Written by Dirk Gessler
When I was growing up my brother and I loved chipped beef on toast. For the uninitiated among us, chipped beef on toast is composed of small thin chunks of beef in a white cream sauce poured over a slice or two of toast. What’s not to love? For the nutritionally uneducated it has everything you need for a meal. You have your meat group and your carb group. What else is there?
We asked for it all the time. My dad hated it. He called it SoS (shit on a shingle). I didn’t understand why he didn’t like it until I joined the Navy. It turns out that the military cooks only knew how to make a few different meals, and SoS was at the top of that list. Apparently it was equally acceptable to make it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. In order to make a good meal it appeared as if there were only two checkboxes to fill when meal planning. Does it have meat? Check. Does it have carbs? Check. Done and done. SoS fit the bill nicely, and its easy to make in large batches. It didn’t take long for me to understand my dad’s dislike of the “meal,” and that was long before I had even heard of Paleo.
What does all this have to do with CrossFit or even fitness at all? I have point, just bear with me. In CrossFit there is a type of WOD called a chipper. Generally a chipper is composed of a large number of one or more exercises strung together to form a long, exhausting workout. Depending on who you talk to, it’s called a chipper because you have to chip away at it to finish or because you feel like you went through a wood chipper when you finally do finish.
Creating these beauties is simplicity itself. You take a bunch of exercises that suck, pick a large number of reps, and slap them all together. It is really that easy, or at least that’s what people think. You add a 3-2-1 go and twenty to thirty (or more) minutes later everyone is exhausted and covered in sweat. Clearly they had a good workout, right? Once they can finally move again everyone claps the coach on the back as they limp/crawl/shuffle out of the gym and says “Great WOD coach!” Everyone is happy right? What’s the problem?
The problem is that chippers are the equivalent of shit on a shingle. They are easy to create and apply to large groups of people whenever you want. They take almost no time, and even less thought, to create, and everyone seems to love them, at least for awhile. Unfortunately many people in this world have been conditioned to believe that a workout has to be long and exhausting to be effective. CrossFit teaches us otherwise. The bulk of our WODs should be short and brutal. We should endeavor to keep athletes in the anaerobic zone as much as possible. I find this happens with lower rep schemes in the 6 – 14 minute time domains depending on the exercises chosen. If the athlete has to stop and catch their breath every few reps they are moving into the aerobic zone far too much to have the desired intensity effect.
Does this mean we should never program a chipper? It certainly doesn’t. We just need to remember that chippers are another tool in our kit. They are a tool to use sparingly. Here is where the analogy breaks down; SoS should never be in your tool kit. You shouldn’t serve it to anyone…ever!