I’ll let you in on a little secret. No one knows how to program for functional fitness. Even coaches for top athletes will be the first to tell you they don’t have everything figured out. There are several reasons for this; however, the real reason is functional fitness has not been around long enough to have been well researched by the scientific community. This leaves us stealing bits and pieces from a variety of sources to help us program workouts, in order to achieve our fitness goals. Keep reading to learn a simple method that I use to program for my athletes.

Goal Setting

The first thing that must be considered, when writing an exercise program, is to figure out your goals. For the purposes of this article we will be dealing with writing a program for an individual athlete and not a whole group of people.

These goals should be simple, concrete and measurable. Here’s some examples of good goals.

Increase Deadlift from 405 to 425 in 8 weeks.

or

Row 2000m in 7 minutes and 30 seconds in 1 month

You’ll notice that these goals are measurable, and include a time frame. Likewise, I generally believe that you are more likely to achieve success if you put all your effort on achieving one goal at a time. Yes it is possible to achieve multiple goals, but it is much more difficult. So pick a goal and focus on it like a fat kid on cupcakes.

Frequency

The next thing to consider is how much time you want to workout and what your workout schedule looks like. This is one area where many people have trouble realistically picking their schedule. We can’t help but see how much the top athletes work out and think that we too must put in that much effort. For the vast majority of us this is simply not necessary, and possible dangerous to our health.

This go’s back to your goal setting. If your ultimate goal is to go to the games then you will have to gradually work up to this incredible volume; however, I would guess that secretly you just want to be jacked and keep progressing on your wods.

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You need to pick your workout schedule realistically. You can achieve great results working out 4-6 hours a week. This is not a clear-cut rule, but I find that most people, myself included, can always find this amount of time to workout.

Key Takeaway: Plan for a workout frequency you can always achieve.

Movements

The next consideration for our program is what exercise we need to use to achieve our goals. If we go back to our goal of increasing our deadlift, we know that we will have to work our posterior chain. Next we have to look at what the limiting factor is that is keeping us from that goal already.

If I have an athlete that can deadlift 405 they are already pretty strong, but most likely they have some weak links in muscle groups that contribute to the deadlift. Often times, this will be something like weak upper back muscles, which causes the back to round at max load. If this is the case, then I need to program in some movements that will target this area. In this example I would probably use bent over rows.

Once you have identified your weaknesses and chosen your exercises to remedy them, you need fill in the blanks with your other basic exercises for the rest of your body. This isn’t rocket science, as there are only so many movement patterns that your body can perform. Here are some common ones

Upper Body Press: Bench, Strict Press, Dips

Upper Body Pull: Pull Up, Rows

Lower Body Press: Squat, Front Squat, Lunges

Transverse: Sandbag movements side to side

Hinge: Deadlift, Romainian DL, Olympic lifts

Energy Systems

Now we must take a look at energy systems. Generally speaking there are three: Phosphagen (ATP), Glycolytic, Oxidative. Phosphagen is short intense movements lasting less than 10sec. Glycolytic is anaerobic in nature and is generally 10 sec to 7 minutes or so. Oxidative is aerobic and something that can be maintained from 7 minutes on.

All these systems must be worked to make a complete athlete; however, no athlete is completely balanced in all systems. If we are programing for someone who is already pretty strong and they are good at short intense wods, we know that they need work on the oxidative system.

To program for that I would generally include 2 wods a week that are 15min to 20 min in length. If they were really deficient in this energy system I would add an additional purely aerobic day i.e run, row, swim only.

Volume

Now that we have a pretty good idea of what the program will look like for one week, we need to look at how it will progress over time. Generally speaking I like to start with a manageable first week, increase volume on weeks 2 and 3, and then on week 4 drop the volume a bit and increase load, deloading on week 5. Depending on the experience level of the athlete the cycle might need to be double this length or a week shorter.

Once cycle one is done I like to rotate exercises, but maintain the emphasis on our weak points. So if we were hammering stiff leg deadlifts for our posterior chain, I might rotate that to sumo deadlift for the next cycle.

WOD and Strength

Now this is where we will fit our wod design around our strength program. For example if we are bench pressing on Monday, I like to include another chest exercise in the wod on Wednesday. So the wod might look like:

Wednesday:

5 Rounds for Time

Row 250m

Dip: 15

Try to keep at least two days between muscle group usage. This will allow for decent recovery. There is also a fair amount of research showing that hitting a muscle group twice a week yields the best results. As always there will be some athletes that can handle this volume, or even more, and there will be some that cannot. You need to be flexible about this. Take a look at this example cycle

Monday: Bench Press 5×5, WOD (10 min AMRAP of 10 power snatch, 15 Pull up

Tuesday: Squat 5×8, WOD (5 Rounds 5 squat clean @ 185, bent over row @ 185

Wednesday: Deadlift 6×4, WOD (5 Rounds of row 250m, 15 dips)

Thursday: Power Snatch 3 reps at 75% EMOM until form breaks down

Friday: 5k Run comfortable pace

Saturday and Sunday off

This is a week of programming for an athlete who wants to increase their deadlift and also needs some work on their oxidative energy system. You’ll notice that each muscle group is used roughly two days apart from each other. You’ll also notice that it isn’t always strength, then wod. Don’t limit yourself to only thinking in that manner.

Final Thoughts

When I am programming for my athletes and I’m getting a lot of whining and complaints on the last week before deload, I know I’ve done my job. To achieve your goals you will need to feel like crap before you deload. The body responds to stress in the same way every time. You overload it to the point that it cannot recover, then you rest and allow it to recover. Rinse and repeat.

As I said in the beginning there are no text books that will give you a magic programming formula, but that’s ok, you just need to pick a goal, find your weakness, and consistently work on them. The real secret to success in any endeavor isn’t coming up with the best plan, it’s having a good one and not quitting.

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