Your Workout Tempo: Crockpot or Microwave?

The way I see it, a workout is either going to skew more towards faster pace at higher intensity or slower pace at lower intensity. One is like using a microwave to cook a meal while the other is like using a crockpot, and there is a time and place for each due to their unique benefits.

Crockpot Workouts
These are of the cook it low and slow variety. Tempo is steady where you’re cooking at low temperatures. Last Thursday’s eight round circuit was a prime example:

8 Bench Press
12 Ballistic Step Ups
10 Bilateral Rows
100m Farmer Walk
(x8)

Anything that is well above the thirty minute work block duration.

In crockpot workouts, we’re primarily building muscle. Because we’re in higher rep counts at heavier loads, intra workout recovery becomes a bit more important for muscles the able to recover from movement to movement. If you try to rush a crockpot meal by prematurely turning up the heat or taking it out early, it’s ruined. Since we’re not trying reach an exhaustive pace, we’re not concerned with anaerobic conditioning.

A common mistake many make is to use microwave weights in a crockpot workout. For example, if you were out for a leisurely stroll on your farmer’s walks and left Thursday thinking, “that wasn’t that hard” then you microwaved a crockpot meal. Level up, go heavy, Ignore your tempo.

Microwave Workouts
These are the workouts where taste isn’t really of primary concern. You’re trying to heat your meal and get the calories. Same goes for microwave workouts of the very short pace, peak intensity variety. These would be anything in a tier 2, a short AMRAP, and the like. In these workouts, we’re trying to perform as much work as possible in as short amount of time to enhance our anaerobic conditioning and the high end outputs of our aerobic conditioning. Strength and load are less of a concern, we want volume.

10′ AMRAP
5 Hell Trots
100m Run

Go, go, go.

If you apply a microwave method to a Crockpot workout, you lose a ton of muscle and strength building on the table. Conversely, if you slow cook a microwave meal, you’re getting very little out of it.

Of course, workouts are not binary. Many, in fact most, fall somewhere in between the two. Listen to your coaches for the daily objective, apply the right cooking method and you’ll leave accomplished and better for it every time.

-Dave