Kaizen means continuous improvement... and that's what we do (us and you!).

If you’ve been around for a little bit, you’re familiar with our STRENGTH - STANDARD - CARDIO breakdown for selecting how you can approach the workouts based on what you’d like to improve in your performance.

Moving forward, you’ll notice that we’ve replaced CARDIO with STAMINA.

There are a few reasons for this.

  1. Cardio vascular endurance describes the ability for your heart and lungs to fuel your body with oxygen.

  2. Cardio vascular training describes a monostructural movement, such as running, walking, biking, or rowing.

  3. Cardio vascular training typically describes an aerobic event that extends past 20 minutes.

Therefore, the use of the term “cardio” to simply describe a lighter-weight workout is not accurate (especially if the workout is short). Instead, the word STAMINA offers a more precise description. Stamina refers to:

  1. the maximum or near maximum effort expended for a certain physical activity

  2. the ability to work in unbroken sets, with a fast pace, or an “all out” effort

  3. for monostructural movements (i.e. running), stamina measures the ability to work in short spurts; however, stamina is equally applicable to resistance training (loaded movements), gymnastics, and all sports

  4. stamina involves more than a cardio vascular response; stamina involves muscle endurance or the ability for muscles to recover from maximal effort

“Every day is cardio day at CrossFit” is still true, because your heart and lungs are getting better at transporting oxygen every time you elevate your respiration and heart rate. The old CrossFit joke that goes “how do CrossFitters do cardio…? They lift weights faster” is also valid.

Moreover, thinking about training strength and stamina allows us to better address some global fitness goals: most of us are simply looking to be leaner and to maximize our overall health. And the research on this is unequivocal:

Body composition (how lean you are) is determined by metabolism.

Metabolism is determined by muscle mass.

Muscle mass is determined by how much weight you can move.

How much weight you can move is determined by strength, technique, and mobility.

In other words: strength, technique, and mobility truly should be everyone’s focus. The old school, steady-state cardio bus has long been abandoned. Research clearly shows that traditional endurance activities do not effectively “burn fat” as they once were assumed to do, and long-term reliance on steady state cardio can actually slow your metabolism and compromise lean mass. Moreover, if you are an endurance athlete, where your performance is measured in long-distance events, training strength and stamina can only make you faster.

So, what does this all mean?

Moving forward, we want to emphasize the ways you can optimize your workouts:

  1. Train at least 3 sessions per week, and shoot for 5-6.

  2. Use the warm up & cool down with purpose to build core strength and increase mobility.

  3. Record your performance, using either the Zen Planner app or other mechanism.  

To further enhance your performance:

  1. Dial in diet & recovery. If you are not sleeping or eating well, gym performance will suffer regardless of your efforts. (Sign up for our next nutrition workshop!)

  2. Use a 6-week cycle to ramp up your training: for 3 weeks, adapt your workouts for strength; for 2 weeks, adapt your workouts for stamina; and during the 6th week, follow the “standard” to establish baselines.

  3. Thoughtfully increase loads in subsequent strength cycles (assess mobility and technique to continue to increase capacity); thoughtfully increase intensities in subsequent stamina cycles (think about larger unbroken sets or faster rep cycling).

  4. Express your fitness through experiencing new activities. This is where we hike, paddle, cycle, play ultimate frisbee, surf, jog, enter a weightlifting meet, take a fencing class, learn tai chi, or take up BMX. Try a CrossFit competition. Sign up for a 5K. Do a Tough Mudder. Etc.

If you’d like additional insight into how you can use the STRENGTH - STANDARD - STAMINA templates to improve your performance, talk to Rusty or Madeline.




Madeline Mirasol