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1. Prioritize Your Time, Build a Team, Change Your Habits

You don’t have a lot of time, that’s a given. On a continuum stretching from “All the time in the world” to “Gordon Gecko,” you’re probably somewhere in the middle. You’ve got discretionary time, but none to waste. Your time is scarce, and you generally only have somewhere between 14-16 waking hours a day to parcel out that time to all of your obligations and priorities. Certain obligations, like work and family, are non-negotiable – and rightfully so. So the variable amount of time you’re left with on any given day, and what you do with it, says a lot about your priorities.

When I was younger, they weren’t always in the right place. Sometimes a night out drinking took precedent over training the next day. That’s understandable, that’s forgivable, but in the long-term, it’s not reasonable; especially if you have big goals. Big goals require actual time-commitment, not just lip service. Big goals require a team, not a rotating cast of characters you share gym space with. Seek out people with similar goals and similar priorities; make a schedule, and stick to it. If you’ve got work or class early, it’s helpful to have a training partner who doesn’t balk at 6:00 AM track sessions. It’s not fun, but it’s what’s required (especially, if given your schedule, you know won’t have a chance to get it done later). It’s what’s demanded, even on the days where you won’t demand it of yourself. And on those days, if you won’t show up for yourself, you’ll damn sure show up for someone else. That’s a team. In San Francisco I was surrounded by people who understood that, who appreciated it, because they know how rare it is to find that type of commitment. Consequently, I started demanding more of myself, seeing how much my teammates demanded of themselves. “Excellence,” as my man Aristotle pointed out, “is not an act, but a habit.” So I altered my usual habits to better emulate the habits of my teammates, especially those that had already been where I was looking to go. Success, more or less, is a learned behavior. Surround yourself with successful people, and act accordingly.

2. Rest…no, seriously. Rest.

It’s hard, I know. If you’re anything like me you spend all week looking forward to a scheduled rest day, you tell your friends and training partners how badly you need one, and then when the day arrives you find some way to do something other than rest. If you’re the type to call a few dozen laps of swimming, 90 minutes of hot yoga, and light barbell cycling an “active rest day”, you’re missing the point and cannibalizing your gains. If rest is scheduled as part of your weekly programming, then it is part of your training plan, not an arbitrary time-out. Start looking at rest as integral to, not an interruption of, your training. There’s a popular adage: “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” I’ve found, in my case and many others, that rest is something that makes a lot of athletes uncomfortable. It’s time to get comfortable with the idea that sometimes not training is the best way to improve the quality of your actual training. Again, I look to my Fire teammates as examples. In practice, they worked hard, but within their limits. They tried new skills, and didn’t mind looking dumb when their first few attempts were unsuccessful. Outside of practice, they stayed active. They swam, played tennis and golf, and rode bikes (not for time or distance or score, but rather for pure enjoyment). When they watched TV, they watched TV and mobilized. They economized their time better than most, and certainly better than me, prior to moving there. I realized I had been going about balancing my training and life the wrong way: I had been trying to separate my training from my life, with the impossible task of applying equal amounts of time and energy to both. Instead, I’ve begun to let my life inform my training, with the understanding that the better I manage my life outside the gym, the more attention I pay to the physical, mental, and emotional effects of training (both good and bad), the more productive my training becomes.

3. Remember the Golden Rule

It’s a truism that great athletes don’t necessarily make great coaches. But among the great athletes I competed with, they shared a common attribute: they genuinely cared about people, and took every opportunity to learn as much from other people as those people hoped to learn from them. What’s my point? My point, without delving into touchy-feely territory or delivering some hortatory message on karma, is that the best athletes routinely put the considerations of others ahead of their own. This type of selflessness, I’ve found, has a way of paying dividends. Fans cheer the loudest, coaches work the hardest, and companies invest the most in athletes that are also exemplary people. Paul Southern, the GM of the Fire, said the team’s draft strategy was to “draft exceptional people, who also happen to be exceptional athletes.” The team created a culture that attracted those types of athletes, and the strategy paid off with an appearance in the inaugural Grid Championship. If you want to make it far in Crossfit, Grid, or life in general, you’re going to need help at some point. And people are usually more willing to help those they can trust to return the favor. I’ll end by quoting Abraham Lincoln, who famously said in his address to San Dimas High School, “Be excellent to each other, and . . . party on dudes!”

Many Crossfitters and Olympic weightlifters constantly hear the term “finish your pull” from their coaches.

But what are their coaches really trying to tell them?

“Finishing the pull” refers to an athlete fully extending the hips, knees and shoulders into a snatch or clean and jerk during the final phase of the pull. This is the moment right before the athlete begins to pull themselves under the bar in order to receive the weight—either on the shoulders for a clean or overhead for a snatch.

Here are two examples of athletes “finishing their pull” by extending their ankles, knees, hips and shoulders into the bar and finishing with their shoulders behind the bar. This full extension ensures for maximum barbell momentum.

Many athletes try to imitate the best lifters in the world by focusing on speed alone. If the athlete only focuses on speed and trying to get under the bar faster, then many times they do not reach full extension. Most times, they will bend their arms prematurely, instead of getting maximum exertion into the bar. This in turn can limit the upward momentum the athlete can put on the bar.

Here is an example of an athlete with an early arm bend on the pull:

Furthermore, athletes may fail to extend their hips, shoulders, knees and ankles fully. Here are some examples of athletes not reaching full extension in each of these areas.

No knee extension:

No hip extension:

No shoulder extension:

So how do you know if you are reaching full extension or “finishing the pull”? One way is to video yourself and see if your hips, knees and shoulders get fully extended when played in slow motion and paused. Compare yourself to these pictures and see where you line up. A second method is to draw a line on the ground and see if you are jumping forward in the completion of the lift. If an athlete jumps forward, this usually indicates that the athlete never reached full extension of the hips and the shoulders finished on top of the bar, rather than slightly behind. Another indicator is if you constantly fail the weight forward, such as catching a clean on your toes or constantly missing a snatch with the weight falling forward.

What can you do to help fix this? Below are four exercises you can use to help correct not “finishing your pull.”

1. Tell the athlete to jump back a 1/2 inch when performing a snatch or clean
2. Focus on plyometric exercises that require full extension (i.e. squat jumps)
3. When performing pulling exercises, focus on full extension
4. Practice shrugs from the hang position

Eating carbohydrates at the right time during the day is the most effective way to shed unwanted body fat and insure adequate energy for exercise. Deciding when to eat carbohydrates is simple: only eat large doses of carbohydrates after you workout! The science behind this idea makes perfect sense, and not doing this is a common mistake made by a very large percentage of our population.

Here’s why.

During digestion, carbohydrates are turned into glucose. Upon the ingestion of carbohydrates, insulin is released and binds to muscle tissue cells to shuttle glucose into the cell to be stored as muscle glycogen. Muscle glycogen is the body’s stored source of carbohydrates. Muscle glycogen is stored by skeletal muscle and used as an energy source during exercise – this is especially true for Crossfit style workouts. When muscle glycogen is depleted during a workout, it is imperative that carbohydrates are ingested to ensure the recovery of this muscle glycogen for future workouts. The common mistake made by most people (and the primary reason for the obesity epidemic) is eating large doses of carbohydrates all day long. The body can only store a limited amount of carbohydrates as muscle glycogen. Elite athletes have the ability to store more than the average Joe, but there is still a limit. Once muscle glycogen has been restored to capacity, all excess carbohydrates must go somewhere else. If you are not actively using these excess carbohydrates for energy, they will be turned into fat.

As previously stated, the consumption of carbohydrates signals the body to release insulin. Insulin is a peptide hormone that promotes the absorption of glucose from the blood to muscle and fat tissue. Eating large doses of carbohydrates too frequently can cause cells to respond poorly to insulin. This poor response hinders the ability of the cell to remove glucose from the blood stream, and leads to excess body fat and type II diabetes. Eating large doses of carbohydrates only after workouts is the perfect way to get the carbohydrates you need, while guaranteeing insulin sensitivity.

The best thing is, as long as you don’t go too overboard (eat more carbohydrates than needed for restoring muscle glycogen), it really doesn’t matter if you are choosing simple or complex carbohydrates. Simple carbohydrates will actually help to restore muscle glycogen faster, and insure energy for two-a-day workouts.

Cupcakes after a hard workout? You earned them, go for it!

Front squats vs. back squats.

Which one is more important?

To help answer this question, we must first discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each.

The Back Squat

The back squat requires the athlete to place the bar on the back of the neck, sitting on the traps. This allows the bar and distribution of the weight to sit in line with the spine, directly over the athlete’s area of base. In this position, the athlete is able to control the barbell more easily, isolating the leg muscles for a more direct application. It can be argued that more strength can be created using the back squat, simply because more weight can be lifted with the back squat than the front squat. This application of force, which falls directly in line with an athlete’s posterior chain, means that the back squat requires more posterior chain recruitment than the front squat. More specifically, the back squat will develop the glutes and hamstrings slightly more than the front squat.

The Front Squat

Inversely, the front squat, with the weight placed on the shoulders in front of the neck, puts a unique forward torque on the body that the athlete must resist. This forward torque requires the athlete to use more quadriceps and core activation in order to keep the bar from falling forward. Therefore, it can be argued that the front squat helps develop the anterior kinetic chain more than that of the back squat. The front squat also helps the athlete prepare for the receiving position of the clean. As these two movements are related, the more repetitions and weight an athlete can front squat correctly, the more likely the athlete is to possess a better receiving position or “catch” in the clean.

So what’s the verdict?

There is no clear winner here. We all know and have studied that when training, we must train the agonist and antagonist muscles evenly. If one develops significantly more than the other, this imbalance can lead to poor technique or possible injury. When training the legs, one must train them completely. Therefore, solid weightlifting programs that can be adapted to other sports require the use of both the front squat and the back squat in training – with equal importance.

The current way of thinking in sports and in much of the working world is to just “work harder.” A great work ethic is a requirement if you want to be “great” or “the best” at something. With that said, many times this idea of “just work harder” causes diminishing returns in terms of performance and productivity. If you want to learn how to be more productive, read “Eat that Frog” by Brian Tracy. He outlines several practical and immediately applicable techniques for getting more work done in less time. The one I’ve found most useful is this: Each night write down a list of all tasks you have to complete the following day. Order them in order of importance. Then, the following day complete them in that order. By finishing your biggest task first thing each day, you feel more confident immediately. You are also forced to determine what those tasks are and complete them efficiently. In terms of training, learn how the body works. Learn how it breaks down, recovers, builds, and adapts. Question everything. If you don’t have the time or motivation to learn for yourself, then find a coach who does. There is a smarter way of training than just doing more, more, more without a plan.

The mental game of sport and competition is often even more important than the physical. For example, I know several Crossfit athletes that have tremendous numbers when they are in their own gym on their own time. Strong, conditioned, gymnasty. Then the open comes around and they fall apart. They do not perform well under pressure for many different reasons. The three most common reasons for this in my opinion are a lack of competitive experience, lack of “mental toughness,” or life factors outside of the gym.

Lack of competitive experience CAN BE a big obstacle for some competitors to overcome. The lack of experience in and of itself is not the problem. It is the lack of “mental toughness” that often accompanies lack of experience. What I mean by “lack of mental toughness” is the negative internal dialogue and inability to adapt to adversity. What to do about it?

1. Compete more and with a purpose.
2. Get outside of your comfort zone in terms of set and setting. So if you always train with Jake at 6am, occasionally train with Brennan at 6pm. There are endless ways to challenge your own comfort zone.
3. Occasionally put yourself through some type of crucible. For some, a Crossfit workout alone is a crucible. For others, they may have to do a marathon to really push themselves. Others may need to do something like SEALFIT. Regardless of your level of fitness, a crucible need only be “a place or occasion of SEVERE test or trial.” The mental, and for some spiritual, benefits of these experiences are more than I can put in words. Try it for yourself.

Finally, as I discussed in my last post, life factors outside of the gym can and do negatively affect your performance. Minimize the negative effects caused by stress and you will see huge improvements in your performance.

One of the most overlooked aspects of fitness, sports, etc. is the relationship between stress and performance. The stress I’m talking about is the stress caused by factors outside of the gym and off of the field. “Life factors.” So many athletes and coaches continue to underestimate this relationship.

What are life factors outside of the sport itself? Sleep, relationships, finances, career, etc. Sleep alone is probably the most important factor in recovery, and yet tons of athletes still operate with the “sleep is for losers” mentality. Be more productive with your time, and also realize that at a certain point more work is not only useless, but also harmful.

One of the biggest sources of stress in people’s lives is relationships. If your BIGGEST goal in life is to win at your sport, then you should either fix your relationship problems or end the relationship. If your biggest goal is to be a good husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend, then maybe you should spend more time working on and building that than you do in the gym or on the field. That will put you in line with your principal values, as well as creating a more stress free environment for you. That environment will also, in turn, increase your performance in your sport. Win, win.

The “stress-free” environment is a very broad concept. Two of the most important aspects of it are your hormone levels and brain activity. In short, we want to create an internal environment where there exists more anabolic “building” hormones than catabolic “destroying” hormones. Both are necessary in life, but we want to minimize the amount of time that catabolic hormones are circulating our bloodstreams. As far as brain activity goes, if you are focused on how to mend your relationship with your girlfriend or how you’re going to pay rent, how can you focus on your training? Minimize these negative life factors and you will see huge positive effects on your performance.

“Look at trends, not outliers.” The nutrition trend in the professional athletic community is pretty clear. Athletes are eating cleaner and with more precision than ever before. They are eating more REAL food. More lean conventional meats or hearty grass-fed meats. More healthy fats and vegetables. They are eating quality carbohydrates and at optimal times. Supplementation has become clearer, and more athletes are using fish oil, high quality whey, and vitamin D3.

Then there are the outliers. The ones that are labeled “freaks” because they seem to eat whatever they want, stay super lean, recover quickly, and perform just as good as ever. One of two things is happening in these instances. The first is that the athlete truly does have a “crap” diet. They may be super lean and thus have a super high metabolism. They may have an extremely low resting heart rate and life stressors, leading to a better hormonal environment as well as better body composition. Even in these cases, I would argue that the athlete is not performing OPTIMALLY. The absolute best athletes control every single factor they can. The second possibility is that the athlete’s diet is not as it seems. Take an Instagram account for instance. Pictures of donuts, beer, ice cream, cheeseburgers, etc. are fun, funny, and maybe “bad ass.” Does that mean that this is what his/her diet consists of? Not necessarily.

There is so much good, free information on the Internet regarding nutrition. I know a ton of people that jump from diet to diet, fretting about the faults of each one. The key is to pick from the stack of great diets and stick to one for a while. It will help you become more disciplined and give you some usable data about how that diet works for you.

The truth is, following a strict diet takes a lot of willpower. Willpower is a FINITE resource within our brain. There are a few ways you can make following a diet easier for yourself:

1. Make sure the people you spend the most time with know about your diet and support it. The people in our social circles have THE BIGGEST impact on plenty of our life decisions, including our diets. Oh, they constantly make fun of you? Set boundaries. If they don’t respect them, maybe find some new friends that support your goals or just don’t eat around those people.
2. Plan and pre-prepare your food. One of the hardest moments for anyone on a diet is to be very hungry with no healthy food in sight. So plan for that situation by preparing you food far in advance, going as far as to write down what you are going to eat that day. It may not be fun, but it works.
3. Don’t be so “black and white” with your thinking. One slip up, whether planned or not, is no grounds for termination of the diet. Allow yourself planned cheat meals to prevent becoming overwhelmed by the constraining nature of a strict diet.

Again, just because one athlete “eats whatever he wants” doesn’t mean you can or should. Follow the trends, not the outliers.

Regardless of your current goals or fitness level, take what you can from the training that professionals do. The professionals are usually the ones that employ the most “cutting edge” techniques and devices. Whether you aspire to become the next LeBron James, look better in that itty-bitty yellow polka dot bikini, or just pick up your kids a little easier – look at the way professional athletes train, steal some of their methods, and I promise you will see results. Apply the aspects that are most useful and practical to your life and goals (everyone’s body is different).

At brUTE Strength Training the number of professional athletes we work with, whether in CrossFit or other sports, is pale in comparison to the number of athletes we work with that are either not yet professionals or have no desire to reach that level. All of our athletes do, however, train like professionals in order to ensure that their goals are met in the most effective way possible.