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- Crossfit 330- June Building a Bodyweight Workout Plan? Start Here
CrossFit quickly provided the biggest disruption in fitness industry history.
But in a way, the traditionalist CrossFit style of training ended up veering too far to the left of the foundational principles of effective strength and half burpees exercise conditioning program design that have held true for nearly a century at this point through both research and real world results.
And things like programming recovery methods into training via cool downs and low intensity regenerative work such as soft tissue work, corrective exercises and single joint exercises for hypertrophy.
This has been a big no-no in traditional CrossFit.
And with it, traditional CrossFit has been forced to evolve out of sheer necessity to stay relevant in an ever more growing and competitive fitness industry landscape.
Today we are starting to see a synergy in CrossFit group fitness classes that now utilize things that just about any strength and conditioning facility would take for granted.
As we say, CrossFit is becoming more centric, moving closer towards long standing established principles of strength and conditioning.
No matter what you call it, the goal will continue to always be the same, to best serve our clients’ clients, keep them healthy, progressing and thriving for life.
And simply put, force feeding “traditional” CrossFit exercises like snatches and kipping pull-ups and blindly following archaic and dogmatic approaches to what you may think CrossFit is does not serve a vast majority of our clients.
At the end of the day, you must be brutally honest with yourself and answer this question, if you subscribe to the mindset of kicking the shit out of your clients daily while injury rates are sky high and bank accounts are at all time lows, isn’t it time to reevaluate why you got involved with the fitness industry in the first place.
Here’s 5 ways to instantly upgrade your traditional CrossFit training.
What’s more disturbing is that MOST of the folks performing full snatches when I’ve dropped in at other boxes have front desk software crossfit zero business doing a full snatch from a mobility, stability or skill requisite standpoint.
Remember, no one exercise is mandatory to achieve results.
4 Live-Stream Workouts That Turn Your Living Room Into a Fitness Studio | Livestrong.com
Because in reality, your clients don’t know that a landmine press is any less challenging than a handstand push up if they are going hard, heavy and achieving a training effect.
Here is a simple progression pyramid template for the overhead press that we use to intelligently fit exercises to each client’s unique needs to maximize trainability while reducing risk of injury.
This includes patterns like squatting, hip hinging, and upper body push and pulling.
Have a plan, and know how to progress and regress patterns to avoid becoming a “one size fits all” coach.
And I certainly do not think for one second that I have all the answers or that my way is the only way.
But what I do know is that it makes no sense reinventing the wheel.
Since then that’s the stance we’ve adhered to and have had plenty of people not jive with this message which is to be expected seeing that CrossFit started out with the bravado of “your workout is our warm up.”.
Put simply, we have opportunities with our clients that are often overlooked such as during our warm up.
All of this can be accomplished in as little as 10-12 minutes in a group training session (7-9 minutes for an individual).
The key is efficiency programming with a minimum effective dose strategy.
An effective warm up strategy also keeps your clients healthier by strengthening functional weak links and allowing daily maintenance of tissues, movement patterns and motor skill sets.
There is much confusion about what strength training is and of course not all forms of strength are created or developed the same way.
Here’s my go-to list of non-traditional CrossFit strength exercises, all linked individually so you can see these movements in action.
We don’t just use novelty and variations in our programming aimlessly calimove home workout, we work to program them all more intelligently.
Here are some examples of cool down work based off the above 6-phase warm Ups.
This is done on the same musculature you foam rolled in your warm-up but now the execution is different to expedite recovery.
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Crossfit 330- June calisthenics shoulder workout 7, 2019
And a more recovered client means a healthier client in both the short term and long term in a day and age where chronic burn outs and injuries have become the norm.
Don’t be fooled by social media there is a point of diminishing returns; it’s likely if you’ve been around the block a few times you’ve experienced this.
Without an efficient aerobic system, your clients will never be that great at CrossFit either.
I went from training 10x a week with my heart-rate near redline in every single workout to doing more enjoyable easy conditioning pieces.
My resting heart rate dropped from 66 to 54, my heart rate variability scores are 20 points higher than they were 2.5 years ago AND my performance has improved 10-fold.
In fact, I went from being in the 300s in my region to the 60s without doing ANY BRUTAL METCONS.
This will carry over like you wouldn’t believe to other modalities.
If you’re not programming planned rest in at least 1-2 workouts a week then you’re setting people up to never improve their work-output.
Globally demanding movements like snatches, burpees, and thrusters should be used strategically and not randomly.

I have owned my own facility, trained a wide-range of clients ranging from soccer moms, military personnel, law enforcement, CrossFitters, Powerlifters, and professional athletes.
My area of specialization is providing a system of concurrent fitness geared toward the general population in a group setting.
Currently, I own BoxProgramming.com and write programming for over 200 facilities world-wide, managing over 40,000 athletes and clients each month on our smarter CrossFit methods.
Since entering the mainstream fitness space in the early 2000’s and hitting a peak participation globally nearly 10 years later, CrossFit has earned the reputation as the kings of functional fitness worldwide.
The numbers are as staggering as the training style was polarizing.
I do workout at a crossfit gym, but I’m not personally totally onboard the crossfit otr crossfit bandwagon.
Most treat it as something to “get through” until the metcon starts.
So the end result is most people showing up for a metcon to sweat and leaving right after.
It seems most people (at least frank grillo abs at my gym) have no idea how to tell if they’re reaching parallel or don’t care (probably both).
The gym’s coaches really do try to encourage and fix that but there’s only so much they can do.
It’s the really young members (not very many at my gym though) that take strength work and recovery seriously.
Building a Bodyweight Workout Plan? Start Here
Anyways, I still enjoy a great deal of your articles and info.
I just wanted to offer a dissenting opinion based on observation.
I do concur that crossfit is not particularly as popular as it was though.
The Open workouts were and have been barely attended by most members this year.
I do want to remind you that my experience stems from working with more than 200 gyms as well as what I’ve seen being in the CrossFit community for over 15 years so while your gym may not jive with these messages I base my writing off of my practical experience.
I know for myself personally, I never struggled to build value or educate my clients as I was ALWAYS 100% confident I KNEW what my clients needed whether they liked it or not.
Knowing when to hold you back is the job of a good coach.
