Programming Terms and Descriptions

Below is everything you need to know to understand the terms we using in Misfit Affiliate programming. These terms are meant to help communicate what we want you and your members to get out of the training piece, while also providing some insight into how to appropriately scale or modify an athlete so that they achieve the desired stimulus of the workout. 

STRENGTH/SKILL WORK

Stimulus 

• Technique: athletes should be using sub-maximal loading with an emphasis on mechanics and consistency to improve the quality of their movement. Coaches can implement pauses, tempo, or other methods that force athletes to use lighter loading and really focus on how they’re moving. 

• Speed: athletes should be using sub-maximal loading with emphasis on moving fast. Force = mass x acceleration, so we can achieve a strength stimulus with loading as light as 30% if moved with serious speed. 

• Heavy: athletes should be pushing the loading to achieve a more profound strength stimulus. Some days we provide a more limited amount of time to build to a heavy X, so understand that heavy is relative to the day. On true heavy days when lifting is the only thing in class, we will either provide percentages for the entire session, or suggest a starting percentage and then allow athletes to as heavy as they can. These are days we will almost always let athletes push for a PR if it’s feeling good. 

• Stamina: these training pieces typically center around accumulating volume or reps at moderate intensities of either weightlifting or gymnastics movements. 

• For Quality/Accessory: these pieces are meant to be done with lighter loading with an exclusive emphasis on quality. Loading should always be submaximal and movements should be performed under control with perfect technique, not for time or max reps.

• Rest: Approximately how long athletes should rest between sets to achieve the stimulus. Consider the overall flow of class and adjust this prescription accordingly. 

• Strength/Skill Intent: The intent/goal of this section of class. Essentially, this is the programmer speaking to you, the coach, as to what the goal of the piece is. 

• Additional Notes/Resources: Anything else we believe would be helpful to the coach running class including ideas for drills, class setup, logistics, etc..

CONDITIONING/COMPETITOR EXTRA

Feel: the intended stimulus of the workout, or how an athlete can expect to feel during execution. 

• Cardio: workout is written to allow for smooth unbroken movements and fast transitions. Weights and rep schemes should allow for continuous movement with the limiting factor being how the athlete chooses to push transitions without having to stop. When scaling, coaches should err on the side of lighter and/or smaller rep schemes to ensure athletes stay moving. 

• Gas: workout written to push the athlete’s heart rate out of a comfortable range, particularly if they opt for big sets, forcing them to stop at some point due to cardiovascular overload. Workouts that have athletes resting on their knees are often “Gas” workouts. When scaling, coaches should scale athletes individually and ensure that there’s at least one place in the athlete’s workout that will push an athlete outside their comfort zone without stopping them completely. 

• Muscular Overload: workout is intentionally written to slow an athlete down primarily due to localized muscular fatigue. We do this by asking for very large sets of a movement, or by putting movements together that intentionally interfere with each other (e.g. shoulder to overhead + HS Walking). This stimulus is unique and requires different scaling for different athletes. For your fitter, RX athletes at your gym, this may simply mean modifying the volume of the workout or minor tweaks to movements so that they still get slowed down, but not totally stuck. For your scaled athletes, these folks need a workout that prioritizes keeping them moving more than crushing a single muscle group. This stimulus is the LEAST important from an overall fitness standpoint, so scale athletes conservatively vs. crushing them.

Pacing: the intended overall pace at which the athletes should attempt to move through the workout. Paces include Forever, Sustain, Reach, and Send and are defined below. 

• Sustain: a pace that an athlete could stay at for the entire duration of the workout. This pace is what we would expect in a medium-to-long workout or interval where it doesn’t make sense to go faster than is sustainable, and a consistent pace should be held with no serious drop offs. You’ll also see this stimulus in cardio-based intervals where we want repeatable efforts. Note that “sustain” doesn’t necessarily mean “slow”, it just means that we aren’t going out hot and trying to hold on. 

• Reach: you’ll see this pace most often in intervals or short workouts where a sustain pace won’t hit the intensity level we want, but controlled send or send sets athletes up for failure. In intervals, we want aggressive efforts knowing that there is rest coming. For short metcons, this means we want athletes coming out hot and trying to hold on for one single effort. Get out of your comfort zone. 

• Controlled Send: Just a notch below reckless abandon. You’ll see this stimulus for very, very short metcons but most often in short duration intervals that are just a smidge too long to let it all hang out. 

• Send: this is a reckless pace aimed at improving an athletes highest output. Athletes should not consider the total volume of the workout, only the volume of the immediate task about to be performed. These workouts are typically very short, or repeated bouts of extremely high outputs like Assault Bike or row sprints. Send it.

• Forever: The pace at which the athlete could hold throughout the workout if it were an hour long AMRAP, long endurance event, or recovery piece. You might see this in an interval piece where we ask an athlete to use a machine “at a forever pace” for active recovery. This is our least often used term. 

Target Scores: The target score is the time or rounds/reps we hope that the majority of your athletes fall within. We base this on what we know about how long reps and certain movements take and through decades of watching how athletes move in different types of workouts, however sometimes we get it wrong. It is impossible for us to know things like they layout of your space, whether your 400m run route is actually 400m, or how well athletes are scaled based on the desired stimulus. This is meant to help coaches with their class timing and scaling athletes appropriately. Note that the upper end of a target time is not meant to be a time cap. 

Firebreather Score: This score is for the cyborgs in your gym, and is the score we think is attainable but extremely difficult to achieve by an athlete performing the workout as prescribed. Again, sometimes we get this wrong but predicting the fastest possible time is actually quite a bit easier than creating a range for athletes of various ability levels. 

Programmer Notes: Previously labeled as “Coach’s Notes”, this section is now labeled “Programmer Notes” to eliminate confusion. This is where we, the programmer, speak to what we were thinking when the workout was written and how we hope it gets executed.

Scaling: Suggested scaling or modification options we recommend using to retain the desired stimulus of the workout, including movement substitutions when there is the potential for equipment limitations. When scaling, coaches can keep these options in mind but should defer to their knowledge of the athlete first. We almost always recommend scaling the loading before scaling the reps of a movement, with gymnastics being the most common exception. It also goes without saying that reducing the loading of any weighted movement is a scaling option that should be used regularly based on the Feel and Target Score of the workout. 

Additional Notes/Resources: Anything else we believe would be helpful to the coach running class including links to coaching/efficiency tip videos, ideas for skill work, class setup, logistics, etc..