Where the Strength Work Sits in a Session

We put the lifting before the workout. Warm-up, then strength, then the metcon, and that's been the order all summer. From November it changes, and the strength work moves to the back end of the hour.

Both orders are deliberate and the reason is the temperature of the room.

Strength first is the default for good reasons. Lifting is a skill under load, and skills are best learned when your central nervous system is fresh and your attention is intact. Put a heavy set of squats after twelve minutes of burpees and you might lift less. So from spring through autumn, the lift comes first.

Then the unit gets cold. Ten minutes of general warm-up doesn't get a fifty-year-old's hips, shoulders and thoracic spine ready to load anything near a heavy single in January. Cold tissue is stiffer and tolerates less range. You lose position, and the risk goes up at the exact point in the year when people are already stiffer, sleeping worse and more likely to pick something up.

A conditioning piece solves that better than any warm-up. Twelve minutes of hard work raises core temperature and puts you in a state where the lifting is safer and, in practice, usually heavier. The technical cost of lifting slightly fatigued is small. The cost of lifting cold is bigger.

So from November through March the hour runs warm-up, metcon, strength. April through October it goes back. And strength is programmed every single week of the year — it doesn't arrive in the autumn and disappear in the summer. Only the position in the hour moves.

One other thing moves in the winter. The warm-up gets a bit more intensity with more general work before anything specific.

There's a trade-off I'll be honest about. You might not hit a lifetime PB in February off the back of a metcon, but that's okay. We are still building a great amount of strength.

If you train somewhere else, or in a garage, take the same principle: don't lift heavy in a cold room off the back of ten minutes of arm swings. Ten minutes on a bike or rower first, then lift.

You'll notice the change in the first week of November. Now you know why.

This is the sort of thing you get when someone is thinking about your training for you. Free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com.