I’ve been consuming a lot more content on Zones/FTP/MAP as it’s been a good few years since I directly used them in training. I’ve been wanting to reincorporate them into more targeted training that has a blend of each. Before you ask there is no true goal from the training rather spend more time integrating it in novel ways. See where things break, excels or just plain doesn’t work. So my question is; how have you guys used similar tools, what did you like, not like, or just wish to try.

Density Progressions: The Programming Variable Coaches Often Miss Most coaches spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship between volume and intensity. This makes sense because it is easy to quantify: - How much work is being done? - How heavy is it? - What paces are they holding?  But one variable that often gets overlooked is density. Density simply refers to how compressed the work is. It’s the relationship between how much work is being done and how quickly it’s being performed. Two workouts can have identical volume and similar intensity, but create completely different physiological responses depending on how dense the work is. Example: Same Volume, Very Different Density Let’s take a simple example. Workout A 200 wall balls for time Workout B 10 wall balls every minute on the minute for 20 minutes In both cases, the athlete is doing 200 wall balls. But the experience and the physiological response are completely different. In the “for time” version, the work is much more dense. Fatigue accumulates continuously. Metabolites build up. Intramuscular pressure increases. Perfusion drops. Tension under fatigue increases as the athlete tries to maintain movement speed. All of this creates a much more stressful internal physiological environment. You get: • More accumulated fatigue • Less metabolite clearance • More ischemia inside the working muscles • More tension being produced while the muscle is already fatigued That combination dramatically increases the amount of muscular damage and soreness that athletes experience. In the EMOM version, every minute includes a built-in rest period. That rest allows partial clearance of metabolites, restoration of blood flow, and recovery of force production. The volume is the same, but the density is much lower, so the physiological cost is very different. Why Density Matters in CrossFit Density becomes even more important when we consider the nature of the sport. CrossFit workouts tend to be very dense especially formats like: