GPP & Sport.

"Optimal physical competency is a compromise, a balancing act; a compromise between not only conflicting but perfectly antagonistic skills. The manner in which you resolve this conflict defines the quality of your fitness and is the art of exercise prescription." - Greg Glassman

"Develop the capacity of a novice 800-meter track athlete, gymnast, and weightlifter and you’ll be fitter than any world-class runner, gymnast, or weightlifter." - From CrossFit Journal

The Bottom Line on GPP

There's often a great deal of confusion surrounding general physical preparedness (GPP) in general, and CrossFit's brand of GPP in particular. This post is an attempt to stimulate conversation over what GPP is, and hopefully in the process, clear up any misunderstandings over what we do and how we train our athletes.

When defining a word or concept, it's often useful and highly instructive to discuss what something is not before jumping into what it is.

GPP is not training for a set of skills germane only to a particular sport or physical activity. We'd no sooner adopt the training program of a marathon runner than we would a sumo wrestler (both have relatively narrow, highly specific needs for their sport of choice), assuming GPP is the goal of the training program. GPP is not about putting your eggs in one basket and focusing on a single aspect of training, or a single general physical skill such as endurance, stamina, or strength.

GPP, and specifically CrossFit's brand of GPP, is about, quite simply, increasing an athlete's work capacity across broad time and modal domains (thanks to Coach Glassman for coining this phrase). This means that one can do well in any endeavor, whether it's of long duration, short duration, high power, or low power (although what's the point of being good at low-powered activities - they're so boring!), and whether it involves one's own body, external objects (e.g., barbells, dumbbells, and throwing implements), or any combination of these two modalities.

Problems occur, though, when athletes and coaches try and fuse GPP with sport practice. What happens is that both aspects of training suffer. This type of fusion usually results in ill-conceived concepts such as practicing the swing of a (tennis) forehand while using the cable pulley machine. Not only is the use of the cable pulley a colossal waste of the athlete's time, adding little if anything to his off-court strength-and-conditioning base, the carryover to actually hitting a forehand on the tennis court is nonexistent, and can even cause the tennis player's forehand skill to erode.

(As an aside, the reason the scenario above doesn't work for the tennis player is because swinging a tennis racket weighing between 12- and 14-ounces and swinging a cable pulley, which offers significantly more resistance than a tennis racket, cause different neuro-muscular firing patterns; thus there's no carryover and it can actually be detrimental to the development of a forehand.)

It's far better to keep GPP and sport practice separate. Use the GPP program to allow the athlete to become supremely conditioned and, at the same time, free the athlete up to devote more time to practicing his or her sport.

That is, if you're so horny for one sport that you are willing to allow your GPP for all other walks of life to suffer. I'm not. Not anymore.