It can be a natural line of thinking that the best way to train for the sport of CrossFit® is to slam metcons every day, multiple times a day. After all, outside of some single-modality tests, the sport is largely centered around AMRAPs, chippers, and “rounds for time” pieces. Those who rise to the top of the sport are those who will perform at these tests at the highest level. While some CrossFit athletes have had success training nearly exclusively with metcons, I would argue that this method does not reflect the tried and true training methods for other, longer-tenured sports, nor is it the most intelligent way to train for CrossFit®.

Training smarter, not harder: Why metcons aren’t everything

A 400m track & field athlete does not exclusively head to the track and run 400m time trials. An American football team does not solely scrimmage every day at practice. Instead, the track athlete runs at varied distances to build a base, and spends time drilling timing, starts, and general run technique. Practice for an American football team is usually spent on drills for each position or practice on specific in-game scenarios, with only a few minutes saved for scrimmage at the end, if at all. These are just two examples of athletes in other sports training in ways that look different from how they compete, and there are many more.

Part of the reason that practice or training for a sport should look different than “gameplay” is that this allows a chance for the intensity to be pulled back, facilitating both a safer environment for the athlete and one that is more conducive to education, practicing new skills, and refining fundamentals. Competition and sports are intense. At full throttle, they will push the body to its limits, raising the risk of injury. This intensity can also force an athlete to move into their natural habits, making it harder to find moments to slow down or try anything new. If competition intensity is the only way an athlete trains, that athlete will likely have difficulty progressing in their sport.

The benefits of varied training in CrossFit®

In CrossFit®, pulling back from solely focusing on training metcons allows athletes to have the space to follow progressions for specific aspects of their fitness, specifically in weightlifting, gymnastics, and cardio. Programs like HWPO Flagship / 60 2.0 or HWPO PRO utilize this idea for members to be able to tease out these singular modalities and build them up in isolation, always with the goal of them putting these abilities back in unison when it is time to complete a metcon, such as in preparation for a competition or in the competition itself. In some training circles, this concept is what periodization encompasses.

Mat Fraser used metcons in his training, but as is well-known in HWPO Training circles and too much of the CrossFit® community that followed along over his career, this was far from the only thing he did in training.

He was able to build up the “tools” in his “fitness toolbox” separately and to such a degree that when he did put it all together for metcons, he was better at these metcons than so many others who exclusively trained in the opposite manner. This idea is seen in HWPO Training programs to this day, and for good reason: it works.

How to maximize metcons in a balanced training program

If you are following an HWPO Training program centered around being a better CrossFit athlete, consider the classic CrossFit metcons in your training to be your gameplay “scrimmage” like an American football team might do in practice. This “scrimmage” is essential, should rarely be removed entirely, and is a chance to practice giving output at or near the game speed. But, the majority of your improvement will likely come from the other elements in the program–just like the majority of an American football team’s improvement comes in the drills and non-scrimmage work that takes up a majority of their practice. When it is time to do a metcon, be sure you are bringing all the intensity you can bring, but when it isn’t, be sure you are just as focused, if not even more so, to make sure you are reaping the rewards from your training in the same manner that Mat did for so much of his career.