Team Soul’s 2021 CrossFit season begins with WODAPALOOZA. For those who have been long time followers of our program this is not news to you. WZA is and has been the kick off of our season since its inception. WZA has always played a fundamental role in the structure of our competition calendar. There’s a couple reasons for that, the fact that it is the largest CF event in the world, takes place a couple months before the Open and happens to be right in our back yard all make it a perfect jump off for the start of the season. The fact that I worked as the Program Director for 2 years also doesn’t hurt. When we look at CrossFit through the lens of sport, structuring the year around events, tests, projections becomes extremely important. Working out as hard as you can all of the time may be fun but isn’t the smartest way to train and isn’t going to pay off long term. Setting goals, planning off-season work and prioritizing different aspects of fitness through the year becomes extremely important and it is what our program excels at. You need to take a more sophisticated approach and strategies in order to be successful in the Sport of Fitness, and this is why we’re excited for WZA and to have a much more defined season this year.
For the past several months, we have been focusing on our “off-season training”. To us this is the foundation of a successful year in the sport of Crossfit and an essential part of training if you want to continue progressing. ( BTW If you want to learn more about how we segment training and why off season training is important, CLICK HERE.) Our off-season training starts with a huge emphasis on segmented training. What this means is we start to train different aspects of fitness individually, in other words we try to become proficient endurance athletes by training endurance work on its own, we try and get better at weightlifting by training like a weightlifter, We perform technical gymnastics work in its own session and outside of “Wods”. Towards the end of our off-season, we then start to combine those elements into mixed pieces and attempt to carry over the proficiency we built into mixed pieces. Now if you have been following the program you should have noticed that we have turned up the intensity and started to blend structures much more leading into the online qualifiers. Now with the start of our WZA Prep Cycle things will continue to progress in that same manner.
This is when we start to use and blend newly established lifts, skills, aerobic markers, and any area of your athleticism that has grown since last year. Gymnastics will be more sports specific and mixed with aerobic elements. We’ll be looking to keep high intensities with Weight Lifting while adding sub optimal structures to force people to be more repeatable with high percentages under fatigue. This element of training is what we call “Battery Work”. Basically, we’re gonna ask you to hit 90+% of your 1RM in an Olympic Lift and mix it with some CF stuff. And then when you are good at it… We need to repeat it. On top of all of these different elements, preparing for multiple high intensity pieces in a day is also a priority. We typically do not advocate multiple sessions a day for anyone who isn’t trying to compete on a high level; however if you are registered for Wodapalooza, you need to be prepared for this. Whether you are walking with a Sandbag or being asked to only HS Walk 25ft even though you have the ability todo 100ft. Know that everything about the next 9 weeks will be structured around your athletic success at Wodapalooza 2021.
The primary focus for our next training cycle is to prepare athletes for in person competition specific to Wodapalooza. It’s very important when structuring a program like this we are very clear about it being an event like WZA. Our sport has grown so much that each in person competition has subtle elements, limitations, program design that is all very specific to the event. Preparation for WZA is not like preparation for Dubai or MACC… I am proud to say that our program is without a doubt the most winning program in the history of Wodapalooza. Our preparation for it is very specific and has been something that our team has always put a great deal of effort into.
The next 9 weeks of our program design will be focused on preparing for the format, structure and elements that make Wodapalooza what it is. In order to make sure you get everything you need out of this next training cycle you have to make sure you are adjusting program design around the division you are competing in. For example… If you’re competing in an intermediate division, you might not want to spend your time walking on the handstand ramp right now. You can expect to see some scales and suggestions based off of competition division (mainly Elite/RX/Intermediate) Other things to plan for are holidays. Being that we have followers with several different schedules, goals, and backgrounds, we will be publishing programming as normal most weeks regardless of holidays. It’s up to you as athletes to make sure you’re performing enough work during this upcoming holiday season. All of our athletes can also plan on participating in a camp the week prior to WZA whether it be virtual or in person. If you’re in town you are more than welcome to come and participate in this camp. This camp will be a full simulation of WZA and we will try to simulate the event as closely as possible so you are as prepared as can be for the actual event.
As always if you have any questions please feel free to hit us up!
TEAM SOUL WODAPALOOZA PREP
SIGN UP NOW