A good training plan, hours spent tackling weaknesses and commitment to your training regime can bring great results, but there are other aspects to your athletic endeavours that you should also account for, as they can have a big impact on your performance.
1. CLEAN UP YOUR DIET
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to most CrossFit athletes, as nutrition is a bit part of the sport. Regardless, many athletes still diligently go to the Box but pay little attention to their nutrition.
The food you eat has a huge impact not only on your performance – giving you the energy to perform – but also your recovery and development.
Eat for performance
During the CrossFit Open, eat to support your performance. This means three things:
- Eating for calorie maintenance
- Ensuring glycogen stores are topped off before each Open workout
- Eating enough to support recovery afterwards.
Because most CrossFit Open workouts are relatively short (typically not longer than 25 minutes) and of pretty high intensity, your body will rely on your muscle’s glycogen stores to provide the energy required to perform at your maximum capacity. Energy from fat stores, while efficient for endurance events, plays a way smaller role during Open workouts.
In the leadup to the Open workouts eat high quality, unprocessed foods as much as you possibly can. Lean proteins, some veggies, a good bit of starches like rice, oats and sweet potatoes are good places to start.
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Eat for mental health
Your gut and your brain are highly connected, which means your gut health can affect your mental health.
Being stressed can affect your GI tract, slowing down digestion to prioritise other tasks necessary for survival – that’s one way the brain can affect your gut. Equally, the gut can affect the brain if, for example, you’re experiencing issues with inflammation in your GI tract.
These can have negative consequences on your mental status, making you feel depressed, withdrawn, or less motivated.
One of the simplest changes you can make to take care of your gut health is to eat real food, avoid anything that causes you to have bloating or indigestion, and chewing your food well.
Putting yourself in a position of decreased inflammation could improve your mindset and cut down extra stress coming from within your body.
2. MEET YOUR CALORIC REQUIREMENTS
Once you’ve sorted out what to eat, you need to consider how much to eat.
Try to eat until you’re relatively full and pay attention to each of your meals, trying to understand if your hunger increases or decreases, and how your energy levels are affected.
Being mindful while you’re eating each meal of the day should help you do a pretty good job at meeting your caloric requirements, which in turn will ensure you have enough energy to meet the demands of the CrossFit Open.
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Meeting, or even slightly exceeding your caloric demands, will also help you recover as much as possible from each training session. This is especially important before you do an Open workout.
Any exercise that’s high intensity is fuelled exclusively by glucose. The energy for this type of training comes from pre-existing muscle glycogen stores. It takes over 24 hours to replenish glycogen stores, so to ensure you’re topped off and ready to perform to your best, you should eat enough the day of the workout and the day before.
3. TIDY UP YOUR SLEEP ROUTINE
Set up a sleep routine, where you go to bed and wake up around the same time every day throughout the CrossFit Open.
Sleep is the best performance enhancer there is.
If you are worried about "optimizing" your health, well-being, or performance but you are not sleeping 7 to 9 hours per night, start there. pic.twitter.com/neGCtYuNPw
— Brad Stulberg (@BStulberg) January 13, 2021
Sleep has been called “the best performance enhancer there is” and for a good reason: it recovers the muscles from effort, consolidates learning and memorizing, and also helps manage stress and emotions better than any medication or supplement available on the market.
After increased mental and physical effort – which the Open brings about – the body needs to recover. The higher the mental and physical effort undertaken in a day, the more profound the recovery needs to be. Therefore, the fact that sleep is especially important during the CrossFit Open, when the body is subjected to higher amounts of stress than normal, is self-explanatory.
Try to sleep eight hours every night and dial in your sleep routine.
How Sleep Affects Recovery, Performance and Health for CrossFit Athletes
