How does maintaining an aspect of your fitness improve your fitness? At the end of an Olympic weightlifting-focused cycle, you PR with a bodyweight snatch. From there, you immediately start a program that is focused on highly technical gymnastics. If you are able to maintain your snatch PR through the gymnastics cycle while improving your max effort muscle ups, you have become more fit. Voilà, maintenance equals improvement.

The above example is for an intermediate athlete, one that has spent some time focusing on their overall fitness and has a handle on their strengths and weaknesses. How does a maintenance program work for a beginner? If you just started a fitness class and your peers seem miles ahead of you in the squat, it’s probably because their life’s circumstances had them squatting much more often, along with other factors such as anatomy, upkeep and confidence. It may be time to start squatting a lot more.

Below are my template maintenance programs for the beginner and intermediate athletes that you can use for your own personal needs. First, though, let’s lay out some simple rules to consider before starting a maintenance program.

1.Talk to your coach first. Your coach, or a team behind the scenes, writes the workouts that you do everyday. These workouts fit into a larger, purposeful framework called the programming. You, as an individual or beginner athlete, may have some specific ideas of things on which you’d like to focus. Some of these things may directly conflict with the intent of the current cycle, or your coach may have more specific ideas on how to help you out. Either way, their knowledge is indispensable.

2. Perfect practice makes perfect. No matter the focus of your program, your time is best spent by moving and practicing virtuously. Sloppy begets sloppy; half-assedness begets half-assedness. Make it matter.

3. Play by the rules. The guidelines set out in this article are meant to optimize your practice without being detrimental to the primary focus of your programming. If you steer off course, you will either not do enough, wasting your time, or will do too much, wasting even more time. I hope you eventually make purposeful changes to the guidelines here as you mold them to your needs. Just don’t be a meathead by saying, “Not hard enough! More is always better!” That defeats the purpose of a maintenance program.

Beginner

What do you need to get better at? Everything? With some pretty simple, well-rounded programming, just about everything does improve to some extent as a beginner. There are likely some holes in your game that you’d like to fill sooner rather than later. I encourage you to pick one or two of these areas to focus on in a maintenance program until you see marked improvement. Here are some categories you may choose from and some notes on how to improve.

Shore up weaknesses. To improve your strict press, you are already doing mobility work and now you’d like to do some additional pressing in order to become more comfortable in the positions. Perhaps it’s clear your core is the weak link in many simple gymnastics movements like pull ups and push ups, or maybe there is a huge discrepancy between your left and right leg while squatting and some unilateral lunging would help balance it out.

The first step in shoring up a weakness is to test the movement. How many strict presses can you perform at ½ bodyweight? How long can you hold a perfect plank? How many lunges can you do with perfect form in 90 seconds?

Next, you need to set a goal so that you can rank the results as a success or failure. Make sure your goal is very reasonable. Going from five presses to 25 is a bit extreme, and being able to hold a plank for seven minutes is a stupid human trick. Your coach likely has very specific standards that are most applicable to your trajectory. You can use the well-respected fitness standards as outlined by Level 4 CrossFit Seattle as an example of reasonable tests.

To see improvement from your initial test to the retest three to five weeks later, you’ll want to structure workouts with just enough variety to keep things interesting. Let’s use the plank as an example. Let’s say that in your initial test, you are able to maintain a perfect plank for 35 seconds. Your goal for the retest in five weeks could be to hold a perfect plank for 120 seconds. Choose a volume slightly more than your entire goal, such as 160-ish seconds, and perform that volume with varying work to rest ratios two to four times per week. Here are some examples of plank workouts:

1. 8 rounds: 20 seconds work, 20 seconds rest.

2. 3 waves: 30 seconds work, 15 seconds rest, 20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest

3. 4 max effort sets minus 10 seconds. Rest as much as necessary between efforts so that times are even. (ME-10s means stop before you fail. The first time you perform this workout make it nearly easy to insure success then up the difficulty each time you do it.)

What if the re-test rolls around and you don’t meet your goal? Did you see any improvement at all? That’s good! Perhaps you set the goal too high. Did you perform worse on the test? Look back over the workouts you did with a coach and answer these questions: Did you do enough the right way? What life variables (sleep, nutrition, recovery, etc.) were deleterious to your efforts? What can you learn from your mistakes?

Highly technical movements (barbell, gymnastics, etc.) On day one at your new box, you were introduced to the double under. Now it’s the bane of your existence. The snatch still feels like an alien dance move and your kipping toes to bar brings shame to your family. It’s good to practice these movements regularly (two to four times per week) before or after a workout. Before a workout you’re fresh and can focus, after you’re tired and this is how you’ll often have to perform the exercises during a workout. Don’t push it when you’re tired, though--the risk for injury is higher.

Practice sessions are simple. With barbell movements, keep it very light. You just need to practice the positions. If you add too much weight, you may become sloppy. Start by practicing the full lift, and then do pieces of the lift to focus on certain aspects (i.e., from the hang or a muscle variation), then end by re-integrating the entire movement. For gymnastics movements, do very small sets to just focus on technique.

It is helpful for both gymnastics and barbell movements to practice alone, with instruction and with a camera. Your developing sense of body awareness may stop you from realizing what’s actually happen while you practice a new movement. Being able to see your flaws in a video will do a lot to improve your awareness for yourself and others. Take a look at the video with your coach, who can pause it and play it in slow motion to give you a really good idea of what you can do to get better.

Intermediate

The idea for this article came to me after a buddy and I did a Catalyst Athletics weightlifting cycle called “Kara’s 9 Weeks of Heaven.” We both PR’ed our snatches and clean and jerks as a result of all of our hard work and the awesome programming. The plan was to jump on the bandwagon of James OPT Fitzgerald’s “Being” programming immediately after and we both said at the same time, “But I don’t want to lose ANY of the progress I just made!” The upcoming guidelines are an attempt to move onwards and upwards in a way generalized programming may sometimes let slip away. The basic template here is also a good fit for an intermediate athlete taking regular WOD classes at their local box who want to make the most of the extra credit work they are often itching to do. There is no one fits all program, there is no magical cure, but these sound principles should allow you to forward more sturdily than ever before.

Maintain basic strength and skill: Barbell

First rule: NO MISSES. If you work up to a weight that is too heavy, you are not only causing too much physiological damage, you are also wasting too much mental energy on what is meant to be supplementary. Next, pick one to three exercises to focus on.

Here is an example template for the slow movements: squats, deads, presses. This is one exposure/week, kept relatively light so as not to interfere with your primary goal/s:

Week one: 5x1 @ ~80%
Week two: 3x3 @ ~80%
Week three: 2x5 @ ~80%
Week four: Rest

I will not provide a written out template for the Olympic lifts. Instead I encourage you to do them one to three times per week by feel. The focus here is technique over weight. Make very small jumps in weight to make certain you can abide by the first rule (NO MISSES.)

Highly technical gymnastics

The most important aspect of practicing movements like the handstand push-up and muscle up is to add in the volume slowly. Structures include: X reps every minute on the minute (EMOM), as many perfect reps as possible in three to eight minutes, unbroken sets of the movement, etc. You could also sprinkle the practice during your strength work. Between sets of back squats add a few handstand walks to keep things interesting.

Volume gymnastics

Maintaining consistent volume in simple gymnastic movements can be done in many fashions. While I was doing the Catalyst Athletics cycle, I added very small chunks of classic movements (burpees, toes to bar, box jumps, etc.) to my warm-ups. Done in very simple circuits, it was a good dynamic warm-up and kept my head in the game.

Three contexts for big chunks of gymnastics movements in the sport of fitness include: WODS- think Cindy, Angie or Helen; as a metabolic stressor- think 13.1 (snatches and burpees); and as a finisher- think 12.5 (finish with muscle ups) or Jackie. If you decide to add some gymnastics to your routine, pick a context so that you can focus your practice.

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

The most important takeaway is this- make sure all of your physical efforts fit in the context of your goals and are the most economical use of your time. If you waste time in the gym, you will lose enthusiasm for the endeavor and may stop altogether. With a purposeful maintenance program you can make specific changes, based on actual records, to help you reach your goals as quickly as possible.