You are hereWhat is Your Version of a "Good Workout"?
What is Your Version of a "Good Workout"?
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day (also a fellow crossfitter) about what makes a good workout. "When I am totally wasted afterwards" was her version of a great workout. I have heard this a lot from people, and experienced it even more when I was working at the very fancy club in Lafayette. My clients always wanted to work really hard and felt that if they weren't exhausted by the end of the session, they didn't really get a good workout.
It has been well documented that this sort of training often leads to an athlete who is not as fast or strong as they could be and is more than likely to have a variety of injuries. Strength training has been proven to be the best foundation for almost any athletes, supplemented by sports specific training and some high intensity drills. When you are first starting out, it is even more important to focus on the strength side of the training. In spite of this, people would rather do one of the girl workouts than focus on strength training.
The Whole9 blog has a great post about what they call the "Lure of the Sexy Met-Con". Here is a clip from it:
There are a few things wrong with this phenomenon. First, longer length met-cons (even those that go “heavy” for time) will not make you as strong as you could be. Sure, your cardio will improve, and you’ll most likely see some strength gains, but nowhere near the gains you’d see picking up heavy stuff with a tried-and-true 5×5, 3×5 and 3×3 protocol. (Of course, this point is only valid if you believe, as we do, that prioritizing strength is the most effective way to get better at everything.)
In addition, these types of workouts miss the bus by focusing on quantity at the expense of quality of movement....
You can read the rest of the article here.
So, what do you think is a great workout? What style of training makes you feel the best, or the strongest? Please post experiences to comments, even if you don't agree with me.
Great post Dawn. I have been dealing with this lately at work listening to people who say they want to work out but immediately say " I don't want that heavy lifting stuff". They then prescribe themselves the same longer metcon movements that they practically do every other day, or add rounds to my wods because they want "more". Meanwhile their progress has either plateaued or have seen very little body composition change.
Switching to the crossfits lighter workouts I often have to pinch myself at the results. They do work. I have always preferred to do the heavier stuff 5 sets (10,8,6,4,2) although I have had to walk that desire back on lifts that I had not done since high school and probably performed badly then (clean, deadlift.) I still want a bit more than Moses's prescription and sometimes come in early to CFO or go to 24 for a heavy set of Bench. It is a pretty personal preference as to what a good workout is, I lift for body aesthetics and functionality. I feel very comfortable in my body image so my CFO goal is to maintain and gracefully accept the changes. (Unlike Tom, Dylan Thomas's, "Do not go gentle into that good night" is no my favorite poem.) My "sports" are yoga and 5rhythms dance and I have the strength (albeit sometimes not the flexibility) to do everything that I want to do on the mat or on the dance floor. As for the long and light workouts, personally I see no redeeming fitness qualities in gasping for air like a fish on a boardwalk at the end of workout, consequently I am fine to phone it in on the occasional metcon, particularly if the workout involve a risky movement like the snatch or overhead squat.
I just did Saturday's workout this morning and that was great. Pushed me mentally and physically while getting a great sweat going. Having said that, the big metcon days used to be my favorite, but that has shifted of late. I'm really digging the programming that Moses is doing, and my muscle memory seems to be responding. Whenever I complete something that I didn't think I could do at the beginning of the class is a great workout for me. And that happens almost daily. Heavy is good!
I can't help but like lifting best, because just about every metcon gasses me about 10 seconds in, and BW work makes me cry. It's much easier for me to see the gains with lifting, though I know that I am gradually getting better at everything overall.
Pullups, you will be my bitch.
I think a great workout is any workout that helps me fix a weakness, solve a problem, or push past a plateau.
Depending on what I'm training for, it might be a strength workout (2.5 hours with TomC is no joke), a hard metcon, a CFO A&B WOD, a fast 5k, a long hilly bike ride, or 45 minutes doing snatch technique with the bar. I will feel different levels of wasted after those things.
It's probably not a long slow run (which will leave me feeling wasted but do nothing for me except help me run long slow miles) or a phoned in metcon (unless there is good skill development in it).
The workout that makes me feel the best is sprints early in the morning. And yet, it would not be good for me to do that every day or even more than once a week.
In the real world of work and less than perfect sleep, not every workout will be a great workout. Nor is the way I feel after a workout the best guide to what I should be doing. Most important is deciding what I need to work on, understanding my ability to recover, and then doing workouts that work towards those goals. I believe if you stay consistent and focused (and take the advice you get from good coaches), you will make great gains over time, even if every workout doesn't make you feel like a hero.
Great post. Having just come off of a 2 year stint of working out on my own, I'm having to relearn a lot of stuff, not the least of which is "less is more." I'm trying to be patient. Bad from is something I've managed to drill in pretty deeply into neural pathways, at least with some things, and I understand that fixing my form will pay off.
Also, I tend to use exercise as a way of exorcising demons (which may explain my scary facial expressions) and generally feel a little disappointed if I'm not wasted by the end. I'm learning to walk away, even if I feel like I could do more, instead of going out and doing some additional exercise elsewhere. It's not that the workouts at CFO are easy, by any means, but the combination of not being able to do prescribed weight or full range of motion sometimes results in feeling like I didn't get enough of a workout. Patience. Practice. Humility. Work. Lather, rinse, repeat.