So you've been doing CrossFit a while, but you haven't packed on the muscle the Games athletes have? Now you want to shake up your training to promote growth, but still do CrossFit and not become a pure bodybuilder. How do you go about it?
First, let's be clear: hypertrophy is not a performance goal. If you pursue strength directly, you'll get stronger faster than if you pursue size. There's overlap, but chasing size is not the best way to get stronger. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with training to get bigger. Just make peace with taking a slight deviation from optimal performance training in exchange for muscle.
Pitfall one: too much conditioning
Muscle growth requires a calorie surplus. Those extra calories are the bricks you'll build your muscle houses with. All those sweaty, gassy sessions are stealing your bricks, which means you either deliver more (eat even more) or your building goes slower, or stops. Going into a build phase, strip MetCons back to the bare minimum needed to stay sane. None are required to grow, as bodybuilders regularly prove. And if you're not putting on weight, eat more.
Pitfall two: efficiency is the enemy of growth
The stimulus for growth is maximal stress to a muscle: tension, metabolic stress (the burn) and volume. That's best achieved through time under tension and working to failure. This is the opposite of most CrossFit, which is about efficiency: spreading the workload across the whole body so no single muscle reaches failure. Great for scores, useless for growth signals.
To grow, favour tempo work, strict variations over kipping, and controlled tension over speed and momentum. Focus on the big lifts: squat, deadlift, presses, strict pull-ups. Four to five sets of 8 to 12 reps, with the last set maxed out until you can't do another. Drop sets and negatives can take a muscle beyond traditional failure.
Then get out of the gym
Once you've trashed the muscle group, get eating and get recovering. Once the hypertrophy switch is on, that's it: further damage just delays the next session. A hard idea for CrossFitters, where more practice means more skill, but if you've truly trained to failure, recovery is the fastest route to gains.
Key takeaways
- Reduce calorie expenditure on non-muscle-building training: cardio, conditioning, MetCons
- Lift slowly and to failure: 4 to 5 sets of 8 to 12 reps, maxing out the last set
- Once you've got the growth stimulus, hurry up and recover. Don't bury the gains under extra work