When your first start a new program, your body goes through a period of adjustment which is usually accompanied by lots of soreness and reduced ability to move on subsequent days. Usually with most programs your body adjusts, adapts and the program becomes easier for you to complete. The soreness you feel on the days after a workout is lessened or non existent. This is something that most people look forward too during the first few weeks while they are enduring the discomfort that comes with a new work out routine. Luckily for you though you will never get to experience this decrease in discomfort. I say lucky because when you are no longer sore of uncomfortable on the following days it means your body is no longer adapting to what you are putting it through which mean your results will decline or vanish and your program becomes ineffective. This is part of what is known as the General Adaptation Syndrome. In the G.A.S a stimulus is introduced ( for the purpose of our discussion the stimulus is exercise) and this cause an alarm stage in the body during which the function of the body is reduced ( you feel weaker/ slower/ sore ect.) then the body starts to adapt to the stimulus and function improves past the point where it was before the introduction of the stimulus ( this is where you get stronger, faster, loses fat, gain muscle, ect.) And here is the important part, if the stimulus is not removed first you hit a plateau( no more improvements in performance ) and after that your functionality declines again until your performance is below where you started at ( this is commonly referred to as over training) CrossFit fortunately has found a way around this over training problem. The answer is two parts, the first prevents over training by imposing strict guidelines for rest and recovery. For the most elite CrossFit athletes it is to follow a 3 days on 1 day off cycle or more rarely a 5 day on 2 day off cycle. The average person however usually does not need to take part in CrossFit more that 3 or 4 times a week with rest days between every 1 or 2 work outs. This strategy as well as adequate nutrition and sleep every day will help to prevent over training, it is also something most programs try to emphasize, however CrossFit incorporates something else which will prevent the plateau part of GAS which other programs have trouble incorporating, CrossFit is constantly varied the workout you do this week may take a month, a year, or may and sometimes less, to come up again. The constantly varied nature of the training will prevent plateaus from occurring in your results. Also because of this your body never adapts completely and there fore the soreness never really goes away, instead what will change is your mental capacity to endure the discomfort that comes from training to you absolute max every single time you work out. This also ignores the scaling we do with each work out so that we can always increase the weight or decrease the time you complete the task in all which increase the intensity of the workout, but that is a topic of another post.
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