Our coaching and workouts at RxFIT are aimed to help you (eventually) accomplish anything, anywhere, at any time. An acronym often used to describe our methodology is GPP — short for general physical preparedness.

Coach Greg Glassman has made the following statements at various times on the topic of GPP. I believe it sums up this topic well:

• GPP is the most underdeveloped and neglected aspect of athletic training, especially in elite athletes.
• Every athlete we’ve worked with, from Olympic medalists to UFC legends, has some glaring chink in his/her GPP, and it takes at most two hours, two sessions, on average, to find these chinks.
• Fixing these chinks, these deficiencies, has immediate benefit within your sport and very often in ways not quite obvious mechanically and perhaps metabolically. For instance, more pull-ups make for better skiing and skiers. Upper-body pushing movements make for better rowing and rowers. Anaerobic training is a boon to endurance athletes.
• There’s greater margin for improving performance in elite athletes, where the margins of victory are very tight, in improving GPP than can be garnered through additional sport-specific training.
• CrossFit-style workouts will for many sports reduce the total training volume, reduce training injuries, and allow more time for vital sport-specific skills and drills.
• Sport training and physiology are not so well understood that highly specialized strength and conditioning routines are optimally effective.

Takeaway

Seek to develop capacity in weightlifting, calisthenics, and your cardio. Work out in short, medium, and long time domains.

Then, mix and match these movements and time domains in as many ways as creativity will allow in order to optimize your GPP.

Tyler