Most people when they walk into a gym want to maximise the results that they can get in a minimum amount of time. CrossFit has been proved as a method that gets real results and can do this to without having spend hours in the gym. But even the best methods executed poorly will still give you poor results. So here are 5 ways to get the most out of your time in the gym to maximise it’s impact on your life outside of the gym.
But before I go into the 5 points it is first important to get clear on what your overall goal and “why” for training actually is. What made you walk into the gym and sign up in the first place. We can often get lost or side tracked in our training so it’s important to make sure that what you are doing and how you are doing it is aligned with your overall goals.
- Get a coach and listen to them. CrossFit isn’t some big secret and the workouts and methodology can all easily be found online and you can teach yourself everything you need to know and become super fit in just your garage at home. But if you want to maximise the time you spend training then it’s best to invest in a coach. Having a coach will fast track your progress and skip all the steps of learning and figuring things out as the coach will be able to identify exactly what you need to keep moving forward. If you’ve been training under a coach in some way for a while but feel that you could be getting more out of your training then ask your coach for more help and make sure you listen to what they say and do the things they are telling you, even if you don’t like it.
- Train in a group. Training by yourself is great but humans are social animals and we thrive when we are in groups. So much of the training with a CrossFit methodology requires you to push yourself and you will always push harder with a group. If you are limited for time with your training then getting in a group will be the best way to maximise your output in the time you have and keep you accountable for the long term.
- Focus less on what you do and more on how you do it. Progressing in strength and skill takes time and dedication to moving properly. We often get caught up chasing certain number goals on lifts or an amount of reps for gymnastics movements but we rarely set our goal as being able to do that weight or movement a certain way with a certain technique. There’s a word that used to be common in the CrossFit space but sadly has been mostly forgotten these days. That word is “Virtuosity”. It means to do the common uncommonly well. This should be the goal and pursuit in all of our movements as it will lead to continued progress and get you the most benefit out of everything you do.
- Intensity trumps volume. The CrossFit methodology is all about building work capacity. Which is the ability to do more in less amount of time. So to put it plainly, it’s about intensity. The more you can do in less amount of time, the more fit you are. So rather than having long gruelling sessions or even multiple sessions a day, you might just need one good session in which you can put full effort into it. Intensity comes in different forms so don’t confuse this as just going so hard that you spew every day but instead it’s about putting your best effort into each session and reducing the amount of fluffing about you might do.
- When you think you’ve mastered the basics, start again and fine tune things even more. Because we include such technical movements in our training we often think that we have mastered some of the basic movements and rarely come back to focus on how we can improve them. By regularly coming back to the basics and finding ways to do them better we will continue to improve our movement and continue to raise the ceiling on what we can achieve when it comes to more technical movements.
The above points don’t just apply to CrossFit training but really could be applied to any sport or style of training. If you want to start maximising your training time, then you know where to find us.
