I have been following CrossFit methodology for 4 years now. Over those years, I have struggled through shoulder impingement, overtraining, and generally figuring out what the right dose of exercise is. When I began, just as when beginning anything, the sky was the limit. In the first 3 to 12 months of doing anything you do not know what your limitations are. You have not done it enough to get a reliable sense of what sustainable growth looks like. In the first year of doing CrossFit, it is easy to imagine adding 50 lbs to your bench press and taking 2:00 off your mile time in a mere 12 months. In fact, it may happen, but the first 50 lbs and the first 2:00 are the easy gains. This follows the principle that Josh Kaufman describes in his book “The First 20 Hours” and in this TED talk:
The premise is essentially this: while it takes many hours to become an expert at something, it make take only 20 hours of focused practice to become competent at something. In fact, the first 20 hours are the time of greatest growth and adaptation:
Notice that beyond 20 hours more practice time continues to yield growth, the growth is simply slower. For this reason, the first month or two of exercising can be the most exciting, because progress will be fast. This is good, because it will hopefully hook you into a regular exercise routine. However, without a proper understanding of how improvement works, you may overreach and have a hard time transitioning to a slower rate of growth.
At some point, you are going to reach a point where you have to work fairly hard to have a little bit of growth. You are going to be far enough into your practice time that your rate of growth is going to be slow no matter how hard you work. Below is my Beyond the Whiteboard Fitness Level since I began using it in May 2015.
The data points are on 2 month intervals. The level 79 and 76 from 2016 are outliers because they are from a time that I was not logging enough results to get a reliable fitness level. When those are removed, a very steady trendline develops–I have grown by approximately 1 fitness level point every 2 months. This is simply my rate of growth with the effort I could give over that time. It would be great to accelerate this, but it is all my body is going to do with the 5 days per week I have to exercise. Now, if I were able to go back to July 2013, when I began, I am sure I would have started somewhere in the 40s and I suppose I would have grown at a rate of 2-3 fitness level points every 2 months. This was what my body was able to do early on in my development.
Why do I describe all this and how does it relate to 5 hours per week? The point is this: you are going to reach a point in exercising where you are going to see slow growth. Hopefully you are so genetically endowed that your slow growth doesn’t happen until your fitness level is in the 90s. If this is the case, maybe you should continue pushing the limits and try to be competitive in the sport of fitness. However, for most, you are going to hit a period of slow growth when your fitness level is in the 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s. How are you going to stay motivated during this time? You should keep it fun and varied, work out with friends, and, mostly, just realize this is how it goes. Your body can only get stronger and more conditioned at a certain rate. You are not going to stay motivated by seeing significant gains all the time. You are going to need to commit to a certain amount of time and enjoy the process.
For me, I could train 2-3 hours per day, 5 days per week, and maybe grow at 1.25-1.75 fitness level points every 2 months. Or, I could train 1 hour per day, 5 days per week, and grow at 0.5-1 fitness level point every 2 months. Where does each leave me? I have pushed my limits enough to know that just 1.5-2 hours per day of hard training starts to rob from other areas of my life. That 1.5-2 hours takes all the energy I have and all I want to do otherwise is lay around. After 2 hours of hard training, I do not want to invest in relationships, read, cook, ride my bike, garden, play any other sports, or focus on anything that takes sustained effort. In contrast, 1 hour seems to leave enough in the tank that I can do other things that require physical and mental effort. In fact, that 1 hour can give me momentum to bring energy to other things in my life. This is one reason why CrossFit has settled on 1 hour classes, and why founder Greg Glassman is credited with saying, “Past one hour, more is not better.”
For the 99.9% of us that are not going to make a living exercising, we must aim for exercise that makes us fitter and better at life. Through my years of trying to be fitter and better at life, 5 hours a week seems like a nice balance. The workouts on 320 Gym are programmed with this in mind. If you want to stretch for more, use the workout planning sheet to program your own, but if you simply give 5 hours per week to the workouts written, you should develop broad fitness that enriches rather than robs other areas of your life.
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