Every movement has an energy cost, and through training we increase our reserve energy bank in order to pay that cost. On the flip side of that coin, better technique reduces the cost of any given movement. Moving more efficiently — or the way your body is designed to work — is obviously safer, but you’ll also perform better. So from a competitive perspective, ignoring proper movement is just dumb. Improving engine through technique is really simple. When we refer to engine we are referring to the rate of work an individual can maintain over different time domains. Without having to actually, biologically, improve our engine or cardio-vascular system, we can maintain a higher rate of work through more efficient technique. That is, if we can reduce the energy cost of a movement through improved technique, then we will be able to maintain a higher rate of work for a given time. Simply put: you’ll perform better in WODs by doing the little things correctly. The purpose of working on technique is to be more efficient.

For a max weight this is obvious, but for multiple reps at lower weights this will mean you’re using less energy to get the same thing done. If you do each rep slightly better, the amount of energy you save will add up fast. Many people rush and feel like they are moving faster, or set a rate that they can’t maintain. Instead of rushing, it is crucial to stay calm and focus on doing each rep correctly; you want to feel calm and in control. To make this drastic improvement to performance requires no physical adaptation. Better technique brings an instant improvement in engine. It will take time to master the movements, but once you have mastered technique, the improvement to engine will be fast. Not like the serious time it will take to increase strength or flexibility.

A very easy example to illustrate this is the CrossFit workout Karen, 150 Wallballs for time. A very common mistake is to receive the ball and let it drop from chest height to the belly button. Let’s say this is a distance of about a foot. If it drops a foot we’ll need to bring it back up, so each rep is an extra two feet of movement. Over the course of 150 reps, that’s an extra 300ft of movement — this is the length of a football field! With the target height of 10ft for men, that would be like doing an extra 30 reps. You don’t get extra points for the extra work you do. If, for instance, you were really trying to run a mile as fast as possible, running 5 laps instead of 4 probably isn’t a great strategy.

The legendary Powerlifting coach Louie Simmons says the first book every lifter should own is a physics book. Why? Physics is the study of matter and energy. We use energy to move matter. The amount of energy we have is our engine, and the matter could be any object we want to move including our own body weight. Each movement can be broken down into an equation to tell us how much energy is required to accomplish the goal: move a weight from shoulder to overhead, move from standing to the ground then back to standing (burpee), or any movement you could think of. All of them break down to: Force equals Mass times Acceleration (F=MA), Work equals Force times Distance (W=FD), Power equals Work over Time (P=W/D), Torque equals the Force times Distance times the Angle (T=FDsin(A)), blah blah blah, there are more if we wanted to get super detailed. To make this simple: we can think of power as our work capacity since power is work over time. In terms of a WOD, in a chipper we have a set amount of work and we are trying to do it as fast as possible. In an AMRAP time is fixed and we are trying to do more work or reps. Either way our goal is more power. When we make a movement cost less energy, the math still balances out but our score is improved. Improving our technique is like improving our miles per gallon. We use the same amount of gas but we get further.  

Some common areas to look for improvement include fundamentals of the movement, having extra movement, doing extra reps, and resting in the wrong place.

Basics of Each Movement

When in doubt, simplify the movement down to the most basic and follow the fundamentals of the movement. A good example of this would be a thruster. A thruster is just a front squat directly into a push press. If we have good squat mechanics and finish the same way we would a push press, we’ll be fine.

Extra movement

Another common source of inefficiency is doing more movement than we must. Allowing a bar to move off its path or moving our body off line during gymnastic movements. Whatever moves away must come back to complete the rep. We used the example of letting the ball drop a little during wallballs.  

Extra Reps

Doing extra reps during a workout is much more common than you’d think. This happens when we break on a movement. If you are able to go unbroken on any movement regardless of the weight, congratulations you are a cyborg sent here from the future, good luck in your search for Sarah Connor. For the rest of us, we’ll need to break at some point, and this is where we can plan ahead.

Two great examples of this are the hero WOD DT and 14.5 from the CrossFit Open. Let’s look at DT first: 5 Rounds of 12 deadlifts 9 hang cleans 6 shoulder to overhead at 155 for men and 105 for women. In heavier WODs like DT we run the risk of missing a rep and wasting energy so there we should play it safe, but depending on where we rest we might be adding extra reps. If I break during the hang cleans I have to do a deadlift first to get back to it. If I break on the shoulder to overhead I’ll need to do a clean to get the bar back to my shoulder. In that case by the end of the workout you’ll be doing 5 ½ rounds or more. But if we break on the deadlifts, there are no extra reps. We can do 11 deadlifts take a break and then do the 12th rep and go right into the cleans. As for 14.5, if we break on the thrusters we need to do an extra clean. If we break on burpees we get to lay on the ground.    

Extra holds in bad positions

If you are going to rest make sure it’s in a position with the least amount of stress as possible. If we take a pause between reps it’s important to make sure we are locked out and supported by our skeleton and not burning out our muscles. Easy example: during a squat set you might take a breath up top and not chill at the bottom between reps. If we choose to rest on a movement we need to make sure we aren’t still under a load of some kind. It might be better to do the extra rep to get back into the set instead of wasting energy holding a weight or hanging from a bar. Imagine you’re about to go for a heavy squat, walk the bar out and just stand there for a while. Although you haven’t done any reps, holding that load on your back will zap your energy.

Watch the best athletes in the world and you’ll notice they make it look easy. It looks easy because they are not fighting with themselves. We have a limited amount of energy in the bank and the cost of a movement is less with good technique.

 

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