I wrote about Crossfit once, so I am not going to write another lengthy post. However, after listening to some Crossfitters this morning, I felt compelled to make a second post, especially as it seems that Crossfit workouts are gaining in popularity among basketball players.
The Crossfitters were talking about their soreness from a previous workout. They spoke about not being able to walk the next day as a great workout. They treat DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) like a badge of pride.
That’s fine, if that’s all you do and want to do. If it makes you feel good to not be able to walk after doing 400m of overhead lunge walks, more power to you.
When I train a basketball team, however, the players have to be able to walk the next day. Their goal isn’t to complete a 400m lunge walk in the shortest possible time, their goal is to play basketball better. If I destroy the players with lunges, deadlifts, squats, etc., and they cannot perform on the basketball court the next day, I failed.
Lifting weights is part of the performance program. Our sessions are not the entirety of their training. The numbers that the players put up in the weight room and the times that they achieve in sprints do not matter if they perform poorly on the court.
Working at a junior college, I never know when a D1, D2, D3, or NAIA coach is going to pop in to check out a player in practice. What happens if the player is destroyed physically from an extra hard workout and performs poorly in front of a coach? What if a player is fatigued from the previous day’s workout and twists an ankle or tears an ACL?
Wrecking your body in every workout is not training for sports performance. DOMS is not a positive for an athlete engaged in pre-season preparations. Off the court training, whether strength, power or conditioning-related, is meant to supplement and enhance on court training and performance, not detract from it. If a player is too tired or too sore to perform optimally in practice the next day, something is wrong. Either the workout was too far beyond the players’ abilities or the recovery between workouts and practices is inadequate. The true measure of a successful workout is that it stretches the players’ current abilities without being too hard to prevent adequate recovery.
Just wanted you to know not all crossfitters are about the soreness. actually crossfit teaches that crossfit training is just above nutrition in the pyramid of fitness. sport is on top. Athletes just need to keep there priorities and stay focused. a crossfit work out should improve your game not hinder it. It should be used to ensure you are excercising weaker muscle groups that you may be compensating for and increase your strength and endurance for your sport. As for the remark on soreness sometimes it is nice to know that you can still feel that way, its a reminder that we can always improve but screw being that way all the time.
It makes a difference of what stage in your training you are at. If you are in season, then a maintenance workout requires a less intense workout in which case DOMS will
Most likely not set in. But if you are in an off season workout players need to work hard to push their bodies. Off-season is the time to change your body and and increase muscle density/size to incease blood flow an allow higher levels
Of glycogen levels stored in the muscle in whic case recovery time is shortened.
Chad
Yes and no.
During the season, I don’t believe the intensity has to decrease substantially; I reduce the volume. Intensity fluctuates within a periodized program and the goal for the meso or microcycle.
During the off-season, my goal is always to challenge the athletes. However, if they can’t walk the next day due to DOMS, and therefore cannot practice their sport, the challenge was too far beyond their current abilities. I touched on this to a degree here:
http://developyourbballiq.com/off-season-conditioning-more-is-not-always-better/
I save the hardest workouts, during the off-season, to the days before an off-day from basketball practice. Therefore, if there is any residual soreness or threat of DOMS, they have a day to recover.
This article is not about being easy. We squat, clean, deadlift, etc. Girls have gone from barely a minute in the plank to over 3:30 in the plank in one off-season and from using 18-inch boxes for jumps to the 30-inch box.
More importantly, they are fresh for practice and almost never feel wasted – when they do, we back off.
Athletic development is a process, not an event. The workouts don’t have names because the workouts themselves are not important. For an athlete, the games are what is important. My performance as a strength coach is not measured by the numbers lifted in the weight room this week, but by on-court performance starting roughly 6 weeks from now. The goal isn’t to survive a hard workout, but to improve in small increments and be ready for more work tomorrow.
Regardless of the time of year, if the players are suffering from DOMS after a workout, they’re not ready to work out again tomorrow. That’s not my goal.
Being hard is easy. Wrecking their legs would be easy. The challenge is to push just to the edge to illicit the desired improvements while backing off enough that they are ready mentally and physically for the next workout or practice.
Another article with a similar message:
http://www.oneresult.com/articles/training/why-real-athletes-don’t-do-crossfit
The difference between training athletes and doing Crossfit http://t.co/XEwofqme #Off-seasontraining
A study published on the efficacy of Crossfit:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Crossfit-based+high+intensity+power+training+improves+maximal+aerobic+fitness+and+body+composition
Whereas there were improvements in Vo2 max and body composition during a 10-week study, there was no control group to account for the effects of the Paleo diet, and 16% of the subjects dropped out due to injury. A 16% injury rate in 10 weeks is extremely high – in 10 months of training basketball players, I haven’t had an injury that caused an athlete to miss more than one workout, and that minor injury was with an athlete returning from an ACL tear. I have a couple girls with knee issues, but they are the result of previous injuries incurred while playing basketball in high school.