THE COMPOUND: PART TWO

Seven more weeks. Same name, same energy, a different set of bricks going on top of the foundation we just built.

Hunter, Paige, and I sat down to break down exactly what’s in this phase and why. If you went through Part One, this builds directly on top of it. If you’re new, here’s what you need to know before Monday.

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The Weekly Structure

Every week of this phase has the same backbone. Strength bias comes from heavy back squat and heavy overhead press. Gymnastics bias comes from strict pulling, rows and strict pull-up variations. Conditioning is the bread and butter, spread across the week in couplets, triplets, and chippers, short, medium, and long. You’re still running one to two times a week, because running is the ultimate expression of fitness in this sport and in life generally. And Sundays are Engine Class. Call it CrossFit Light, call it Hyrox style work, call it whatever you want. Longer format, low skill demand, low strength demand, just showing up and getting after it. If you build that culture in your gym the way we’ve seen it built in Portland, you’ll have a waitlist for it.

That’s the skeleton. Now let’s get into why it’s built this way.

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Why “The Compound” Again

Quick recap for anyone new to the naming. Compound has a triple meaning. The strength bias lifts, back squat and overhead press, are two of the most foundational compound movements that exist. The word also evokes the kind of dark, dingy, metal-plates gym that this sport came from, the kind of place where people are clanging and banging and nobody’s worried about the lighting. And compounding refers to combining and building elements on top of each other to create something new.

Part One laid the foundation with the deadlift, the bench press, running, and strict pulling. Part Two builds directly on top of that. We’re adding strict pressing and the back squat, and we’re continuing the running and the strict pulling that Part One established. The affiliate setting doesn’t have a clean beginning and end the way a competition season does. But when you give your members a narrative to follow, you create a moment to look back and actually see the progress that’s happened.

This is also where the patience conversation matters most. Every gym has the athlete who wants to skip the foundational work and go straight to kipping handstand pushups or muscle ups, ready or not. Laying the groundwork with the classic lifts and strict gymnastics isn’t holding people back. It’s the thing that makes everything else possible six months from now. You’re not letting the inmates run the asylum. You’re building them something that’s actually going to hold weight.

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The Squat Program

This might be the best squat cycle we’ve written, and I want to explain why it works so well at the affiliate level specifically.

At the competitive level, you get to scatter your training across the year. Top end strength here, strength endurance there, running over on this side, and you bring it all together eventually. At the affiliate level, you don’t have those touch points. A single lift-only day has to check a lot of boxes at once because there isn’t a tomorrow’s session to pick up the slack.

The structure: a set of nine, a set of seven, a set of five, a set of three, building from 50% up to 80%. Then the real meat of the session, a max rep set at that same 80%, or building toward 90% as the phase progresses. This blends two extremes. A small number of athletes in any affiliate class have the strength, skill, and muscle fiber type to make a true low-rep heavy day effective. A small number need pure volume because the load is artificially capped by what they can safely handle. Most CrossFitters actually fall in the middle, needing real volume to elicit a strength stimulus before the weight gets heavy enough to matter.

This structure gives everyone something. The newer athlete accumulates practice with the lift even if the weight stays moderate. The strong-but-less-fit athlete gets a real fitness stimulus from the volume before the heavy stuff shows up. And the stronger, fitter athlete gets benefit out of literally every part of the session.

There’s a hidden benefit too: this format builds in its own warm-up. Nobody is intimidated by a set of nine reps when it’s just labeled as the squat program. People do it without complaint because it’s framed as the thing that’s making them stronger, which it is.

Between sets, we use a slow 1k bike at zone one to zone two effort. That’s five total kilometers of easy biking woven into the session. It flushes the legs for the next day, burns additional calories, and keeps people physically engaged rather than wandering the gym during a lift-only day. It’s a small detail that does a lot of quiet work.

A note for coaches on individualizing this: percentages aren’t gospel for everyone in the room. If someone is genuinely strong, three reps at 80% isn’t going to move the needle much for them, and that’s fine, because the max rep set at the end is where they get their work in. The stronger and fitter athlete benefits from the entire session. Everyone else benefits proportionally from wherever their strengths lie.

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Coaching the Squat at the Affiliate Level

A real conversation worth having here: anthropometry matters more than most coaches account for.

Femur length, torso length, the proportion of your limbs relative to your torso, these things dictate how your squat is going to look and feel, and they explain a lot of the “why is my deadlift so much stronger than my squat” or vice versa questions you’ll get from members. Shorter, stockier builds tend to squat more comfortably relative to their deadlift. Longer-limbed athletes, especially those with a long wingspan relative to height, tend to favor the deadlift. Neither is better. It’s just leverage.

If you have a shorter femur, your hips are naturally going to sit lower in a squat and your knee position is going to be higher. That comes with real consequences. You need a strong posterior chain and a strong midline to control that position, because that’s exactly where things tend to break down. RDLs, deadlifts, the accessory work that builds that chain, matters more for that body type than it does for someone built differently.

At the affiliate level, you’re not reinventing every athlete’s squat from scratch every single class. You know your members. The job becomes finding the one or two points of performance that matter most for that group and reinforcing them consistently over a phase, rather than trying to fix everything every single rep. Maybe week one is foot position and stance. Maybe later in the phase, when the weight gets heavy, the focus shifts to bracing and intra-abdominal pressure. You’re taking your athletes on a journey through the mechanics over the course of the phase rather than trying to dump all the information on them in one class.

And the touch points matter most when there’s actual weight on the bar. In a high heart rate interval, coaching cues mostly bounce off. But on a lift day, walking the rig and getting one real correction in with each athlete, that’s where you can genuinely move someone’s technique forward. A strong athlete who can’t figure out why they stall at 20 pounds heavier than usual. A bouncer at the bottom of their squat who needs to feel what it’s like to control the descent instead of relying on the rebound. These are real coachable moments, and a lift day gives you the space to find them.

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Order of Operations: Squat, Press, and Where They Fall

Every other week follows the squat cycle described above as a standalone lift. The weeks in between, back squat pairs with an actual workout, which does double duty: it builds squat capacity and also builds the ability to execute a workout when your legs are already compromised. That interference effect, lifting heavy and then conditioning right after, is exactly what shows up in competition and exactly what you need to be ready for.

On the weeks where squat is paired with a workout, overhead pressing shows up as a standalone lift on the same day as conditioning. Barbell, dumbbell, push press, strict press, whatever variation fits. One detail worth understanding: deadlift into back squat, and bench press into overhead press, create a kind of central nervous system overload. Getting a touch point with something heavier earlier in the session creates a neurological adaptation. Your body learns to handle moving heavy weight, and that primes the system for what comes next. It’s not just about loading muscle tissue. It’s about teaching your nervous system how to move weight.

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Strict Pulling and the Pull-up Conversation

We’re going back to strict pulling, and there’s a real conversation worth having about what that actually requires.

Strict pull-ups demand isometric strength, the ability to hang and hold position, and eccentric strength, the ability to lower yourself under control. A lot of athletes have plenty of one and very little of the other. You can have someone who can pull off a great set of strict pull-ups concentrically but who free-falls every single time on the way down because the eccentric strength simply isn’t there yet. That’s not a small gap. It’s a separate piece of the puzzle.

The scaling spectrum for this matters. Band assistance gives the most help at the bottom, where most people need it, and almost no help at the very top, which for a lot of athletes with limited shoulder mobility is exactly where the rep actually gets hard. A scaled strict pull-up with feet on the ground, allowing the athlete to use their lower half to assist as needed, gives a different kind of assistance profile and is worth having in your toolbox alongside the band.

Negatives deserve real respect and real caution. They build genuine strength in the eccentric range, but they have real potential to wreck someone if overused, the same way an athlete who hasn’t done Romanian deadlifts in a month shouldn’t suddenly do fifty of them. A few controlled negatives per session, not forty-eight, is the right dose for most people starting out.

The safest way to load a negative: start from a position where the athlete already feels strong, like standing on a box with their chin already over the bar, rather than grabbing the bar and free-falling into a hard catch. The velocity and the sudden braking force on a jumping pull-up’s descent is where a lot of the risk lives. Controlled positions, controlled descents, less risk, more benefit.

One specific athlete profile worth knowing as a coach: the very strong, fast-twitch-dominant athlete who can rep out pull-ups concentrically but completely falls apart the moment you ask for a slow controlled lowering. That mismatch usually means the contractile potential is disproportionately ahead of the eccentric control. For that athlete, isolating negatives specifically, separate from the standard pull-up work, addresses a real and specific weakness rather than reinforcing what’s already strong.

This phase, the pulling and pushing bias shifts back toward more pulling volume than Part One had, since Part One was already pulling heavy on the deadlift and we didn’t want to stack high volume deadlifting with high volume pulling gymnastics. Now that the squat and the press are carrying more of the heavy lifting load, there’s room to bias pulling gymnastics more heavily again. Think of it as variance across the week rather than a fixed “every Wednesday is pull-up day” structure. Over the course of the week, you’re getting both pushing and pulling, horizontal and vertical, mixed intentionally.

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Running

We’re continuing the running bias from Part One, and it’s worth talking about how far to actually take running mechanics coaching at the affiliate level.

The honest answer is that running form is genuinely teachable, but it competes for class time against everything else you’re trying to develop. Watching elite athletes run versus athletes who are struggling late in a race shows a clear visual difference: knee drive, heel to butt, a slight forward lean, a circular leg motion. Athletes who are fading tend to have their legs drift behind them with the knee never crossing the frontal plane.

You can build running mechanics into a warm-up without sacrificing the rest of class. High knees, butt kicks, lateral shuttles to loosen the legs, then a short pose-running style drill progression. Make it part of the culture: every time there’s a running piece in the workout, the warm-up includes a few unstructured reps of the mechanics drill where speed doesn’t matter at all. Give people permission to focus purely on form there, then let them run however they want once the workout actually starts. Over time, the mechanics start to bleed into the actual workout without you having to force it.

Cadence is one of the most useful audit tools for an athlete trying to improve their own running independently. Zone two cadence, mile repeat cadence, and 400 meter repeat cadence are all different, and they increase as effort increases. Picking your feet up more at lower speeds rather than trying to be powerful is a good starting cue for most CrossFitters working on this on their own.

For the individual athlete who complains specifically about pain when running, that’s the moment to dig deeper. Is it a warm-up issue? A cooldown issue? An actual mechanical fault? There’s a real difference between an athlete who needs a true technical correction and an athlete who just needs better preparation around the run itself.

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Conditioning Bias

Couplets, triplets, short, medium, long. We’re going to keep running this format because it works and because it’s the actual sport. One important reminder for anyone spending 20 to 30 minutes of class on a single movement: that’s valuable for building strength and skill in that specific lever, but it’s one day a week. The conditioning bias is what teaches your body to execute when everything else is also demanding something from it at the same time.

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A Word on Programming Philosophy

Misfit Affiliate programming was never meant to be a piece of paper you slide under a door with a “good luck out there” attached. The programming gives you thoughtful structure and real content to work from, but it needs your expertise and your knowledge of your specific members layered on top of it. Maybe an athlete has a slightly more upright squat because they’re training for online semifinals and that position genuinely serves them. Maybe someone can rip through their first set of strict pull-ups but completely loses it by set two, which tells you something useful about pacing and capacity that the program alone can’t capture. We want to make you dangerous with the information. We need you to actually be dangerous when you’re out on the floor running the class.

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The Bottom Line

Seven weeks. Building directly on top of what Part One established. The squat program checks more boxes than almost anything we’ve written. The pressing and pulling bias is intentional and connected to what came before it. Running continues to matter, and the form conversation is worth having even if it’s a secondary focal point most days.

The athletes who came through Part One and stay consistent through Part Two are going to look back at the end of this phase and see something real. That’s the whole point of giving a phase a name and a narrative. It’s not packaging. It’s a way to mark the progress that’s actually happening underneath all of it.

Templates and the full breakdown are available through teammisfit.com, with two-week free trials through SugarWOD, StreamFit, or PushPress. If you want to talk through whether it’s the right fit for your gym, reach out directly at coach@misfitathletics.com.

See you Monday.

Drew

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