Legion Strength & Conditioning Podcast

In this episode, Jon shares his experience at the CrossFit Games, coaching CrossFit Omnia to another top-ten finish in the team division. We talk a lot about balancing the weight and order of the events with cuts at the games. This year saw the cuts happening after two days of a heavy engine focus in the programming, which would have affected a lot of teams and athletes that might be more suited t...

Is a testing phase of training a reliable assessment for a new athlete coming on board? It's practical, but it's essentially condensing the things you'll find out in training and competition into 1-2 weeks. Many athletes don't want to do it as well. They are usually more eager to start training and stay productive through that initial stage. One direction all of our coaching styles has moved towar...

What makes training difficult isn't the challenge of getting someone fitter and stronger. It's understanding how to keep athletes improving for a long time What happens when it feels like you stop improving? In a sport where you get punished more for your weaknesses than you do rewarded for your strengths, finding ways to progress long-term is essential. But maybe our framing of improvement needs...

There are a lot of subtleties in coaching that you can't pick up in textbooks and from theory. We all probably know a coach that doesn't have all the qualifications, but they grasp the craft better than others who might have always had their head in a textbook. Tacit knowledge is what you pick up from doing the activity, and it's something that can be tremendously valuable in a dynamic field where...

Have you ever returned after doing a course with your brain frazzled and unsure of what to do on Monday? Well...that is part of the journey in upgrading your knowledge and coaching model, but how can you extract the helpful information to make it workable with the people you coach. If you're working with people in person, maybe you can experiment with things immediately. But if you coach athletes...

Curiosity is what gets a lot of coaches into training and eventually becoming coaches, and usually, these people continue to digest a lot of information, content and education about training. But being able to apply this information in a practical setting can be challenging. Especially when much of the information out there isn't delivered in a way that makes this transition easy. In this episode,...

With the changes in the structure of the CrossFit Games in the past few seasons, the stakes of the open have changed, with many athletes not needing to take it as seriously. But what happens when CrossFitters see a leaderboard...well they approach it like any leaderboard. Misaligning expectations with the open like this is detrimental, especially if their training is not preparing them specificall...

Ever had a very structured training plan that you were almost certain would come together, but when you did the competition or the qualifier, it didn't go as well as you'd hoped? Relying on very structured approaches of preparation for CrossFit is a standard failure mode we find in the sport, coming from athletes and coaches that are pretty analytical. The problem with this approach is that it can...

We're a week away from Quarter Finals, and the qualified athletes have already had three workouts to sharpen the competing sword with the open. But as the workouts become more high stakes going into the next round, how do we support athletes? Some athletes need encouragement and a good luck message, and they are good! Others will require a warm-up, a detailed plan and potentially some video review...

Ever found yourself or one of your athletes having a block in increasing the cycle speed with specific movements? You do 100+ burpees in a long workout, and it's the same 'step down, step up' style you do in a shorter sprint-style workout. Is it that burpees are just hard, is there a particular technique you should use, or is it that you have a strong distaste for burpees regardless of the workout...

With a week to go until the open, there are probably a lot of athletes on the bubble of quarter-finals putting in those final touches to their training. But is it too late to work on those training progressions? Many of the athletes on the bubble likely have one thing that prevents them from being more certain about being in the top 10%. They are either not strong enough, don't have the skills or...

Do CrossFit athletes need to train more in the transverse plane? It definitely sounds nice to those interested in programming, but if we look at the demands of the sport, we don't see movements challenging the transverse or frontal plane much. It's not always clear what level of variability in movement we should include in a CrossFit athlete's training. Giving someone more options in their movemen...

Is working on your mindset all it's hyped up to be? Is it actually what people need to maximise their potential, or can it misalign expectations and cause a lot of wasted time? In this week's episode, Todd talks about 'Collective Teacher Efficacy', presented to him in his rationality group. We draw on some of the parallels found in fitness. Collective Teacher Efficacy claims that teachers having a...

In a data-heavy sport like CrossFit, athletes are always working towards ironing out the holes in their game to progress and bring up the bigger picture. But when does focusing on priorities become myopic and make athletes pessimistic about their performance and training. There are many examples in elite sports where dissatisfaction with where you are can lead to great performance. However, when r...

The CrossFit Games season structure has changed again, and the qualification stage of the semi-finals is set to be more structured moving into next season. Every year since the sport stopped doing regionals, qualifying for the CrossFit Games has always looked a bit different every year. The changes moving forward look to centralise the programming back to CrossFit and some changes to the distribut...

In many sports, you can get reasonably frequent exposure to competitions which can take the pressure off these competitive experiences. But in CrossFit, the ratio of training to competition is significantly one-sided. Competitions, even during the 'season', don't happen that often, so when they do the pressure is on. But one part of the sport that might be even more high-pressure and stressful is...

What are the essential parts that make up a programme? Is it the sets and reps, the exercise selection, or the weekly progression scheme? We'd argue that having a clear understanding and picture of what you want the programming to lead to is the most critical element when writing training. Often people can get wrapped up in the minutia and the details of a programme, leading to less focus on the e...

With so many different areas to develop in CrossFit, knowing how and what to prioritise in someone's training can be challenging. Once you've created a training split with all the different elements of the sport, there's not much room for anything else...unless you're a full-time athlete with high bandwidth for training. Balancing priorities while maintaining other qualities found in the sport is...

Since the semi-finals, there has been much talk about PED use at the CrossFit Games. Many athletes were caught this year after the testing at semi-final events, and it has received a lot of attention from YouTubers, blogs like The Morning Chalk Up and finally, our very own podcast! If you're after hot takes and gossip, this topical episode has all of that, with Todd and I making wild guesses on qu...

Writing a few specific progressions to get someone fit and strong can be pretty straightforward for most coaches. The challenge comes in combining these progressions into a cohesive training plan. Some coaches love zooming out and designing templates. Others feel frustrated and like they're "missing something" — or get caught in analysis paralysis. Either way, template design is an essential skill...

As a coach, the last thing you want to be dealing with is a barrage of text messages from clients in different timezones asking contextless questions about workouts you don't quite remember off hand. One of the toughest things to learn when starting with remote coaching is how to communicate with clients. When coaching in person, you can handle with things reactively as they arise. However, when w...

It's CrossFit Games week, and in this special 100th episode, Jon gives away all of his secrets in preparing CrossFit Omnia Black and teenage athlete Abigail Moore for the CrossFit Games this year. CrossFit Omnia qualified for the Games as a "true affiliate team." The team is made up of athletes who live in the Denver area, and some of them have full-time jobs outside of the gym. Abigail Moore has...

Coaches who get into individual program design often start because they enjoy the process of, well, writing programming. However, any experienced coach knows the grind of falling behind on writing training and staying up late on a Sunday evening churning out the final few programmes for the following week. A good process is important if you want to continue to enjoy programming. If you can stay or...

Even for well-established coaches, acquiring new clients can be a real challenge. For someone just getting started, getting that first client can be a total mystery. In the early 2010s, there were only a handful of coaches even offering remote coaching. Now, there are dozens of programming companies offering individualized coaching, templated training, and free blogs with workouts. So, how does a...

For our next podcast series, we will discuss the business of remote coaching. To start, we are sharing our personal experiences of getting started coaching athletes remotely. All three of us started coaching athletes online in the early 2010s — a time when remote coaching was still new in the CrossFit space. While being a remote coach sounds like a great digital nomad lifestyle, each of us was abl...