big fan of. They’re also just thoughts, I could be totally wrong about any or all of them, but I figured you might find them interesting.

A word on the Crossfit Games, since you mentioned it in your post. I agree, Crossfit is a training methodology and not a sport. However, the Games are useful in the regard that they provide a clear proving ground for variances in methodology used by the athletes to prepare. There will always be outliers, but if a majority of successful athletes are employing a certain approach, the Games provide some objective numbers by which to judge. I don’t have a big interest in them, but good research data if nothing else.

All the best.

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Somehow then Mountain Athlete and GymJones came up, I mentioned I had been unimpressed with MA and Will said Mark Twight had been urging him to do a GymJones cert.

Me:

Wouldn’t be fair to say I was unimpressed with GymJones – never been there. I’ve just looked at their programming over the years and done some of it. It seemed similar to the programming at Mountain Athlete. Some friends got psyched on MA this summer and encouraged me to check it out. The similarities I speak of were workouts that gave you a task-oriented WOD, but removed the time element and were somewhat lengthy so it was really an hour long slog. Programming aside, the trainer at MA in Boulder (which has now become “The Alpine Training Center”) was not good, to put it simply. I understand how those guys were psyched since I think it was their first exposure to general training of that ilk; but all she seemed to do was write a workout on the board and then yell “Come on!” and “Good, good” while you were exercising. She seemed to have no knowledge of the movements and how to execute them properly. I saw guys doing front squats on their toes without full depth, GHD situps with loose knees, etc.

That being said, I would never put Twight in that class. He appears to have supreme knowledge of movement standards and technique. The only commonality I meant to draw was the programming – I’m just not convinced of the value of those long, medium-intensity, grind workouts. But I could be wrong. I’d definitely be interested to hear your impression of a GymJones cert versus Crossfit (which GJ was born out of anyways). Russell Berger did a smear article on GJ in the CF Journal not too long ago, check it out if you haven’t seen it, he’s the spin doctor of CF but that was still some interesting stuff in there.

Will:

MT does know his movements, and has a lot of real-world miles in terms of nutrition and thinking about it all. And he does live it, unlike so many of the “Zone/Paleo/WTF” diets out there. Been doing a bunch of reading on Zone/Paleo stuff, not super impressed. One measures everything, which is doomed to fail, and one wants us to eat foods from 10,000 years ago which broadly don’t exist in the same forms today. Right.

I’m gonna keep eating simple foods, plenty of protein, fat, avoid sugar, and go like a mofo. It’s been working for me with tweaks depending on my sport for 10 years (the years of super low-fat did not work other than to  keep me under five percent BF–not going there again).

Yeah, I would say MT is nothing if not a wealth of experience and real-world trials for all those methodologies he’s dabbled in. Anecdotal perhaps, but informative nonetheless. As an aside, I’ve had the good fortune to climb a bunch with some old fogies from Washington (Mark Shipman, Curt Haire, John Tarver, Michael Koerner) and I love hearing their young-punk-Twight stories. One time Tarver gave Twight a ride to Canada, and in the morning found Twight had made off with his new 80m rope! (He returned it after the climb.) Bahahaha.

I messed with Zone-ish for a while, just estimating portions, but I will never weigh my food, that’s stupid. The last few years I’ve been slowly going more and more paleo in my eating. Like you said, what’s most important is knowing your body, and I can tell when I need to eat what so I just eat what I need to within the parameters of good quality. I think most paleo guys would agree that its not about eating foods in the same form, but just approximating the source to be as similar as possible (i.e. carbs from veggies and fruit rather than bread).

Most recently I’ve been strict on cutting out gluten altogether (as best I can) and strongly limiting dairy, just to play with it. I can honestly say its huge. I’ve always had days where I wake up feeling “light” or “heavy.” You know, just that general feeling that centers in your gut – “Man, I could crush a Rifle jug-fest right now” vs. “the second I’m on my arms my 500 pound body will drag me off.” Since cutting out the gluten those heavy days are few and far between, if at all. That might also be related to portion size too – without bread and the like its tough to overeat on broccoli.

All that said, as you point out: simple is good.