Am I doing too much?

[mantius]

@thex Your muscles recover on rest days, you don't address those, are you doing them?

 

[joseph_]

@thex cut out the metcon, focus on your strength. you will see some major strength gains at this age - i wouldn’t be so focussed on metcons, maybe include one 3/4 times a week if you manage to get all of your other bits done

you can train your engine anytime - crossfit is becoming more about strength so id capitalise on that while you can !!&

 

[bapfb40]

@thex food and sleep

 

[yadayah]

@thex Unless you’re juicing it’s gonna be very hard to gain muscle. Strength takes a long time. Years.

 

[barricade24]

@thex Hi, I’m the head competitors coach at my gym we have 40 athletes training to get to the next level (2 semifinals teams and some individuals) with about 10-12 of them training as much as you are. The best way to capitalize on the “CrossFit” year is by segmenting important aspects of training to different times of the year. The way I program for my athletes we use 2 main strength building “Cycles” during the year. The first one is right after the end of their season, either quarterfinals or semifinals for my athletes. The second time we focus on strength is right around the holidays. During these strength specific cycles we spend a lot less time doing Zone 2 and Metcons and a lot more time on Main Lifts along with a lot of accessories. I utilize a ton of accessories because the small muscles is where most athletes lack in. A lot of us crossfiters overcompensate in our lifts because all we do is the main lifts - Squat,Dead, Press, Snatch, Clean. However, Most strength gains can be made in the accessory style movements. These movements will help overcome poor movement patterns that are caused by imbalances or, If your movement is great, they will protect your body from all the heavy loads you need to be under helping you break through plateaus.
All in all Gaining strength takes the longest of all the “fitness disciplines”. This means you need a coach that will plan out the full year ahead of time, who will watch your movements to see your imbalances, and who doesn’t just throw a basic 1 size fit all program at you.

 

[crispy1]

@thex I hate to be a Debbie downer but if you are going from no history of training or high level athletics at 20 and hoping to compete, that’s going to be virtually impossible; if your goal is the games.

 

[christiankevin]

@thex First, I completely hear your frustrations and can't imagine how it must be.

I'm fairly new to CrossFit, been doing it a year as of a few days ago and there are still days where I struggle with certain movements BUT what I can say is I am much stronger and consistent in ability than I was a year ago. Why?

Good, certified, empathetic coaching by professionals.

I'm simply echoing others here but I recommend finding a coach or box with a coach who is knowledgeable. The second thing that helped me is working with a nutritionist recently.

These things together have helped me with cutting weight in a sustainable way while also gaining strength and technique to perform higher level skills.

It maybe isn't the most exciting answer but more than anything this combination has helped me tremendously. I competed in my very first Open this year and only performed so well because of my coaches and classmates.

 

[christiankevin]

Also, at MOST I train 5 - 6 times a week but that's ONCE a day.

Though I'm not looking to be a Games athlete currently so that might be different for others.

 

[morrisnjogu]

@thex Yes

 

[peggjesus8782]

@thex I'm just sitting here wondering how you have time to train 2-3 times a day.

 

[jackline]

@peggjesus8782 I was thinking the same thing. But 20 yrs old I assume college student or living at home and working Part Time

 

[dawn16]

@thex Def take some days

 

[winrose]

@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.

 

[perrybll]

@thex Need more rest, and workout a little less, your strength is going to be built when you are letting your body recover.

 

[jamech]

@thex I was similar to you. Could not gain weight or strength. I decided to drink 2 protein shakes a day with 3 eggs 2 scoops of protein and whole milk. Gained 30 lbs in about a month and a half and was a lot stronger. Key is to convince your body you are in a food rich environment.