FIT

I've had a chance to read over 'FIT', the brainchild of Lon Kilgore, Michael Hartman, and Justin Lascek of 70's Big. Fit is a manual that attempts to cover all aspects of the fitness world, encompassing strength, conditioning, endurance and mobility. It's full of templates and explanations, and tries to tie it all in according to the individual athlete's needs.

Lifetime Supply of Bacon Not Included

The Pros:

Since it's my primary area of interest, I was happy to find a relatively coherent guide to combining strength and conditioning. Special care was indeed taken to building programs that make sense for individual athletes. Instead of lumping everyone into a single category, a la CrossFit, FIT provides programs for complete beginners, the strong but unconditioned, the conditioned but weak, the young, the old and a multitude of various combinations of physical attributes. For a guy like me, in his 30s and concerned that his conditioning is passable but his strength is stalling, it has some decent advice (have a strength program, for example, instead of an ad-hoc strength workout whenever CrossFit HQ calls for it, and maybe limit yourself to one lift per workout). There's multiple shout-outs to the Wendler 5-3-1 system that I've been using for the last six months, which of course makes me feel special and loved. Also included are good write-ups and pictorials on the major lifts, conditioning and assistance exercises, plus some added mobility work.

The Cons:

Some of the methods in the book seem a bit harder to connect, as sometimes the terminology feels inconsistent. When combining different volumes of lifting with conditioning, I feel the book takes a little more work than it should. With half a brain, you can figure out what the authors are asking you to do, but for those that need everything spelled out for them, having to cross-reference several charts to build a program might be daunting. Fortunately for those people, there are several preset programs included. What's also missing is a method of planning metabolic conditioning circuits (met-cons) that meet the recommended time requirements. How do you go about programming a five minute met-con workout? There are a few templates, but addressing issues of loading and rep schemes and how they will effect the time component is noticeably absent (more on this below).

What Now:

If reading a book hasn't changed the way you do things, reading it was probably a waste of time (it happens). So here's what has changed for me:

1. Adding max rep components for basic exercises. The 10 reps across 3 sets metric made me realize my programming was falling short for pull-ups and dips and other assorted exercises.

2. I'm still trying to find a way to program the perfect met-con. As I mentioned above, FIT calls for met-cons to be either in the 5 minute or the 10 minute range. This isn't the first time I've heard of this limitation, as both the irreverent Outlaw CrossFit and CrossFit Football both follow a similar guideline. I'm pretty good at 

'guesstimating' what should fall into that range, but the scientist in me wants a concrete formula I can test against reality. Digging into 600+ posted workouts and results to gather evidence for this task gets annoying pretty fast, so I can forgive the 'FIT' crew for not having a shake-and-bake solution ready for us. In the words of Uncle Drywall: 'If you think reading the comments section makes you dumber, try mining it for data. Fuck. '

On a final note, Lascek himself just did a post on Prilepin's Chart, and I'm just going to go right ahead and tell myself I was partially responsible for that. Let me have my moment of misplaced self-importance, people. Seriously though, Lascek has been nothing but helpful with his Q&A sessions, so not only is FIT a fantastic resource, it's authors aren't sitting on their laurels; they're an active resource for anyone interested in strength and conditioning.