You are as fit as you are competent in each of these ten skills. A deficiency in any one of the ten general skills will hinder your ability to achieve elite fitness. Interestingly enough, focusing solely on any one of the ten skills can also blunt your fitness. The goal of CrossFit is to increase your work capacity across broad time and modal domains. Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t take on some practice or training that focuses on any one skill. Need to work on the balance to get better at handstands? Go for it! Just don’t devote all your time to one skill at the sacrifice of the others.
Out of the List Below, which of the ten general skills is your weakness (or weaknesses if it’s more than one)? How can you work on improving?
TRAINING
- Cardiovascular/respiratory endurance – The ability of body systems to gather, process, and deliver oxygen.
- Stamina – The ability of body systems to process, deliver, store, and utilize energy.
- Strength – The ability of a muscular unit, or combination of muscular units, to apply force.
- Flexibility – the ability to maximize the range of motion at a given joint.
Importantly, improvements in these skills 1-4 come about through training. By Training we refer to activity that improves performance through a measurable organic change in the body.
EQUAL PARTS TRAINING and PRACTICE
- Power – The ability of a muscular unit, or combination of muscular units, to apply maximum force in minimum time.
- Speed – The ability to minimize the time cycle of a repeated movement.
Skills 5-6, These are adaptations of equal parts Training and Practice.
PRACTICE
- Coordination – The ability to combine several distinct movement patterns into a singular distinct movement.
- Agility – The ability to minimize transition time from one movement pattern to another.
- Balance – The ability to control the placement of the bodies center of gravity in relation to its support base.
- Accuracy – The ability to control movement in a given direction or at a given intensity.
By contrast improvements in these skills 5-10 come about through practice. Practice refers to activity that improves performance through changes in the nervous system.
Mental Fortitude
This is one that some may say is missing! Mental Fortitude is a must to get through those especially brutal workouts, but mental fortitude is a mindset, not a skill set. Thought I would throw that out there for those of you who were thinking about it.
(Thanks to Jim Crawley and Bruce Evans of Dynamax and The CrossFit Journal)
