Sorry I’m not sorry for using a catchy title to draw you in.
I’m really serious about this topic.
“RX’ing” a workout is something you’re probably familiar with if you've ever done CrossFit, but if not here’s an example:
You head to your local CrossFit gym and on the board the workout listed says:
“3 Rounds for Time:
15 Thrusters (95/65)
15 Chest to Bar Pull-Ups”
“RX’ing” this workout would be doing the 3 Rounds of Thrusters at 95lbs for men or 65lbs for women, and doing Chest to Bar Pull-Ups, not a scaled version like banded Pull-Ups or Jumping Pull-Ups.
Sounds cool, right? Well, not so fast!
There are tons of questions that need to be answered before we can even BEGIN to know how to approach this workout. Here are just a few to get your brain-wheels turning:
Do you have full Range of Motion for all of the given movement patterns of this workout? How do you know? If not, then what?
What is the goal or the intended stimulus of this workout? Less than 5 minutes? Or should I be going heavy and breaking up the reps?
Can you perform a perfect Barbell Front Squat/Strict Press? How about weighted? How about at 95/65?
Can you do multiple Strict Pull-Ups? How many kipping Pull-Ups can you do? Can you even do Chest-to-Bar Pull-Ups?
These are just some of the things coaches should be considering when guiding athletes into proper dosing for their workout prescriptions.
Now here’s the kicker… the above questions aren’t good enough.
Wait, what?! Why you ask?
Well, that’s because as humans we need to look at the bigger picture to understand our training and better understand how to set ourselves up for success.
The way I see it, there are generally 4 Types of Fitness Days:
Competition
Practice/Training
Active Recovery
Rest
Competition Days are what you train for. These are when you have PRE-PLANNED to give a workout everything you’ve got. This is NOT a game-time decision, or something that just happens. (We’ve all been there, you walk into the gym and feel pretty good, so what do you do? You go for a Personal Record, DUH!) But back to being serious, these are days that you have TRAINED FOR. If you have not prepared for it, it’s likely you shouldn’t test it.
Practice/Training Days are the majority of days in the gym. These are the days where the clock really doesn’t matter as much as hitting the intended stimulus of the workout, moving for quality and creating a mind/body awareness. These are also the days that we are not pushing our mind, body and soul to absolute max. In short, you should be able to do these workouts and come back the next day feeling generally good. These are also great workouts to play with time under tension aka tempo, and to really build yourself up vs breaking yourself down.
Active Recovery Days are not “I’ve worked out 6 days in a row this week, and I know I should rest, so I’ll go run a 5k at a light pace.” STOP. That is not active recovery, that is a WORKOUT. That puts stress on your muscles, tendons, ligaments and your system as a whole. What Active Recovery days ARE is having a Plan B. Say you go into the gym and the board says “Work up to a heavy 1 Rep Deadlift today” but you just did a ton of lower body work the day before, and your back/legs are shot. What do you do? You do an active recovery workout. You go through 3-5 movements or so at a light but focused pace for 10-20 minutes. What does this do? It aids in your overall recovery, keeps your body loose and above all IT KEEPS YOU SAFE! You are much more likely to become injured trying to push through soreness/tightness vs playing it smart and living to fight another day.
Rest Days are not what you think they are. Most people think this is a day where you veg-out on the couch and binge-watch Netflix. Negative. This is a day where you have an extra 1-2 hours to better your mind, food prep, clean the house, etc. You get the picture…it’s a day where you get to focus on you and set yourself up for success in the coming days and it also allows your body to recover from the stresses you’ve put it through in the prior days. And dare I say it, sometimes you need 2 of these days in a row. Maybe you even need a whole week. Who knows!
Okay, so now that we have that stuff laid out on the table, back to our prior topic… the overall picture of your training and how that plays into why you should/shouldn’t RX.
Let’s look at two examples…
Scenario 1) Let’s say you check out on all of the above questions and you could actually “RX” that workout on a good day, but you just had two really hard back to back days of training because this isn’t a planned Competition Day. What should you do?!
The way I see it, you have 3 options:
Treat it as a Training Day and focus on hitting the intended stimulus. Assuming that the stimulus of this workout is short/medium in length (6 minutes) go light, do a scaled version of pull-ups, and move for quality, understanding that this is really just another day of moving. In a year, this workout won’t matter. (In reality, no workout matters. When you die, people won’t remember what time you got on a workout, they’ll remember you for the human that you were. How’s that for perspective?)
Treat it as an Active Recovery Day. Talk to your coach and see what options they can give you that would do your body more benefit. Maybe, just maybe, you don’t come to the gym that day. Woah. Shocking, I know. But in reality, if you have good reason for it, I’d rather not see you in the gym vs seeing you in the gym knowing that you’re demolishing your body and not doing yourself any good.
Take a Rest Day. Want to know how to know if you should do this option? Get ready because it’s mind blowing. Ask yourself this question: “Should I take a rest day today?” and if you have even just a slight gut feeling that the answer is “yes” then I think you get the idea. :)
Scenario 2) Now let’s say you just took a rest day and are coming in feeling really, really good. You’re a strong human, and this workout seems right up your alley. The coach tells you he wants this workout done in 6 minutes, to which you say “I can probably do it in 3 if I do it just at RX.” The way I see it, you have 2 options here:
Treat it as a Training Day and go heavier than RX and try to do the pull-ups unbroken. This will ensure that you meet the required stimulus of the workout, and push yourself to the appropriate limit that you need to progress past your current level of fitness. It also ensures that you are mentally pushing yourself in a new way, a HUGE piece to keeping your training fun and enjoyable.
Do it just as “RX” and completely miss the intended stimulus of the day by finishing it in 3 minutes. Now sure, if this was a workout in a CrossFit competition, you would certainly do it at the given weight and movement scale, and give it your best shot. But remember, this is a class workout. Training is not competition. If the intended stimulus was “Go as fast as you can possibly go” then yes, RX might make sense for you in this scenario. However, with the given goal, it does not.
A workout designed for your gym with an “RX prescription” is simply not designed for you.
Read that again and let it sink in.
The class environment is awesome. You’re likely to get more fit by doing class workouts. And yes, of course it quite possibly could be something you need. However, let’s face it…when a programmer puts an RX weight of 95/65 on a workout, they are not thinking of you. They are thinking of the general weight that they could see an average member of the gym doing to reach the given stimulus (if they even put one in there).
If you are coming in to the gym and doing every single workout as RX, you are doing yourself a disservice.
Why? Because you are not actually taking the intended goal or your own fitness level/overall training game-plan into account. (If you already are, congratulations because you are on another level of crushing it!)
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “Leave your ego at the door.” Well, if you are constantly basing your workout decisions off a number on a board or what you are capable of doing vs what you should ACTUALLY be doing in a workout to hit the desired stimulus, then you are feeding your ego and not your fitness.
On the other hand, if one of your goals is to aspire to be able to complete workouts as RX, please don’t confuse RX’ing for what you actually mean. What you actually mean is that you want to get stronger, become more skilled/advanced at gymnastic movements and all around be more fit. Don’t confuse those things for RX’ing, because sometimes that’s not what RX’ing looks like. RX’ing a workout is not a right of passage like it used to be 10 years ago in CrossFit. Now-a-days, it’s simply a number/movement on a board, and the only value assigned to it is the meaning you attach to it.
Going back to our above example of the 3 Rounds for Time, what if the workout goal was 3 minutes?
If that is the desired stimulus, that comes out to 1 minute per round. Now let’s say you know you’re capable of doing 95lb Thrusters and multiple Chest to Bar Pull-Ups. Good for you, and your ego. What you should care about is being able to complete that workout in 3 minutes. If that means you have to use an empty barbell and do Jumping Pull-Ups, then so be it. If the thought of doing those movements seems stupid because you’re “better than that,” then I wish you luck in life, because your ego is bigger than you think.
Now like we said above, if the desired stimulus is 6 minutes for that same workout, that comes out to 2 minutes per round, and allows more time for you to rest or do a more challenging weight option. So what if you are actually capable of doing 135lbs on that workout, but because the board says 95lbs you choose that.
You see, when you don’t think these things through and actually looking at what the workout should entail, you end up either biting off more than you can chew or underwhelming yourself and ultimately leaving some fitness on the table.
I pray that one day you realize that nobody cares what weight you use or what scale of a movement you are doing or what your time is on a workout. Stop letting the fear of what other people think dictate the one thing that you should be in control over…YOUR FITNESS. People care about a someone that has a positively infectious personality and someone that is a hard-worker. If you aren’t willing to bring those qualities to the group, then maybe the group isn’t for you. If you’re only ever willing to base your workouts off of a number/movement on the board, then you’ll only ever be as good as the person programming the class workouts allows you to be.
It’s time we stop RX’ing workouts, and instead ask ourselves daily what will ultimately ensure longevity for our bodies to be the best humans we can possibly be.