@thex You’re probably doing too much, yes. This is kinda personal to you how much is too much but also kind of not, based on how the body adaptation works. I’ll explain.
Disclaimer: I’m not a cross fitter but I’ve been training myself in endurance sports that also involve strength (rowing, cycling) for almost 25 years.
First key point is for strength training, strength and size gains both require motor unit recruitment and mechanical tension. Your body is lazy and it generally recruits the lowest number of M/Us required to meet the force demand, starting with the smallest first. As the force demand increases, and/or as the initially recruited motor units fatigue, you recruit more, including the biggest M/Us with the highest proportion of type II fibers that are critical for hypertrophy and strength. This is called the size principle. To get at them, you need the right combination of weight and reps. As you’d guess, lower weight = more reps required to get there. You know you’re getting there as the voluntary contraction speed slows, like last few reps of a set. That’s where your M/Us are all hands on deck to meet the demands placed on them.
However! In-session fatigue matters. As you train you fatigue, both locally as muscle fiber glycogen gets depleted and centrally (because neural drive actually fatigues), and then the motor unit recruitment goes down again. Meaning, if you’re going for strength or size, there is a limited number of sets you can do in a session that are actually effective. I don’t have the pub med links handy but iirc it’s something like recruitment starts plateauing as early as 3 or 4 sets per muscle group and after 5 or 6, goes down. Note this is per muscle group, but it goes across groups too because of central fatigue lowering the neural drive. Meaning, if you max out deadlift, you’re gonna get less benefit out of your bench press in the same session even though totally different muscles. Similarly, if you don’t rest enough between sessions, you won’t get to the required level of mechanical tension at all.
Second key point is there can be affirmative downside to overdoing it. Muscle damage abd hypertrophy are not the same thing. Meaning if you overdo it too much, your body burns its limited matches just repairing instead of making your muscles bigger.
So here’s what I mean about how much is too much: whether you get enough gains to stop at 3 or 4 sets, or if you require the much smaller incremental benefits of five or six sets to keep progressing, is personal. But that the benefit goes to zero shortly thereafter is not, it’s objectively a fact. There can be reasons to do more sets and reps—eg conditioning, drilling movement patterns etc, but hypertrophy and strength are not one of them. This is a common misconception as you can see from all the fitness influencer posts on social media where they do squat, hack squat, pendulum squat, single leg squat, wild numbers of working sets that are mostly junk. Probably the reason is they get a good pump on and think this = hypertrophy, but it doesn’t.
So bringing this back to OP’s question: 2 hours in the gym plus more in the afternoon, every day, is probably way more than you need for strength and size gains anf very likely enough to actually inhibit you. I’d back it off and see what happens. I always recommend starting with the least you need to progress rather than the most you can handle, bc of key point 2 but also be use it frees up time for things like skills work, rest and eating that are also important. Cross fit is clearly more complex than many sports because there’s so many different fitness parameters and muscle groups so you can do more hard sessions per week than eg an elite runner. But on strength piece specifically, these principles apply.
Different mechanism but aerobic training concepts are similar in the sense that you need to be recovered enough to go hard enough to get the benefits.
