Meet Peter: the 2017 CrossFit Hackney program

The New Year is nearly upon us and it’s time to get stuck into a new CrossFit program. So what can we tell you to entice you into your lycra once you’ve recovered from your NYE excesses?

Firstly, this year’s new program will continue some of the principles of our usual program design (you can read more about our approach here if you’re new to Momentum and our programming). We could call this approach an undulating periodisation model, a conjugated method, the Hepburn method or we could just call it Peter if we wanted to.

Peter’s high level aim in the first part of 2017 – and this won’t come as a surprise because it’s a common theme at Momentum – will be getting you stronger in a number of fundamental movements (deadlift, squat, press, pull). This is the basis of your success and enjoyment of CrossFit – think about the base of a pyramid – the wider the base, the higher it can go. Strength isn’t the only quality Peter will be honing in 2017 but it’s the one that takes the longest to develop. Peter can polish your skills and build your engine as he goes but when it comes to strength you’ve just got to spend time (years preferably) under the bar.

Don’t think, however, that because we’re sticking to this general, simple theme, that Peter is going to be boring. Far from it, he’s an exciting guy with some surprises up his sleeve. As well as working on your strength, he’ll be building condition with some of our old favourites (including the infamous Open workout 15.5), testing you in the 2017 CrossFit Open as well as challenging your capacity with lung burning blasts on the bike and rower. Peter’ll also be working on getting that GPP fired up and more generally getting you ready for future workouts, the summer, life in general and being hot, fit and damn sexy.

In our CrossFit classes this year we will move away from three levels to a two level structure:

FIT – (for the general membership population, focusing more on working in higher rep ranges, building tendon and ligament strength, working on hypertrophy and muscle tone, developing skills, grinding in good patterns and teaching you new movements); and

STRONG – (for our more experienced athletes who have some substantial time weightlifting under their belts (2-3 yrs) and are confident and proficient in a range of movements).

You can choose to mix and match these levels if you want to.

These levels are not to be confused with the new Blue Bear program which is replacing our previous CrossFit Weapons and which is for athletes who want to compete in the sport of CrossFit. If you think you might be interested in Blue Bear and want to find out more, come and have a chat with us.

Please, please always be aware of your current training and fitness levels, any historical injuries (we don’t want to create new ones) and to quote a classic Josh Schouten, always “leave your ego at the door”. We have a strict no dicks policy and if we suspect you are swinging yours we will ask you nicely to pop it away. We always chase form over weight, weight on the bar will come, trust us. Skills are learned, good skill can take 500 reps to learn and bad skill take 5000 reps to unlearn so take your time and do it properly.

See you all on the 2nd January in your shiny new kit and let’s get this party started.