Hey crew, Coach Greg here: In this two part series on the question of intensity vs. volume I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about my thoughts on how intensity and volume relate to effective CrossFit training and overall fitness. I want to answer the question of, will I get more results by simply doing more workouts a day? I have been either training or coaching at CrossFit affiliates for about 5 years now, and I have seen a definite upward trend in the amount of volume athletes who want to compete are putting towards their training. I want to look at the importance of intensity for overall athletic performance, and then I want to look at why we are seeing some of the trends that are happening.

To start, it’s my belief that intensity is far more important than volume at achieving results in CrossFit. When I say the word intensity, I am talking about power output, the higher the power output the higher the intensity. In CrossFit the goal is to maximize your power output (intensity) across as many different domains of fitness as possible, in other words the goal is to do more work in a shorter time period. We do that through constantly varied functional workouts.  Constantly varied can mean anything from a workout that is short and fast, and has very high intensity (think of 100m dash or 1rep max clean and jerk) to a workout that is long and slow (think of running a marathon or Murph), and everything that falls in between those two. The goal of what we are trying to do is maximize our ability across all domains of fitness, and that means we have to train all those different domains, and one is NOT more important than the others. In my opinion all of them add something different that will help develop a complete athlete.

So I want to focus on the short duration and high intensity piece here for a moment. This is one part that suffers when people focus too much on volume, and not enough on intensity. So if I take that 100m dash or 1 rep max lift, a lot of people will think that well that’s not enough of a workout, I need to do 1, or 2 or even 3 more WODs so that I can improve faster at CrossFit. The problem with this is that by adding more workouts to that same training session, you essential dilute the intensity you can put into that 100m dash or that short duration workout. I like to use the example of a tank of gas, you have a finite amount of energy in your body’s “gas tank” that you can expend in your training for that day. If that workout is 3 minutes long your goal should be to expend all that energy (empty the tank). Likewise that goal should be the same for a 20 minute workout. Now if you do three or four workouts in a row, you will either consciously or subconsciously hold back energy to be able to complete all the workouts, thereby, not giving your all on any single part. It basically creates the appearance of one longer workout.

Now I am by no means saying that I think you should never do multiple workouts in a row because I think there is a valid time and place for that. What you really need to do is figure out what your focus is going into training. If that goal for the day is longer and volume based, you want to see how much your body can handle,  then great, multiple workouts is a great way to do that. If your goal is to improve at one area like a short sprint style workout, you do yourself a disservice by adding in the extra volume because you sacrifice intensity. It really comes down to what is the goal for that day because you can’t realistically expect to improve on all aspects of fitness every day. That’s also not what I would consider constantly varied. Some days are going to be shorter workouts, but that should be a challenge to you to see how hard you can go, to see if you can empty your “gas tank” completely in that 3 min time frame or whatever the short duration is for that workout.  

I could seriously talk for hours on this stuff, but let me know what you guys think, if you have any specific questions or thoughts on this topic I would love to hear them. In the next part of this article I plan to dig into why we have seen this trend towards more volume. How volume and intensity both fit into training for something like the CrossFit Games, and also what I see as the best mix of how to apply these for someone just trying to become fit for everyday life.