Merging Cross Training with Mass Training

CrossFit is one of the most engaging and all-encompassing workout regime available today. Its top competitors are ranked amongst the fittest men and women in the world. Despite this profile, CrossFit doesn’t make you the best in everything. For instance, if you want to pack muscles you may think of adding in mass building training into your workout. There is a strong similarity between a mass building and bodybuilding training, but the former is concentrated more of the lifting of weights than fitness.

CrossFit Workouts

CrossFit by its very nature doesn’t have a predictable workout routine. They refer to their workouts as WODs which in full means workout of the day. Every day there is a new workout which is the official CrossFit website publishes. The workouts are usually a mixture of gymnastic exercises, barbell exercises, and endurance exercises. Because of the unpredictability of CrossFit training, you can’t add an extra style of training on it.

Scheduling Mass Training

Traditional mass training which is more of bodybuilding involves working the same muscles day in day out. To gain muscle mass, recovery becomes important. Since CrossFit isn’t inclined towards mass training, there is no priority in working the same muscle groups on consecutive days.

The tricky part of mass training is the difficulty in scheduling it in the same week with CrossFit. This is because the two regimes have different philosophies. Scheduling becomes much more complicated in a scenario where your schedule is busy. To organize your schedule, you must prioritize your goals and allocate more time to either mass training or CrossFit. For instance, where you have three days to work out, you can allocate a day to mass training and two to CrossFit.

Prioritizing Mass Training

If you want to do mass training and CrossFit within the same timeframe, you may hive off part of your CrossFit workout if it exercises the same muscle group trained on the day before. A good example is where you train your legs on Monday during your mass training program, and on Tuesday the plan is to do leg exercises such as barbell squats during your CrossFit training program. In this case, it makes a lot of sense to skip the squats so that your leg can recover.

Because of this mix-up, you will always find yourself at a crossroads in your training where your priority will have to be in one or the other, but not both. If you want to gain mass, CrossFit will have to be sacrificed and replaced with mass training in most of the workouts.

Planning Your Workouts and Energy Balance

When planning your mass workouts, you should split your muscle groups into lower body and upper body muscles. Twice per week, ensure you work out each half of your body and in between slot a rest day. The other approach is to break down your body into muscle groups such as chest, back, core, arms, and legs.

To ensure that more energy is dedicated to mass training in any given week, you should start with the mass workout before going into the CrossFit exercises.
Working out is one part of the equation that will enable you to gain mass. The other part is CrossFit nutrition. Eating enough and balanced diet will give your body system the energy you need to blaze through your workouts. A caloric surplus is recommended for muscle mass.