6.5 years of CF. I've hit a plateau. Is it reasonable to expect to continue to improve?

[mattbraunlin]

@mikelore Repeating many shared thoughts here, but I’ll distill them down as I usually do to my members.

1) You celebrate your fitness level now, recognize you’re much better and don’t have to disrupt the habits, patterns and lifestyle/cycle that have gotten you there. (Stay in the pocket, nothing wrong with this!).

2) You focus in on one of areas you want to improve - say strength - and make it your primary focus. And I don’t mean 60/40 strength to CrossFit training, we’re talking moreso 85/15. Drop the gut busting, exhausting metcons and build up a big base of strength and then get back into CrossFit more concertedly. This may necessitate a change of gym if the programming/facilities etc aren’t able to provide the necessary stimulus (talk to your coaches). This is a tough one, because it can get you away from the elements that brought you today’s fitness level. [You can do the same with the max output V02 training, but I do find that’s easier to build in order to maintain within the CF environment].

3) Truly reevaluate your nutrition/recovery/effort with a critical lens and bring in a 3rd party perspective to see where efficiencies can be squeezed. I routinely find members feeling like they’re doing all the can and they’re deficient by multiple grams of protein day over day, only sleep 6 hours a night or have an insanely stressful “rest of life” that’s frying their ability to recover! Nothing in life operates in a silo.

 

[jamesbond004]

@mikelore Re: "Where I would like to see, and would expect to see, improvement is in my capacity to do bread-and-butter CF basic movements like wall balls, dubs, dumbbell snatches, burpees, etc". Some of those are skills, some of those are engine. If you want RMU, HSW, or better dubs, you need to spend time practicing outside of your normal WODs. You're not going to get HSW trying them for 10min once a month when they show up as RX+. If you want to improve your engine for things like wall balls, burpees, and you've plateaued with your current training, you need to change your training. likely you'll need to increase the volume of metcons/zone 2 work.

Speaking to strength decrease: Many boxes don't do good strength programming (you say your top end strength isn't great, which makes me think your box is included in that list). If you add 45-60min of proper strength work 2x/wk you'll see improvement on your lifts. Look at a good free program. You can take something like Candito's 6 week program, and remove all the bench days to get a 2x/wk lower body program: http://www.canditotraininghq.com/free-programs/ . If you're willing to spend a bit, there are many good paid programs, or you could even get a coach to write programming for you.