You’ve probably never done a functional fitness program like this before. Most gyms are heavily biased towards one aspect of fitness or an other, and they tend to overcomplicate, and over program for their athletes. This program will deliver a well balanced functional fitness plan that will have you moving every day, lifting heavy, and sweating your ass off. Keep reading to see if this 30 Day Functional Fitness Program is for you.
This program was written for folks that want a to get their heart rates jacked, with functional fitness. You’ll be lifting weights, doing calisthenics and generally kicking ass. This is really the intended audience for this program.
- Athletes With Limited Time (Less than 30min per session)
- Athletes Returning to the Gym After a Break
- Those Who Are Familiar With The Gym, but Are New to High Intensity training
I expect this program to take most athletes around 30 minutes of total gym time to complete. This should include a 5-10 min warm up, the WOD, and a 10 min cool down. It goes without saying that each of these WODs needs to be at max intensity. You can’t rely on extra work later on because there is none! The WOD is all you get.
This doesn’t mean that every single day is a METCON with light weights. As you look through the program you’ll note that there are heavy days, light days, and familiar metabolic conditioning sessions.
This program is well balanced with enough heavy weight to make sure that newer athletes gain strength and more experienced athletes maintain what they have already built. If you are an experienced athlete, with significant time under the bar, you will need some more specific strength programing as this won’t cut it.
I often receive emails from athletes who are functional fitness curious, but have already spent years in the gym. This will be a great program for them as many of the movements are simple to execute. There aren’t any muscle ups programmed, nor are there any full snatches. That might tempt you to think that this will be easy. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Without further ado, let’s get into the program.
30 Day Functional Fitness Program: WODS Only
This program has you moving every day for 30 days; however, the more astute observers will notice that there are only 28 WODs programmed on the sheet. This leaves us with two days to test and retest.
If I have one gripe with many gyms, and functional fitness programs, it’s the lack of testing. You cannot measure progress if you do not know where you are currently, and how far you’ve come. For this program we are utilizing the benchmark WOD “Fight Gone Bad” as our test. It will be performed first and it will be performed last, before and after the programmed 28 WODs.
I’ve chosen this workout because it is a great test of overall fitness. You can’t score well with only a huge engine, nor can you score well if you are just a strong gym dude. You need to be well rounded, efficient in your movement, and metabolically fit. It’s also a low skill WOD so anyone can test their fitness.
Here is the link to download the PDF of the 30 Day Functional Fitness Program: WODs Only.
This program is fairly simple, requiring only one WOD per day, but that doesn’t mean you should try to rush through the gym as quickly as possible. You will perform much better with a thorough warm up. This is what I recommend for a general warm up template.
- 3-5 Min running, rowing, jogging (raises core temps)
- 5 Min of movement specific warm up (lighter reps with the same moves in the WOD)
- 3-5 Min rest before WOD
I will also caution the more experienced athletes not to feel the standard urge to do more. If you are doing this program, it’s for a reason. You are smart enough to know that you shouldn’t jump right into Matt Fraser’s training regime without some ramp up. Stick to the plan, and execute it with precision and intensity.
As a coach, I would rather an athlete tell me they did all 30 days, and had to scale all the moves, but never missed day, versus someone who did three WODs in one day, and then missed then next week. Once you’ve finished this program you can move onto more severe programs. In fact, I’ve got you covered with 72 weeks of free programming.
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Post Gym Recovery
This part of the equation is just as important as what you did in the gym. I don’t care how fast your time was if you average 5 hours of sleep a night and all the workers at Wendy’s know you by name!
Take a look at this article on nutrition for athletes, and you can download this calculator that will give you a great starting point for your caloric intake, and macro requirements. Lastly, I would recommend that you read this article on recovery practices for athletes that are actually supported by research.
Final Thoughts
I expect most of you to make great progress with this program. It will really hammer your energy systems, and you will be able to bring a lot of intensity to each sessions because you aren’t pre-fatigued by heavy strength and conditioning work before hand.
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Feel free to post your progress, and your questions and comments in the section below. I will see them faster, and be able to answer your questions much easier. Now get out there and start training!
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