How To Teach Athletes To Maintain The Workout Stimulus
Written by Nuno Costa
Your job as a Coach has many elements, and a big one is making sure that athletes are maintaining the workout stimulus. If an athlete is taking 40 minutes to do a workout that should take 15 minutes, or using a weight nearing their 1 rep max when they should be cycling 4-5 reps at a time, they probably aren’t following the stimulus. That’s where you come in!
What are we trying to achieve in our training?
Before we can talk about the workout stimulus, we have to understand what we are trying to achieve with our daily training. CrossFit is a GPP program – General Physical Preparedness, that means doing the things we do in the gym helps you become better prepared for whatever life throws at you. We don’t want you to just be good in the gym – we want you to use your fitness outside our walls. While maintaining the stimulus of a workout can be applicable to all classes offered at Invictus, though we will use CrossFit as our main example.
Teaching athletes – that in itself is something that we pride ourselves on at Invictus! We have great programming, but it’s the quality of our coaches that execute that programming on a daily basis at our affiliates. We have set the culture that when you come in to workout with us, you are going to be taught and everyone is an athlete, no matter if you just started yesterday or if you’ve been with us for over 10 years.
What is a workout stimulus?
This is where a great coach can take the workout and break it down into simple understandable terms for the members of that class. The stimulus has to be understood in order to be executed properly. It’s not uncommon to see a member chasing RX at the expense of missing out on the stimulus altogether.
The workout stimulus refers to the intended physiological effect placed on the body from a workout. The stimulus may change for different workouts, so let’s look at some examples!
Workout stimulus examples
Let me give a couple of examples: let’s take the workout Amanda, which is 9-7-5 Ring Muscle Ups and Squat Snatch at 135/95.
What is the workout stimulus here? Here’s how I would break this down at the whiteboard:
- Today’s workout involves a high skill gymnastics movement (a pull and a push), a complex weightlifting movement at a moderate weight and this should be completed in 6-10 minutes.
- For most members, this would be a really tough workout, and most would not finish in the 6-10 minute range unless we customize it appropriately.
But that’s the stimulus, it’s not just the load, the movements, the combination of the movement functions as well as some parameters for when we expect them to finish.
In teaching our members to chase the workout stimulus, we as coaches have to have a deep understanding of what the workout entails, what it should feel like, break it down and customize to each individual.
Let’s do another example – let’s say we have an EMOM, because Invictus loves their EMOMs and sometimes they are aggressive, but remember we program for the best and we scale for the rest.
Today’s workout – EMOM for 25 Minutes
- Station 1 – Row 14-18 calories
- Station 2 – 15 Toes To Bar
- Station 3 – 15 Handstand Push-Ups
- Station 4 – 15 Chest To Bar
- Station 5 – Rest
This workout is very aggressive on the gymnastics, especially as the volume accumulates and even the rowing at the beginning will be tough to maintain. There might be one or two people in your gym that can complete this, but the rest of the general population would have to customize in order to maintain the workout stimulus.
So here are some parameters for executing this workout:
- each of these stations should be completed in 45 seconds or less.
- If someone can’t do the RX – then they customize, that might look like – 10 calories row, 10 TTB, 10 HSPU and 10 CTB or regular Kipping Pull-Ups, and that would still be a great workout and you’ve now helped them maintain the workout stimulus.
Don’t sacrifice the stimulus!
There is a fine line between high intensity, and training SMART. If someone is chasing RX at the expense of the workout stimulus then they are missing the point and it will not equate to the best results for their fitness. As a Coach, be confident enough to remind athletes about the stimulus of the workout.
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