Friday WOW (Words of Wisdom)
I'm still mired in video and other tasks for a few days. So in the meantime, if you've got CrossFit on the brain, it would do your mind and body good to check out this piece by Greg Everett of The Performance Menu.
Form and Function
Way back in 2002, I scanned these images by Howard Schatz from Sports Illustrated (October 14, 2002). A fascinating array of elite female athlete physiques, heights and weights, eh? These are some of the women featured in his book Athlete --a very cool pictorial essay that celebrates athletic form and function.
Comments
“…if instead of work capacity we consider productive effort capacity…”
This strikes me as a distinction without a difference. Doesn’t the latter determine the former? How could we possibly not consider productive effort when we consider capacity?
“We select movements based on their functional value; that is, we select the squat not because of its potential for work and power output, but because of the motor qualities that train the body to move in a manner conducive to healthy life and performance in sport. That these motor patterns are also capable of producing more work than their isolation exercise counterparts is extremely important but coincidental. Work capacity and power output improvements are to a large degree specific to the movements with which the training effects are attained.”
Isn’t there a problem squaring the last sentence in this paragraph with the first? Would we not expect squats to give us a fairly non-specific, general improvement in performance over various modalities? Isn’t that why “we select movements based on their functional value?” Isn’t that why we do squats? Isn’t the reason why so many athletes train O-lifts that the illusive second pull of the O-lifts translates so widely to countless athletic movements?
“Work and power are useless terms in the absence of a medium—the medium through which these physical abilities are expressed is movement.”
Work and power are determined by noting mass and distance or mass, distance and time. A change of position, necessary for distance work and power to be non-zero, is the definition of movement. How on Earth could we possibly talk about work and or power without talking about the “medium” of movement? This is a tautology.
I’m a bit puzzled by the technique vs. time debate. I understand the worries concerning the possibility of injury when exertion makes O-lift technique suffer, but the loads that are prescribed for Met Con workouts involving O-Lifts or other big-barbell movements are 1) scalable and 2) very low compared to the loads a specialist O-lifter would be lifting. How likely is an average adult male CrossFitter to be injured by sub-standard clean and jerk form using loads of 135 pounds or less? Must a CrossFitter display good form before he or she can reap the conditioning benefits of a workout like Grace (30 clean and jerks for time)? I think most of us can decide for ourselves which loads and movement combinations feel safe and which should wait for improved technique.
The advantage of concentrating on Work and Power measurements is that these are well-defined and agreed-upon measures that can be compared for an individual over time or between two individuals doing the same task. Proper form and technique, though many agree on what that is for a particular exercise, is much more difficult to define. A watt will always be a watt; a joule will always be a joule. But no two athletes will have the same thruster form. No one disagrees with the contention that good technique is necessary to increase work and power. I’m not sure what the controversy is here.
You scribble some numbers on the back of an envelope and figure out Athlete-2 has done more work. Is he more fit?
Fit for what? Other than crossfit, what are these guys actually doing? What are they training for? It could likely be that Athlete-1's sport or job requires him to throw around more weight, or that Athlete-2's does not. The second athlete's inability to toss around an extra 40% weight might be completely immaterial to what he has to do. Ditto, athlete-1's apparent lack of endurance with a lighter weight.
I know this isn't what you're asking about, but sometimes I'm annoyed by crossfit me-too-ism where people take what "coach" Glassman says without really thinking about it. Has there been any empirical evidence at all that work capacity is good proxy for fitness? That seems like a postulate Glassman basically pulls from the ethers. I keep coming back to, fitness for what?
It isn't just that the work capacities needed by a middle distance runner are different than a line-backer's, which are different than MMA wrestler's. (Which are different than a firefighters, which are different than a soldiers, etc.) It's that whether that work takes the from of moving a lot of little weights quickly or one or two big weights slowly also varies.
FWIW, I see occasional crossfit vids and cringe at the form: someone stiff-legging and round-backing 135 lb cleans for two minutes straight, for example.
But but knowing a single crossfitter who does not lock out (anonymous), or a local crossfit affiliate that doesn't post new pictures on their website (Chris) is a pretty weak condemnation of a system that is working wonders for lot's and lot's of people. Who is crossfit helping? Just check out how many people are posting their performance every day. Now go back and look at how many posted a year or two ago. Your suggestion that crossfit web activity is going down is just silly. I guess what I am confused about is how upset crossfit methodology makes people that don't crossfit themselves. Could someone explain that to me?
And Chris, where did you get the idea that anyone was calling their system better? I was trying to join a discussion about a provocative article and the value of Power and Work measurements to gauge how one's fitness is progressing (or not).
And as for me-too-ism, I'll just remind anonymous (whoever you are) that there's plenty of debate among crossfitters about these things, just check out the discussion boards, which I assure you are as popular as ever. Some of us actually agree with some of Glassman's assertions after thinking long and hard about these things for ourselves.
Crossfit can make fitness fun and is very effective that way.
As for carry over for athletes it has proven to carry over very well for a lot of different athletes.
Mr.Everett's article is spot on in a lot of ways. It's a focus that CF needs to have for the people who are in it for the game of it. Greg is a supporter of CF and only wants it to be the best it can be.
At lest that's what I got from him when I spoke to him last.
He's pointing out that poor form within the CF community needs to be controlled and the only way to do that is via having coaches make sure they are teaching movements well and not excepting poor form.
www.jensgym.blogspot.com