14.2 Recap

Now that 14.2 is done and over and we are looking on to the next one, I wanted to share a small piece of advice for future work outs of this format and style. I kept this strategy to myself as our team needed the boost to make a run at regionals but the credit has to go 100% to Beau and the folks at CrossFit EADO.
It did not take long for any standard athlete or coach to realize that this workout all came down to muscular endurance and capacity in the chest to bar pull-up. This was fairly obvious from even the open announcement. What we realize very quickly was that the time domain and rep scheme debilitated even the most proficient athletes. We were just simply running out of time to complete the necessary pull-ups required in the 16’s 18’s and 20’s. What we quickly realized was that by the time we got to the rounds of 16 or at best the round of 18 even our best athlete had lost the ability to string high rep sets together in the chest to bar pull-up. At best they were able to do doubles. At that rate of speed they just simply did not have enough time to complete the rep scheme required for the time limit. It became fairly obvious that we needed to somehow create a situation where our athletes could string together higher reps sets in the later rounds rather than use them when they were not necessary in the earlier rounds.
With that dilemma in mind, Beau and CrossFit EADO shot me an idea. He said that his athletes were all doing singles using the demo video I had posted earlier in the week. What I thought was genius was that he was having his athletes do singles from the very beginning. His athletes did singles all the way through the round of 14. The time domain allowed for it, it created a more aerobic style workout rather than lactate buffering, and it saves their capacity for bigger reps and sets later in the rounds.
With this strategy in mind our team and individual athletes approached the workout for either their first time or their repeat time and the results were noticeably better.
Of the men who I know repeated the workout we saw and average of 23.5% increase with one male increasing his score by 71 reps! The women had an average of 30% increase in score with one female increase by 56 reps! Averaged together our athletes saw a average increase by 26.3%! That’s massive!
I don’t know why this surprised me or I did not think of this earlier but it makes a ton of sense. There is no necessity for stringing high reps together early on in the workout because the time domain did not require it. It makes the most sense to conserve your energy and capacity for later in the workout. The beauty of this strategy is simple. If the singles ever put you in a place where you are going too slow and are not going to be able to make the time, you simply just began stringing multiple reps together to catch up. This is only possible because you’ve only done singles up to this point and have saved your capacity for when you are racing the clock. I cannot thank CrossFit EADO and Beau enough for their idea and our regional team finished second in the region because of this. Not that any of you are ever going to attempt that workout again but if you’re feeling froggy give that strategy a shot and see how much it improves your reps.