CrossFit South Bend

Keith finishing up his squats from the 10,000lbs workout

DWOD (completed before SWOD)
Sprints
Complete:
8 x 50 yard
Rest 60 seconds

SWOD
Power Snatch 6×2
Strict Pull Ups 3 x max reps

The other day Robb and I were chatting about the Amateur Program. So I thought that I would do a post on the life cycle of the Amateur Program. The general life cycle will last about 21 weeks.
Weeks 1-3: Inter-Muscular Coordination. This can be equated to learning how to throw a baseball. You learn to step, point at your target, throw the baseball and follow through. Basically you are ingraining the movement pattern. Which is why it is crucial we develop the correct movement patterns for all of our lifts
Weeks 4-6: Intra-Muscular Coordination. This is when your CNS (central nervous systems) becomes more efficient. The nervous system is essentially the body’s electrical wiring. During this phase the motor neurons that tell your muscle to contract become more efficient (i.e. allows you to lift your weight). This is key in your ability to display your absolute strength rep ranges of 1-3 this is where the CNS is really tapped in.
Weeks 6-9: Hypertrophy. This is when the muscles start to increase in size. One of the ways to also get stronger is to create a larger cross-sectional of muscle. Just as a side note: there are two types of Hypertrophy. (1) sarcoplasmic (reps of 8-11). This creates a larger bulbous muscle but doesn’t necessarily contribute to strength. Think more body builder here and this is also the rep range our accessory worked would fall into. (2) myofibril (reps of 4-7). This will be more on the strength increase and less on the actual size of the muscle, this is where our barbell work will generally fall under.
Weeks 10-21 (rough timeline) will be spent developing your base level of strength. At some point there will come a time when you are unable to do the weight in your progression that day, so lets play out a little scenario.
Robb has worked his way up to 300lbs on his squats. He comes in on Monday and hits reps of 5-5-4. He was unable to complete his 5th rep. He gets one more try. Maybe his sleep was off, food was off, stressed out, etc. You get the idea. Thursday he comes in and tries 300lbs again and his resulting reps are 4-3-2. At this point Robb is no longer able to recover from the volume and intensity. So what we will do now is called a “Reset.” We will drop back 3 weeks (i.e. 30lbs). He will start back at 270lbs and try to work back past that sticking point. You can replace squat with any of our other lifts and apply the same scenario.
At some point during weeks 10-21 the Amateur program will fail to be optimal. How will we know? Examples are: your ability to recover from the previous days sets has severely decreased, or we have done multiple resets. We will cross this bridge when we get there, and it will be different per individual.