During a CrossFit workout, there is a tendency to exercise some muscle groups more than others. The ones particularly focused on are those that look great under your t-shirt. While it is true that the biceps, chest, shoulder, and abdominal muscles make huge contributions to your strength, other muscles are equally important and as such should not be neglected entirely. When you ignore certain muscle groups during training, you may suffer from muscle imbalances which if not checked can undermine your performance and predispose you to injury. The following are the four muscle groups you should intentionally exercise even as you concentrate on working out the whole body as a unit. The Glutes Strength training is usually inclined in working out the upper body resulting into flat butts and huge chests. To make it worse, some athletes skip leg day and this further sidelines any attempts to strengthen your glutes and other lower body muscles. The gluteal muscles are one of the largest muscle groups in your system and as such ignoring them can come at a very high price. Not working your glutes can lead to loss of power and strength during sprinting and squatting as well as muscle imbalances. People with weak glutes often complain of conditions such as hip stiffness and lower back pain. The Adductors One of the reasons why adductor-focused exercises are ignored is that they tone the inner thighs which many people feel it gives them a feminine reputation. Your body requires strong adductors which in turn helps your thighs to move laterally and give you space to do any leg movement within and outside the CrossFit gym. When doing exercises such as running, climbing stairs, squatting, and plopping down your couch, your thighs get engaged as they move forward and backward as well as side to side. When you work out your adductors, they will help protect and stabilize the knees. Experts recommend lateral lunges as one of the workout types for strengthening your adductors. The Upper Back Texting, typing, and sitting take a toll on your upper back. A weak back can easily give you a hunched posture which in turn makes your pecs appear smaller than they are because they fall in on each other. Strengthening the back gives you a more upright posture and exposes your chest. It is recommended that upper back CrossFit training should be done almost on a daily basis through pulling and pushing CrossFit exercises. The Calves A majority of beginner CrossFit athletes suffer from underdeveloped leg muscles. Since people particularly men are super visual, they tend to work out only the muscles they can see and ignore the rest. Calves often fall in the ignored category. Calves are functional muscles and the weaker they are, the lesser the volume of work they can handle. Additionally, calve muscles also play a key role in strengthening your ankles. If you are an athlete in a sport that needs quick pivoting or explosive sprinting and change of direction, you need to invest in your calves for higher performance.

According to research, 20% of people suffer from one kind of knee pain or the other. This percentage may be higher within the weightlifting population. There are many causes of knee pain some of which include misalignment, osteoarthritis, and IT band issues among others. Irrespective of the cause, knee pain can seriously hinder your CrossFit workout gains. Apart from that, knee pain also causes problems in movement patterns because your body unconsciously starts avoiding hurting movements. This is what ultimately opens the door to more knee-related problems. Collagen and Why It is Important Collagen is one of the main building blocks of body tissues which include the knee. It also happens to be the most abundant protein type within your body system and can be found in hair, muscles, skin, and your knees. Collagen is more or less like a scaffold which holds things together. Your body system generates its collagen, but you can also source it from outside from supplements and bone broth. The reason why collagen has not been a problem in the past is that our lifestyle consisted of eating connective tissues and bones of wild game as well as drinking bone broth. If you do not have access or for some reason cannot slurp broth or gnaw bones, you can go for collagen supplements. Research again indicates that people who supplement with collagen such as collagen peptides experience a faster reduction in athletic-related knee pain. You can get collagen peptides from health food stores or even in online stores and add it to your CrossFit diet plan. The recommended intake is about 20 grams per serving, and if you can have this once per day, then you will be sorted. The side effects of collagen supplementation in your CrossFit diet include thicker hair and nails and better digestion among others. Since collagen doesn’t easily melt, it is important to blend it with your protein shake or stir it in hot drinks. It is also advisable that you take it before bed. This is because it is loaded with amino acid known as glycine which can make you sleepy. Since collagen is categorized as an incomplete protein, it doesn’t have all the necessary amino acids to give you the gains you need. This is why you should not count it as part of your daily protein goals in your CrossFit training. There you go! If you can’t handle the knee pain anymore, think about this protein supplement, and your struggles could be over.

Have you just completed an early morning CrossFit workout and you are feeling somewhat tired, sweaty, and very hungry? Well, this is a common feeling after you give your morning exercise everything you have. At the back of this, all is the awesome feeling of successful training. To come back to your normal self, you need to bring in your post-workout recovery nutrition. Consuming carbohydrate and protein is important after a physical exercise because it boosts your recovery and makes it a lot quicker. The quality of the breakfast needs to be up to scratch if you are to benefit fully. Training in the morning is excellent because it takes your body through a cycle of energy combustion without much food to accompany the process. Because of this, immediately after you must replenish the little your body had before the CrossFit workout. As a rule of thumb, get at least 0.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight of protein into your post-workout meal. This means if you are 75 grams in bodyweight, you should then take 45 grams of protein. Below are three breakfast recipes that are delicious, healthy, and full of nutrients which you may want to include into your post-workout meal. Magic Smoothies Smoothies are fun because they are easy to make, hydrating, nutritious, delicious, and easy for your body to digest. You have plenty of options, and you can always do a mix and match of your favorite ingredients as long as you maintain the needed nutritional profile. In your recipe, you can include frozen blueberries, bananas, almond milk, coconut milk, a handful of seeds and nuts, vegan protein, and some ice cubes. The advantage of vegan protein is that it forms key building blocks for body restoration and it is easy to digest. On the other hand, coconut and almond milk are excellent sources of healthy saturated fats which you will certainly need to power you through your CrossFit challenge. The Omelet of Champions This is again easy to prepare and contains loads of protein. To make your omelet truly unique, enrich it with nutritional powerhouses by combining tomatoes, courgettes, tofu, eggs, spinach, avocado, raw vegetable salad, and if you can, strawberries. Protein Pancakes Pancakes can be a healthy meal if only you pick healthy ingredients. For instance, instead of the regular flour, use rice or bucket wheat flour. You could also replace part of your flour with protein powder scoops. To make your pancake, put together eggs, flour, water, and some milk. If you want your pancakes to be thinner, ensure your mixture is also thin. When your pancakes are ready, feel free to serve them with frozen berry, Greek yogurt, or a smoothie of your choice. The key element to a post-workout recovery CrossFit diet is that it should contain all the nutrients required to balance the meal. Don’t trade anything for the quality and sufficiency of the nutrients.

Research indicates that a person breathes about 20,000 times per day. However, has it occurred to you that you have been doing it all wrong? Breathing seems so natural that while eating or doing any other normal activity, we don’t seem to think about it much. The only time breathing becomes noticeable is when huffing and puffing during a CrossFit workout. Breathing is much more than oxygen coming in and carbon dioxide going out. By the mere fact that we have been breathing doesn’t mean that we have been right all the way. There are a lot of possible ways you could improve your breathing. Benefits from enhanced breathing include stress reduction, lower blood pressure, increased brain size, improved athletic performance among others. Below are the techniques to help you achieve this. Deep Breathing at Rest Proper breathing can help relieve stress by increasing the parasympathetic nervous system activity. This system works in the opposite of fight or flight response system thus giving you a more tranquil and calmer demeanor. If you can, work on your breathing while lying on the ground and your feet raised up against a wall. The advantage of this posture is that it eliminates gravity and its effects on the equation. Then, put one of your hands on your chest and the other one in the abdominal area. Take deep, focused breaths for about a minute or two ensuring that you spend much time on both inhalation and exhalation. The key to this technique is to ensure your abdominals rise before your chest. Breathing While Warming Up Breathing has an impact on your athletic performance, and this is why you should take advantage of the warm-up session in your CrossFit training schedule to refocus on your breath. Take time foam rolling your upper body especially the sections that are hindering your correct breathing ability. Then, perform the deep breathing exercise as explained above before moving into your active warm-up. Focusing on your breath before exercising ensures a reinforcement of proper breathing movements before engaging in the high-intensity interval training. Doing this will lessen your huffing and puffing leading to an effective CrossFit workout. Breathing When Working Out If you want to remember how and when to breath as you work out, you can use the Valsalva Maneuver technique which comprises taking a deep breath immediately before lifting and then holding your breath as you do the lifting. This method is important in creating an intra-abdominal pressure which in turn creates a strong foundation and allows you to handle the much greater weight. When lifting sub-maximal loads, bracing is recommended. This involves activating your core musculature thus creating a super fitness in your mid-section. This helps you to stabilize your core and as such goes a long way in reducing the risk of injury. If you have been keen on counting your macros, stretching, hydrating and foam rolling, you should also try and integrate your breathing into your CrossFit workout plan. Just one or two minutes a day can enhance your breathing and take your workouts and performance to another level.

The farmer’s walk is much more than picking some heavy objects and attempting to walk with them. It is a CrossFit exercise that is a true game changer. It helps you build on the strength and improves your lifting. Simply the farmer’s walk is your one-stop-shop exercise to excellence in CrossFit Workout. It gives you the grip, enhances your glutes, abs as well as the lung capacity. Loaded Carries This is where an athlete takes up a heavyweight and carries it over a distance or an extended time period. You can use anything for the weights including sandbags, dumbbells, stones, kettlebells, and any other object which gives you the challenge to carry. Among the benefits of loaded carries include an improvement in work capacity which is simply your ability to perform physical work. On top of this, loaded carries can improve your grip strength, endurance, core strength, as well as muscle strength. Loaded carries also complement some of the major movements such as deadlift, squat, and bench press. Muscle Building The farmer’s carry is an exceptional CrossFit workout that enhances muscle building, especially in the upper back area. It creates very high levels of muscular tension and lets you sustain that for an extended time period. Research has shown that this stimulates bigger hormonal responses which aid in muscle growth. Grip Strength Improvement Your hands provide you with the base that supports lots of gymnastic movements as well as lifting movements. Without a proper grip, your path to strength will be limited in a way. Stronger grips are a pre-requisite to any form of lifting and will readily strengthen your shoulders. When doing farmer’s carry with some heavyweights, your grip strength will be your borderline into adding more weights. Enhancing Work Capacity According to the Journal on CrossFit Workout, work capacity refers to the ability to do real physical work as measured by the product of the force and distance divided by time. Alternatively, you can think of it as the overall amount of work you can do, adapt to or recover from positively. Farmer’s carry has been praised as one of the best ways through which you can improve your work capacity and strengthen your mental toughness. This can be achieved by putting the body system under a load for a longer period of time to create pressure in the abdomen and chest while challenging the breathing pattern. Increasing Core Strength There are several exercises you can throw into your CrossFit training schedule to strengthen your core amongst them sit-ups and farmer’s carry. The advantage with the latter is that it is self-correcting which means if your core is not working in the right way, you will immediately notice when you undertake this exercise. For you to have a nice and upright postural position, you need a stiff and rigid spine. By hanging on to some weight and walking, you can, therefore, improve both your posture and core strength.

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.

Squats are a fundamental human movement, and they can help you strengthen your muscles and build the physique of your dreams. They have been termed severally as one of the key building blocks for solid lower body strength. However, you may find it difficult to do squats during your CrossFit training because your body is hurting. Physical therapists are familiar with complaints concerning hurting lower backs, hips, and knees when people squat. The pain could be coming from different sources, but the reality is, irrespective of the source, pain during squatting is an anomaly. According to experts, squat pain usually stems from sitting and not training. When you sit all day long, some physiological issues are likely to develop, and some of these may manifest themselves during squatting. Among the sources of squat pain include tight back, tight hips, weak glutes, or a weak core. Weak Glutes Particularly in women, there tends to be an overuse of their quadriceps and much lesser use of their hamstrings and glutes. The dominant use of the quad is occasioned by the sedentary lifestyle most of them live and the absence of proper education on lifting form. According to the experts from CrossFit training, in order to successfully perform a squat, your glutes, hamstrings, and quads must work together. If the glutes are not as strong so as to control both the eccentric and concentric movements or support your core in maintaining an upright torso, the other body muscles will have to work extra hard. Because of weak glutes, lifters may be forced to lean too far forward when squatting. As a result, the lower back and hip flexors are made to compensate. The overuse of hamstrings relative to glutes also makes lifters susceptible to knee injuries. A Stiff Upper Back and Tight Hips The upper back, also known as the thoracic spine as well as your hips, are meant to be very mobile. However, it is not always the matter because of the sedentary lifestyle. CrossFit training says, spending too much time in a sitting position undermines this mobility. Squatting with limited mobility in your thoracic spine or hips makes you lean forward. An excessive forward leaning may make the spine lose its natural arch. This is much more pronounced in the lower part of the spine. The coming out of the spine from its natural position makes you to feel some aches during the CrossFit exercises. Weak Core Though often overlooked, the core plays a key role during a squat. The importance of maintaining an upright neutral spine during a squat and sustaining it over the duration of the lift cannot be overemphasized. With a weak core, it becomes difficult to keep your torso upright. Failure to maintain an upright torso position will lead you again to an excessive forward lean and loss of the natural arch. Both of these results in discomfort and jeopardize your performance in the CrossFit gym when it comes to lifting. To solve the above issues, you need to perform exercises such as the glute bridge, stir the pot, and foam rolling. These exercises target the paining area and rectifies the problem.

If you are a lifter, one of the treasures you must cultivate and strongly safeguard is a strong back. This doesn’t mean that other athletes and individuals do not need back strength, if anything, all of us benefit in one way or another from such strength. With a strong back, you can live a healthier life and in the course of your training, you will experience lesser debilitating CrossFit injuries over time. In addition, a stronger back enables you to perform lots of functional movements which are important for daily living. When done properly, CrossFit workout can strengthen the whole of your body including the back region. This is why learning proper technique is important before taking a chance on any CrossFit exercises. Below are some of top back exercises you should try out. Back Extension Another name for this exercise is a hip extension. Done properly, this workout can significantly improve your performance. On the contrary, if it is not done well, you risk putting yourself on the path of injuries. The main equipment used during this exercise is called a glute ham developer. Working on this machine involves aligning your body parallel to the ground while facing downwards. Thereafter, bend your hips towards the ground until your body is aligned perpendicularly to the ground. Instead of using momentum, try to engage your glutes, spinal erectors, and hamstrings when performing this move. Pendlay Rows This is a variant of barbell row. The major difference between pendlay row and barbell row is that the former has the lifter returning the bar to the floor following each rep. In addition, the lifter in pendlay row maintains his torso horizontal to the floor. In order to prevent injuries, always position your lower back in a natural angle. Pendlay rows are known to enhance your lat strength thereby contributing thereby contributing to performance improvement. Snatch Grip Deadlift This CrossFit workout is oftentimes done on the podium. The contribution it makes to your back strength is amazing. It develops your upper back and traps as well as your glutes and hamstrings. Snatch grip deadlift is a move that helps you to build your overall strength so that your performance at conventional deadlifts is enhanced. It is advisable for you to start with lower weight because of the pressure this move has on your upper back. The Power Clean This is a move that not only exercises your full body, but also works your deltoids and traps. Ensure you learn the proper form and technique before increasing the weight. When performing this move, you will use your core and back to stabilize your spine and also prevent injuries. The starting point for a power clean is similar to that of a deadlift, but you should ensure the bar is closer to your shins. Butterfly Pull-Up This is an advanced move which targets a big muscle group located at the back known as the latissimus dorsi. Additionally, this move makes use of the core, arm, and the shoulder muscles. Some CrossFitters enjoy butterfly pull-ups because of the momentum it helps them generate in the lower body which propels them upwards. To add to the above CrossFit workout, you can try out kettlebell swing and muscle up. To emphasize, a stronger back will improve the quality of your life and make you a better athlete.