Recently the folks at Outside magazine offered an article critical of randomized training as it relates to the CrossFit Games. I offer the below as my immediate takeaways.
1. I agree completely that the randomized CrossFit protocol does not "tunnel-in" that is, adhere to specificity to create skill mastery in a given sport. Such mastery can only come from sports and skill specific training.
2. Enlightening and not surprising that the majority of CrossFit Games winners (or those who do well) are not adhering to the randomized protocol but gamifying/Platonifying (or using a ludic approach) to do well. The CF games are no different from any other sport, they ask for specific tasks and the athlete must gear to those tasks or fall to those who have made those tasks their utmost prize.
With this said...the de-bunking or criticism of the article only works in the specific domain of the CrossFit Games itself. The concept behind randomization is to prepare real-world operators who can have no specific task on the horizon in front of them on a given day.
We have no idea if we must be called upon to sprint to flee, to have a steady reservoir of go-to stamina in an evacuation event, a needed threshold of strength to move the obstruction out of the way.
In short, real-life is not a game with a guaranteed task-list set before us.
Real-life is unpredictable.
Real-life is variance.
Real-life is randomized.
The critical article points out that randomized training does wonders to a point....then what? A plateau.
Not necessarily.
The plateau exists only if your goal is to compete or thrive in a power-lifting environment, an Olympic lifting competition, specific endurance sport races, and, the CrossFit Games.
If our goal is to make the doing of an exercise our "sport" then randomized training is for naught once we pass the acclimatization stage.
But here I address combat athletes, MMA competitors, grapplers, strikers, real-world operatives whether they be military, law enforcement, emergency personnel, or the wise civilian who realizes they are the true first responder-all we really need is this plateau of hardihood built by randomized training. What we desire after the so-called plateau is not more and more repetitions of push-ups, or heavier and heavier lifts, or longer and longer runs.
We strive to hit the plateau, then do the work of maintaining a randomized plateau and use the plateau as our jumping off point for our specific combat skillset training.
Our goal is not to be the elite doer of exercises. We see clearly that exercise no matter how elite the performance of the given exercise is a prepatory action-no more. Exercise is a means to prepare the body and mind for the rigors of our sport. To spend the rest of our lives getting better at our preparation is a bit of wheel-spinning on par with getting better and faster at writing our ABCs or multiplication table recitations as opposed to taking our alphabet and creating new sentences on pages, or applying our mathematics to real-world needs.
With this said, the article is correct-to excel at any given sport you must groove that sport, so to speak.
To prepare for chance or chaos we must have a randomized base.
To my combat Brothers & Sisters I say, create an admirable randomized plateau and instead of extra hours climbing to the next one excel at our given vocation/avocation.
