With Christmas and New years done it’s a good time to get into the regular training routines again and also to set some goals for 2024.

While general fitness is always the main priority for us with the box programming we also believe in putting a little extra focus towards a few areas to make it easier to achieve mastery in these. The reason that we jump back and forth towards the different areas is that it takes a lot less to maintain a capacity than to develop it. Because of this it makes it a good strategy to spend shorter periods with an increased frequency and volume on certain areas.

The 3 Goals for the upcoming 4 weeks are Olympic Lifting, Handstand Walk and Open Preparation. Read more about it below:

1, Olympic Lifting:

For the Box Programming we are now finishing off our Olympic Lifting Block and during the following weeks the lifting percentages will go up while the number of repetitions goes down. If you have not been consistent with your lifting or just feel like you would like to keep on working your technique a little bit more you always have the opportunity to keep the weights done and do more repetitions. 

The frequency of the lifting in the daily wods will be 2 times a week and in addition we will program 2-3 weightlifting sessions in the Pre Wod. If the Olympic Lifting is something you really want to work on you should strongly consider to put these into the program

2, Handstand Walk:

During this block we will for one session a week work in the daily wod on either a Handstand Walk skill progression or straight arm strength work with the wall walk. While this is a skill that might feel like it’s far away in the beginning we have put together a progression template allowing everyone to work at their level. The Handstand Walk Training not only helps us work towards this specific skill. Because of the Straight Arm Strength it also help the stability overhead in movements like the Snatch, Overhead Squat, Shoulder to Overhead etc

3, Open Preparation:

As many of you know the CrossFit Open is getting closer (Feb 29th-March 18th)  and as in every year this will be a part of the programming on Fridays during this period. It provides a good challenge and there is a level for everyone which makes this a good yearly challenge. Year after year we are also seeing big achievements during the workouts whether that is you getting a PR in a lift or getting your first Toes to Bar/Pull Ups or Muscle Up. 

In the preparation for the CrossFit Open you will see us doing more old Open Workouts on mainly mondays and fridays and in addition you will gradually see more body weight gymnastics in both workouts and in Capacity EMOMS the closer we get to the competition.

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Change in the Weekly Template-Thursday Endurance Session:

In December we did an extensive Client Survey where we got a lot of good feedback from the members following the program. One feedback that we got was the wish of being able to push the Thursday session at higher intensity with less complicated movements. Because of this we are doing a change where the Thursday workouts will be more interval style based workouts during this block. We will also take away the Thursday Tri Erg session as an optional session on Thursdays since many of the members that have had this choice wanted more variation. We will do a new survey at the end of this block for feedback on how this session has worked.

  • While we make it easier to push the intensity on thursdays we will still do less heavy weights etc during this day since we from implementing the Thursday and Sunday sessions see less injuries on the members that trains often and also its sessions that is often easier to start with

Notable Workouts and Benchmarks during this block:

Friday January 12th: Fantastic 4
Wednesday January 17th: Hero Workout Blake
Monday January 22nd: 1 RM Clean & Jerk and Open Workout 13.2
Wednesday 24th: 1 RM Snatch
Friday 26th: Open Workout 11.5

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Functional Fitness Qualifiers:

In the end of january Nor3F Ligaen starts in Norway and for Norwegian Boxes we will program these workouts into the program on the following dates:

Monday January 29th: Nor3F 24.1
Wednesday January 31st: Nor3F 24.2 

Read more about Nor3F Ligaen here: https://nor3f.no/hva-er-nor3f-ligaen/

For boxes outside of Norway we will follow the regular training during these days. 

  • We are also trying to connect with Swe3F to see if its possible to put their qualifier workouts into the program for swedish boxes
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How much should you train?

The biggest challenge in writing (and following) a box programming is that it should fit you both if you are training 1-2 times a week and if you train 5-6 days a week (and everything in between). Because of this there are different strategies in following the program:

If you are training 1-2 times a week you should push the intensity on the workouts you attend really hard in order to get the best possible effect and health benefits. Be ready to go down in weight and movement difficulty in workouts in order to never have to stop because of strength or technique holding you back

If you are training 3-4 times a week you should pick 2-3 workouts where you are pushing the intensity a little extra and for the other days you should hold back on the intensity a little and rather focus more on movement efficiency and other capacities.

If you are an athlete that trains 5-6 times a week it gets even more important to adjust the intensity accordingly. We want to keep the super hard sessions to 2-3 times a week depending on how long they are and on the other sessions we want to hold back even more. This is where the color coding in the program gets important and you should pick the red days to push hard on and then go easier on the blue days and a lot easier on the green days.

You can see the intensity template below to know where it’s easiest to push the intensity. Note that every session is possible to push the intensity hard because we want this to always be possible.

No matter how many days a week you train you should get significant benefits. However the expectations of what you benefits you will get is different:

1-2 days a week: Benefits will be mainly overall Conditioning and Health

3-4 days a week: With this frequency you will see improvements in most aspects of fitness for a very long time and you will also benefit from the different focus blocks we have wich will allow you to gradually get stronger and learn new skills. This is what’s optimal 

5-6 days a week: When going from 3-4 days a week to training 5-6 days a week you will mainly see benefits in more skill practice where you increase the speed in your learning curve. It’s important to note though that the risk of injury increases and if we are not good at adjusting the intensity we might risk training too hard and see less improvements than the 3-4 days a week.

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When choosing to increase the training days it’s often smart to do this first by adding either a Thursday or Sunday session at low intensity  to make it easier for the body to adapt to the increased volume

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Here is the Template for the next 4 weeks. Again, if training 1-2 times a week, you should not care about this but rather push the intensity for every session.