What "Improving Your Engine" for CrossFit Actually Means

in this clip from a recent q a with our TTD athletes we discuss what improving your engine actually means all right another question this is actually the opposite of the strength one I'd love advice for someone with adequate adequate strength but gets crushed with engine capacity limitations okay could you answer that one Brandon yeah I mean I still think it especially this time of year that people should be doing a strength program and I am hesitant to say that anybody very few people in the sport actually are limited by engine or capacity limitations most people based on the open workouts at quarterfinal workouts that we've seen are skill limitations or local limitations it's just you think about the workouts this year strict handstand push-ups bottleneck people it wasn't a capacity thing it wasn't an engine thing ring muscle ups bottleneck people in the first one it wasn't an engineer capacity thing and even in workout two where most people were like that was a true engine limitation you still have to have good local endurance to press off the ground and pull up to the pull-up bar continuously so you're almost better off in my opinion doing the local endurance work first and just like easy Base building work if you have to if you feel like you have to do aerobic work all of the time so that you're really good and you're never bottlenecked by you know oh my grip blew up or my shoulders blew up or you know my my lats blew up in a workout and if you can get rid of those blow up then the only thing the next step would be an actual like cardiac limitation or respiratory limitation but I just don't think those things come up as much as people think do you think they overestimate like do you think in at the community at large overestimates their engine yes because people start I don't know if I asked that right overestimate that's the importance of it yes right yeah well if they were going to say hey I'm weak at one thing and they you know you always hear I need a better engine do you think that that's they're incorrect most of the time when they say that yeah I think so I think it's uh I mean maybe this person is like a world-class weight lifter and has done no end conditioning and actually is engine limited and I'll answer what I think somebody like that should do in the off season but for the most part I think when people get into a workout and it's very uncomfortable and their heart rate gets to Max or they start breathing really hard they think that it's an engine limitation because of how uncomfortable it is and that other high-level athletes aren't feeling that thing and a lot of times they want to get that feeling more often so it feels more normalized and it doesn't feel uncomfortable so they say oh my engine limited me I want to do more engine work I want to feel that more so I can get more comfortable and better at dealing with it but ironically if you do that you end up running your engine down and there's there's reasons why scientifically but just say like you put out too much acid and too much lactate into your system all the time and you basically can like lower your body's internal ability to have a healthy metabolic system so the answer to the question if if you truly are engine limited is kind of the same way that you would build your base and strength in the off season you have to build your conditioning base which is generally Mobility structural strength and then lower intensity conditioning you could even go into the program and pull some of the conditioning from the endurance path that would be good it's lower intensity in terms of well in the fitness if you have the complete program you could pull that but so if you're only in TTD compete we have complete which will get you access to to our TTT Fitness which is where the endurance path is housed yeah and endurance work out of the CrossFit setting is generally the best thing to build engine I know that's kind of like controversial and CrossFit in some places because people want to do the high intensity work but the lower intensity stuff on bikes on rowers on skis a you can build more volume of it it actually targets the heart and lungs and muscles better for endurance work and just be an easier way to build the base but the Brandon's point so most people don't need that she just responded that was my question yes I'm a weight lifter so another thing to add with the upcoming cycle is the CrossFit style progressions that we're including are based on improving muscle endurance limitations but that would be this is just my opinion just based off seeing a bunch of really good athletes and then a bunch of just general population athletes the better Target there would be doing the muscle endurance work before you're just doing hard metcons it just doesn't make because you're always going to be limited by the local endurance first before the cardiac issue basically the CrossFit progressions will also be off-season engine development exactly right and you would pull that out for the people that are doing it strength bias but for someone like her do that and then you could add like 15 20 minute easy bike warm-ups five times a week that gives you 75 to 90 minutes of total en2 or Zone 2 work in your training and that could just be a good way to build total volume yeah I think that's a great way so you could do the endurance work that's the kind of the muscle endurance work that's the CrossFit it looks it's going to look different than the open prep right the open prep we were doing a lot of true hard Crossfit because we were getting into our season now we're going to say hey we have a day where we're just thinking about upper body pressing we have a day we're just thinking about squat endurance we have a day we're just thinking about pulling endurance and we will go through all of those and then if you need more like true aerobic work then too much to Max's point I think everyone could do this like 10 minutes as a warm-up and 10 minutes as a cool down that's 20 minutes every day just had an easy effort yeah yep cool way to build running volume two so just doing a five to ten minute running warm-up like just walk in hop on the air Runner and use that as your warm-up on a daily basis it doesn't seem like much in the moment but add up the total volume in the week you've accumulate a lot of running volume and you got better at the skill yeah hope you enjoyed this clip from our live TTT athlete q a to hear the full episode where we discuss navigating the upcoming CrossFit quarterfinals gaining strength in the off season and what improving your engine really means check out the audio version check out the audio version on all major podcast providers or peep the other Clips here on YouTube

Channel: Training Think Tank

Views: 19,064

Keywords: training think tank, ttt, crossfit, max el-hag, crossfit games, TTT CrossFit, crossfit engine, engine fitness

Id: N5hD6zgfBvw

Length: 5min 51sec (351 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023