Touch-and-Go or Singles

Twenty-one deadlifts at a moderate weight, somewhere in a workout. The clock starts and within three reps you've made a decision that determines the next four minutes, and you probably made it without thinking.

Touch-and-go looks faster. Over twenty-one reps it usually isn't.

Cycling the bar continuously means you never stop working. You lower the bar under control, absorb it, and reverse it immediately — so your grip never gets a break, your lower back never gets a chance to reset its brace, and the eccentric (lowering) portion of every rep is being paid for at full price. It's roughly 1.5 seconds a rep. Quick singles cost about 2.5 seconds a rep, but you drop the bar, your hands open, you take one breath, and you re-brace.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Twenty-one touch-and-go reps at 1.5 seconds is 32 seconds, if you can hold on. Twenty-one quick singles at 2.5 seconds is 53 seconds. The gap is twenty seconds — and the failure mode of touch-and-go is a forty-second stall at rep fourteen, standing over the bar with your hands on your knees, plus a back that's rounding by the end.

So the rule of thumb: if the load is above about 60% of your one-rep max, or the set is longer than ten reps, plan quick singles from the first rep. Not from rep fourteen.

"Quick" is the operative word, and it's where people lose the time. Drop the bar, keep your hands close to it, stand up, one breath, bend down and go. The dead time is the faffing — stepping away, chalking, looking at the clock. Fast singles are a skill worth practising deliberately: set a running clock and do ten singles at a moderate weight, aiming for a rhythm rather than a sprint.

Two things make singles quicker. Hook grip — thumb under the fingers, taped for comfort — means your grip isn't the reason you're resting. And chalk before the workout, not during it, because the trip to the chalk bucket at rep twelve is a rest you're pretending isn't one!

The other advantage is that your last rep looks like your first. Twenty-one reps of a good deadlift makes you better at deadlifting. Fourteen good ones and seven rounded ones makes you sore and slightly worse at it.

Worth saying: some workouts are written to be cycled, and if the load is light and the set is short, touch-and-go is the right call. It's the moderate loads and long sets where people get it wrong.

Decide before the clock starts, and say it out loud. I make people tell me their plan in the brief — half of them change it while they're saying it.

Pacing decisions like this are most of what a coach is for. Free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com.