Crossfit training for athletes

There are many fundamental benefits to athletes in how and what we coach. They can be broken into 4 key areas.
Technique – How to lift, push and pull in strong positions. Reducing injury , increasing strength & efficiency.
Strength -We teach how to get stronger
Power – Generating power for sport is mainly from the hips and then being able to transfer this to your limbs.
Fitness – Each session has a different fitness challenge designed to keep an athlete moving the whole time. Our workouts have a scoring system which makes people more competitive and understand that every movement counts.
NOTE: We never put in a movement to a fitness circuit unless an athlete is highly competent at that movement first.

Technique

Coaching correct movement patterns to all athletes will massively transform how they move in their sport and in their own training. Athletes should not be lifting other athletes, pushing or pulling large loads repetitively and at speed until they have first mastered a deadlift for example.
The fundamental movements we aim to coach athletes are:
Deadlift – How to lift safely and with a strong back.
Strict press – How to press overhead with stable shoulders and a strong stable spine.
Squat – How to squat with correct knee alignment and a straight back
Lunge – How to Transfer weight through one leg with knee in correct alignment and weight through heel.
Pull up – An essential movement in stabilising the shoulders generating pulling strength and preventing/ rehabilitating shoulder injuries.
Sumo deadlift high pull – A movement to generate maximum hip power safely.
Box Jumps – Transferring hip power and strength into
We can coach more advanced movements:
Such as Cleans and snatch, however these are not sport specific and can be learnt at a later date. To optimise athletes development in the shortest time the above exercises need mastering first.

Strength and power

Because the proper techniques are being used we can now safely develop and improve your athletes strength by increasing the load in these exercises.
Power exercises such as:
Sumo deadlift high pull, once mastered the athlete can pull a heavy load under speed into a high position and under safe control. This closely mimics a Rowing movement and also rugby movements like clearing a ruck or a dump tackle. So by training this they will be able to increase safe strength and power in this plane.
Box jumps – This again mimics the power required to row, run jump and more. If you increase your box jump height you will have a faster explosive leg power which will directly increase acceleration.

Fitness

Crossfit has turned fitness into a sport, and an enjoyable sport. It has done this by creating a scoring system thus turning each workout into a competition and also by not counting repetitions with poor form we encourage people to learn to move correctly.
Traditional fitness training is mainly running. This will get your athlete fit at running however when running and strength are combined there body will not be fit at this as this requires much more of the body to be fit.
We also apply strength movements to fitness, which nearly all sports require. We do this very safely especially when training athletes.
Example of a fitness workout
A workout for example may include a short burst of running,then pull ups, press ups then repeating. The workout will be designed so that the athlete can keep moving the whole time, so short burst on each exercise. The workouts are also between 5-12 minutes long. Which closely matches an intense period in sport. By doing this we can increase your athletes ability to be powerful and quick over this period.
If you compare this to a 45 minute workout, No one can sprint for this period so effectively the athlete will be jogging so the result of this whilst increasing there ability to continue non stop for 45 minutes it would decrease their speed in shorter more sport specific bursts .