Why We Neglect This Time Domain

So here at CrossFit Marin our workouts are generally short. Brutal, painful, intense but short. We don’t expect you to spend hours in the gym. In fact unless you are spending most of your time doing very specific skill work spending hours in the gym is detrimental. Yes, spending more time in the gym can make you less fit.

A while back Nick made a post on the Neglected Time Domain. This was a very valid post, but there are reasons we don’t run long workouts on a regular basis.

1. We don’t have time. Our sessions are scheduled at an hour long. We can’t fit in workouts exceeding 50 minutes with warm up, setup and such. This is why we’ve periodically put together things like our new years day workouts that exceed an hour in length.

The next two are the important ones.

2. You do not need to train frequently in long duration workouts to have capacity in long duration efforts. As long as you occasionally hit a long slog you will have good capability in long efforts just continuing to train the way we do. Most of you would handle difficult long efforts just fine. We have a few marathoners and ultra distance athletes in our midst. They have improved by reducing their mileage in training.

3. Training excessively in long workouts reduces your strength and power. Yes, it’s true. If you do too much long slower paced work you will reduce your ability to apply maximal force, and apply force quickly. We have several folks in our gym that have seen first hand the positive results of doing less distance work.

This goes against much of the fitness industry. The vast majority of people who train at all do one of two things. Bodybuilding or long distance efforts. Neither of these modes is a great program to general general fitness. Short and intense workouts induce a much stronger adaptive response towards useful physiological change.

While some work in the neglected time domain is necessary, we need to take care not to spend too much time there.