Pull-ups are among the most versatile CrossFit exercises today. You can decide to do them simply with your bodyweight, using your narrow and wide grips, throw in some chains, or better still do the exercise with your palms turned over and doing a chin up. There are lots of benefits that pull-ups confer on your body amongst them strength, development, and muscularity. While many CrossFitters appreciate these benefits, they also affirm to the fact that pull-ups is one of the most difficult exercises to do. Below are some of the reasons why you may still be struggling to master this workout. You are Too Heavy Pull-ups is one of those CrossFit exercises which requires a complete balance of strength. This means you should be stronger compared to your body weight and also light. Many times, athletes have had trouble with bodyweight movements because they are heavy and their general physical preparedness is minimal. If you have a lot of fat that you need to lose and your shape is not in line, you need to first start tackling the obvious obstacles before you engage fully in pull-ups. For instance, your CrossFit nutrition should be in order to help you cut some weight. You should also focus on heavy resistance training with dumbbells and barbell and undertake other activities including walking, biking, swimming, sprinting, and rowing. Your pull up numbers will also soar if you tighten your nutrition plan and get rid of the excess body fat. Your Grip Strength is Wanting People who come from sedentary backgrounds are usually disadvantages in that they don’t play as many sports and their activity level is generally low. As a result, their grip strength tends to be lacking and this undermines their pull-ups. In order to enhance your grip strength, you need to undertake exercises which involve static contractions of the forearms, hands, upper back, and shoulders. Try hanging up on the pull-up bar for a few minutes, take a long walk while carrying two kettlebells, or load up barbells and time your holds for anything between 30 and 60 seconds. You Over-Rely on Bands Bands give you resistance or assistance at certain points in your range of motion. However, they can have a major disadvantage in these CrossFit exercises. The most unfortunate thing is that many people hit a snag when they try this and get their chin over the bar. At the top of the pull-up, the band gives you least assistance yet this is when you need it the most. On the flipside, they give you the most assistance on the bottom part of your range of motion. Because of this, people fail to gain a mastery of pull up even after months of exercise. Inadequate Practicing In CrossFit training, you are what you continuously do. If your specific work capacity sucks and as such forced to jerk your body around so as to get your chin over the bar, you are simply teaching your body to go through an inefficient movement pattern. Unlearning a bad form is difficult hence it pays to do it right the first time. You can start by hanging on a cheap pull up bar as you take the numbers and do your sets. Each week add reps as you grease your grove to take advantage of enhanced training frequency to perfect your movements.

Nutrition is not just for the gymnast or weightlifters, but it is necessary for life. Understanding the basics of CrossFit nutrition and making them a habit can transform your performance and experience. You may be practicing hard in the gym, but if you don’t have regard to nutrition, it is like paddling with a single oar. Diet is so crucial to CrossFit performance and health that in the CrossFit pyramid, it is positioned at the foundation of it. The CrossFit pyramid starts with nutrition at the base, followed by metabolic conditioning, gymnastics, weightlifting, and throwing, and ultimately sport at the very top of the pyramid. It is suicidal to jump right away into the main class without completing the foundations. In CrossFit nutrition needs to be a lifestyle, a habit that you enjoy. When you nail the basics, the impact this has on health and performance are incredible. Below are the basics to focus on. Eat More Vegetables Most people underestimate the impact of vegetables on their CrossFit health and performance. As we may all know, CrossFit is an intense sport which means your body system requires more support compared to the average athlete. Your meals must comprise a variety of nutrients with a special emphasis on fruits and vegetables. To start with, add more vegetables especially green vegetables into your meals. For instance, adding spirulina or kale into your smoothie in the morning and drop some spinach into your omelet for your lunches and dinner. Personalize Your Nutrition Not everything works for you, and this is why you need to individualize what you eat. To crack this, you need self-awareness. Do you recall the days when you feel overly energized and superhuman? These are the days you probably ate certain meals that gave you the energy. Note down the foods you ate in those days. Also, journalize the foods you ate on the days you felt low and unenthusiastic. Those are the meals to avoid. Instead of following someone else’s nutrition plan, come up with your own that addresses your unique needs. Crossfit nutrition is a process that you need to be disciplined to follow it. Minimize the Decision-Making Stress Always deciding on what to eat before a workout, during a workout, and after a workout can be so overwhelming and draining. This is because you may find yourself in the process of decision making each day. There are simple strategies you can adopt so as to minimize the stress of these decisions so as to focus on other productive areas such as your work, CrossFit training, and social life. You can do meal prepping so that you always have meals in your fridge. Optimize Your Diet Budget You don’t have to buy expensive foods from high-end shops and groceries. The basic thing is to get the most in terms of quality food from your budget. This may call for research from your local producer where you can get good products at cheaper rates. You should also buy larger cuts of meat and spread it over some time. Lastly, ensure your breakfast has protein in it. Most breakfasts are solely carbohydrate-based, and this can undermine your health and workout of the day performance. Don’t discard the cornflakes and milk, but include more proteins to stabilize your energy levels, boost neurotransmitter production, and provide amino acids for muscle building and recovery.   

From the efforts expended in capturing caloric expenditures, it is clear everyone would want to know how much they eat in terms of CrossFit nutrition. However, there are lots of methods and calculators developed that are meant to help in this, and to some extent, they can become confusing. When you get disparate estimates from different scales, you may wonder which category you fall into. The good thing is that they are all estimates and as such don’t define the real you. In order to determine the optimal food amount for your health and CrossFit workout performance, you should start weighing and measuring everything you eat. Caloric Estimates The total calories you burn on any day is known as total energy expenditure. It includes your thermic effect of feeding which simply means the calories you burn when eating food, what you burn when walking around say from the house to the box and the basal metabolic rate which are the calories you burn when the body is at rest. Lots of online calculators use one or the other of the various acceptable forms of basal metabolic rate equations. They depend on a conglomerate of variables such as age, height, and mass. Unfortunately, genetic factors which have been shown to result in individual variations are not factored in by these calculators hence the output is only, but an estimate. Multipliers usually calculate the exercise and non-exercise associated expenditure. For instance, moderately active may be assigned the multiplier 1.5. Alternatively, the calories expended in the various activities in a typical day may be summed up. As a rule of thumb, the thermic effect of feeding is taken to be about 10% of the total calories in CrossFit nutrition. The Best Estimate The best approach kind of ignores the above estimates. It proposes that you track your food intake for about 3 days, these days must represent an accurate composition of your typical diet. The goal for the 3 days is to record as honestly as possible what you eat on a regular basis. The consistency of the calorie totals from one day to the next will enable you to get your baseline number. If you find the numbers varying widely, say over 500 calories, it is advisable that you continue tracking for about a week so as to get a representative total for your typical day. Focus on the Macronutrients One of the reasons why CrossFit nutrition such as the zone diet is gaining popularity is because of the way it breaks down the calories. It clearly states that 40% of the calorie intake should be from carbohydrates, 30% from fat, and the remaining 30% from protein. This composition contains enough carbohydrates to sustain high-intensity activities, enough protein to support your quest for lean mass, and sufficient fat to help in body activity and recovery. In view of the foregoing discussion, the bottom line is, your caloric total should be consistent. By consistency, it is meant that it should be within 50 calories of the target goal per day.

Looking at the athletes who cross the 10000-meter mark, you will inevitably notice their determination reflected by their dead and unblinking eyes. By all means, these folks cannot be your ordinary crop of men and women. They possess a particular frame and strength of mind that can only be obtained through serious training and workouts. The good news is, if you train smart enough, you too can run an ultra. In his book, Power Speed Endurance, Brian MacKenzie says that running anywhere over 30 kilometers at unfriendly altitude requires a unique combination of strength and fitness. Running better is the foundation for running for longer. This is where CrossFit endurance training comes in. What is CrossFit Endurance Training? This type of training combines mobility and functional strength exercises with an intense interval regimen through a series of short, but intense workouts. The goal is to build strength and boost your cardiovascular capacity limits. Runners should target to increase the work they do in the gym inasmuch as they plan to extend their road time. CrossFit Endurance is not just all about hardcore weightlifting. It is a sport-specific plan that combines customized sport-specific training sessions and CrossFit workouts. In the running, CrossFit endurance points you to power and speed. It blows away unnecessary volumes in training and replaces them with intensity. What CrossFit Endurance Training Means for You As a runner, CrossFit endurance training gives you a number of benefits. Some of these benefits can be transferred to other sports if you decide to switch to another athletic career. Among the notable benefits include: Sustained performance to help you run longer without losing your form. Reduced risk of injury – The junk mileage is substituted for functional fitness workouts. Increased speed and explosive power Less damage to a range of motion and mobility – This is accomplished through the incorporation of workouts which enhance your range of motion in the muscle tissues and joints. Increased HGH production – CrossFit endurance training unlocks your human growth hormone production chambers, and this counters muscle mass loss. Improved coordination of both your lower and upper body muscles through compound movements in training. For beginners in CrossFit Workouts, this may sound too good to be true. However, there is research that was done in McMaster University in 2009 which showed massive gains in skeletal muscle oxidative capacity for the participants who trained in just under three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes per session. Particularly for runners, CrossFit endurance helps them develop their skill of running so that they reduce the wear and tear through the development of good running mechanics. There is no endurance training that is complete with a focus on CrossFit nutrition. Learning how to feed your body helps in giving it the endurance health, peak performance, and quick recovery. Records show that up to 79% of runners get injured once per year. There is no point in your becoming one of these statistics and that is why you need to enroll in CrossFit endurance training so that a coach can walk with you throughout this journey.  

Nutrition is the cornerstone of the results that manifest in your fitness endeavor. If you get the nutrition wrong, you will experience difficulties shifting your body fat and enhancing muscle mass. It doesn’t matter if you never miss your workout of the day, the bottom line is your performance will feel stalled. There are athletes out there who are getting amazing results from the zone, paleo, or other forms of clean eating. In the same vein, some athletes get results from measuring their macronutrient intake while there are those who don’t measure and yet get results. In light of these huge variations in nutrition plans and approaches, it is important to know what separates those that work from the rest that simply crashes and burn. There are certain things you shouldn’t do in a training plan because they will never yield any results. The experts from CrossFit nutrition here discuss some of the top nutritional mistakes that unfortunately athletes continue committing. Unclear Priorities Take an instance where you want to improve your snatch. Most certainly, there are steps you will have to take in your training plan so as to make it happen. The approach will be different from that designed to achieve fitness in another workout. In the same way, when thinking about CrossFit nutrition, you should program it in such a way that it meets your fitness goals. If you don’t have clear priorities, it becomes very difficult to link your plan to the priorities. Decide on your priorities and ensure your diet plan works to drive you there and not act as an obstacle. Abusing the Off Day Rest days are very critical and should form part of every CrossFit training routine. Days off enhance your recovery and are important to keep you balanced and sane. However, the biggest problem is that some CrossFit athletes do not plan these off days in their diets. Instead, they are seen more as days in which the athletes may indulge as they rebel from their saintly kitchen behaviors. When you have this mindset, a single cheat day will turn into many cheat days and this will ruin your nutrition plan. Make your cheat day part of your plan. Failure to Evaluate and Adjust Tracking results is important in any project, training program, and just about anything that you do. Since nutrition accounts for a higher percentage of the changes you experience, it is crazy not to evaluate and reevaluate your nutrition on a regular basis. On average, people think that their diet is healthy, but in a real sense, it is not. According to CrossFit nutrition, you can start off by tracking every food and drink that goes into your body system for at least a fortnight. This will give you an idea of the calories you are packing into your system or simply how healthy your meals are. Following the Hype Going with the flow is the most dangerous approach to training and CrossFit nutrition. Just like the fact that you cannot go high-fiving everyone during your bench press sessions simply because the other person is doing their thing, in nutrition, it works the same way. Don’t go with the hype in terms of supplements, trends, and what everyone is talking about. Have a solid plan informed by the foods that work. In nutrition, there is no fairness and equality. Even if you eat the same way as another person, you cant expect to get the same results. Therefore, design your own plan, tweak it, and make it truly yours.

If you keep on wondering why your back is smoked every time following glute ham developer (GHD) sit-ups, the answer could be in the way you do the workout. GHD refers to a piece of equipment which was made to help strengthen the glutes and the hams. Normally, this CrossFit workout movement is done while lying on your stomach, squeezing your butt, and keeping a fairly stable midline. It helps athletes move their hips while simultaneously maintaining a solid spine to protect the body during the movements. Many of the back problems that arise in GHD sit-ups are caused by the inability of the athletes to dissociate the hips from the spine. As a result, they move the two of them all at once which creates shear forces on the spine. Since we incorporate GHD in sit-ups, the truth is it wasn’t created to work the hip flexors and abdominals in a dynamic extension movement. GHD sit-ups is an extremely high-level exercise which requires baseline strength and body awareness as you fling the spine through ranges of flexion and extension. Deciding on the Readiness of Your Body for GHD Sit-Ups There are various steps mentioned by CrossFit workout that you need to go through to access whether indeed your spine can accommodate GHD sit-ups. The following are the steps: Flexibility to Sit Upright You need to access whether you are flexible enough to sit upright with your legs straightened right in front of you. Note that in this position, your lumbar spine must be straight and not round. If you pass this readiness test, then you can move to the next step. If you have problems, then you need to start working on mobility in your daily CrossFit workouts. Failing the flexibility test may point to a combination of spine stiffness as well as a problem with the entire posterior chain which includes calves, glutes, hamstrings, and the bottom of the feet. Holding Your Body in a Parallel Position The next assessment according to CrossFit workout is to check whether you can hold your body in a parallel position on the glute-ham developer equipment while keeping a good spine position and breathing. If you have a problem here, you need to practice especially on perfecting your mechanics. Transitioning from the Parallel Position If you have passed the above step, you now need to test how smoothly you can transition starting from the parallel position, then gradually up to the top and thereafter back to parallel position while maintaining a good spine position. This transition movement is similar to doing a hip hinge exercise such as hip extension and deadlift. The only difference with the GHD is the positioning. If you are able to transition, then you can do the GHD sit-ups very well. It is therefore important not to assume that you are prepared for GHD sit-ups and therefore you can include them in your CrossFit workout of the day. You need to take yourself first through these steps, and then if you are ready, you can move on comfortably.

Conventional wisdom has it that missing the early morning CrossFit workout class, is the common mistake athletes make when going paleo. However, it is worth noting that paleo is a serious dietary lifestyle which has the books, the blogs, and the products to prove its case. Depending on who you ask, you may get varying definitions of paleo. That said, a paleo diet is simply an exclusion of dairy, grains, beans, processed foods, sugar, and legumes. The main focus of this diet is on meats, fats, vegetables, and occasionally, some fruits for a sweet treat. There are lots of paleo diet versions depending on the dieters and their preferences. However, a few rules should be kept in mind to avoid messing up when going paleo. Eating Excessive Meats Since paleo advocates for meats, eating a boatload of them can have ill effects including possibilities of weight gain. A majority of paleo dieters advocate for eating meat once a day which is absolutely fine. At all costs, try and limit meats that are high in saturated fats. Where you can stick with organic poultry and fish and when you decide to go the red meat way, ensure you keep it lean. Grass-fed red meat taken no more than 2 or 3 times a week is recommended. Failure to Plan Ahead Authorities in paleo literature, point to planning as the biggest hurdle dieters face in their attempts to stick with the paleo CrossFit diet. Some of them realize late that they haven’t packed a healthy snack and this pushes them to revert to foods which are non-paleo. When planning your CrossFit diet for the week, have a checklist that you go through to ensure everything is within reach. Foods that cannot be sourced locally for one reason or the other should be replaced with locally available foods that are still paleo approved. Overstepping the Boundary on Baked Goods While it is true that paleo has hundreds of deserts you can explore, the bottom line is, you need to have some self-regulation concerning the quantity and frequency. For instance, maple, honey, coconut sugar, and flour made from nuts are approved foods. However, you should take them in moderation and avoid or minimize intake of foods which change the structure of ingredients. Ignoring the Quality of Ingredients Ensuring that everything you buy is 100% paleo approved is excellent, but of greater importance is rating the quality of the ingredients. For instance, bacon has varying degrees of quality depending on how it is cured. Usually, a little bit of sugar and some salt are necessary for the curing process. Avoid foods that have ingredients labels which you do not quite understand. Fudging Your Nutritional Requirements Since paleo doesn’t allow you to get protein from beans, grains, and dairy, you have to ensure that you boost your portions of meat or their equivalents to bridge the gap. Paleo dieters may have to eat 8 to 9 ounces of meat daily to cover up for the difference. Because of the elimination of healthy food categories in paleo, it is important for anyone considering a paleo CrossFit diet to first meet with their dieticians or nutritionists so that they can be made aware of the risks involved and personalize a plan to meet their CrossFit nutrition needs.

It can be overwhelming figuring out what to eat after your workout in the CrossFit gym. The questions you need to consider are how much to eat and when you should eat. At times, you are too busy to plan, and this makes it challenging, especially when you are on a CrossFit diet such as paleo which demands strict adherence to nutrition rules. To help you in getting through this, it’s important to keep post-workout nutrition simple and sane. Meal Composition Post-workout nutrition is all about recovering and refueling. To do this, you will have to reach out too easily digestible sources of carbohydrates and protein. If you are trying to lean out, your primary focus should be on protein. When you have finished a high-intensity workout, or you are into multiple workouts a day, your post-workout nutrition focus should be on carbohydrates and protein. Fats are also crucial as part of your nutrition, but they digest slowly, an attribute that helps in keeping you full and satisfied. Try limiting fats in your post-workout CrossFit diet so that your body can have the opportunity of getting sufficient levels of protein and carbohydrates. Meal Timing In post-workout nutrition, the sooner you can lay hands on your diet the better. Normally, your muscles get damaged after a high-intensity workout, and your glycogen levels are also low. To replenish and repair, you need glucose and protein as fast as you possibly can.  Within 20 minutes of working out, you need to eat something and after that have your meal of the day which may be breakfast, lunch, or dinner depending on the timing of your workout. Within 2 hours of your workout, focus once more on carbohydrates and protein. Meal Size Your body system can process certain quantities of carbohydrates and protein at a time. This is why you need to make your CrossFit diet small and of easily digestible portions after your workout. It’s not advisable to eat boatloads of foods within 20 minutes after you finish your workout. Your nutrition will also depend on your size, your goals, and the extent of hard work you put in your exercises. Aim at between 15 and 35 grams and about 30 to 100 grams of protein and carbohydrates respectively. Meal Choices In your carbohydrates, ensure high levels of glucose. Look for something that has carbohydrates, but low levels of sugar or carbohydrate sources which do not have a sweet taste. Foods such as sweet potato, plantain, white potato, bagel, bread, oats, and cooked white rice are some of the best carbohydrate sources. On the part of proteins, go for chicken breast, bison, fish, low-fat Greek yogurt, low-fat cottage cheese, high-quality whey protein, and lean ground beef. In order to put all the above into practice, ensure you keep an open mind and try as much as possible to plan.