What's most important: Skill, Strength, or Conditioning?

The answer is as always: it depends...

But this article serves to define when what is most important for YOU, depending on your actual goals and objectives with your training - and of course, your current capacity!

We often see/hear through for instance Social Media things like "Do this to get bar muscle ups!" or "Follow this weightlifting cycle to add 20kg to your back squat!" or "You need to focus on Weightlifting only for a while so you can get 'good at CrossFit'!".
Now if we would follow all of those advices, we'd both need to spend most of our awaken hours in the gym trying to maximise our outcome in ALL areas of fitness, or even more likely: we'd end up hurting ourselves from overtraining joints and muscles by trying to make ourselves good at everything at once..

And whilst all of those tips/programs might have relevance for the right person who truly needs/wants to get good at any individual area of fitness, we believe that this type of over focus on any individual area of training is more often than not not really applicable to most human beings reasons for going to the gym.
As you've heard us say many times before, we believe that for 99% of the people doing Functional Fitness, a well balanced focus on developing Skills over time, increasing Strength slowly, and always having a focus on increased 'general fitness' is likely to be exactly what we need.

But, at the same time we do understand and support the notion of having a training focus that allows YOU to improve in an area considered a weakness, or simply something you enjoy. And a bit further down we'll also define how you can tailor your daily workouts to target specific areas of your fitness if you want to - as an example by using our Super Human Functionality Project, but more on that later.

The most important question is always: What are YOU training for?

For most of our members that's almost always related to GENERAL FITNESS as very few beginners walks through our doors saying "I just realised that I want to be able to do a muscle up, please teach me!".
More often human beings come to us because they want to feel healthier & fitter in general, and have a healthy way to deal with stressors outside of the gym like work and life.

Now if that's the actual reason why you train, then we truly believe that you wont need to stress too much about increasing one area of your fitness, if you just stay consistent you'll improve all of them over time - and can train with your Happiness & Health in mind first!

So WHY do we develop skills & try to get stronger?

Well some of the benefits of getting stronger and unlocking skills like pull ups, rope climbs, etc are quite well known:

• More strength means more capacity in your every day life. If you can deadlift your bodyweight, you're unlikely to struggle as much as most do when moving houses.
• Increased strength also carries over to other sports, as an example it's well documented that endurance athletes increases their capacity (and reduced their injury rate) when adding functional strength to their training regime.
• Gymnastic Skills may or may not carry over directly to your every day life, but they do strengthen the upper body and we also know that stronger muscles burns more calories = makes it easier to "stay in shape".

But what about the most ADVANCED Skills, like Hand Stand Walks, Muscle Ups and Snatches?

Truth be told: Not everyone needs to develop high level skills like this (woah!?). If you never intend to compete in CrossFit, being able to do a muscle up or not wont change your life. Having SOME capacity with a barbell in the more technical Olympic Lifts can absolutely increase your strength, speed and agility and thus give you the benefits mentioned above - but, to be honest you probably wont all of a sudden see a drastic change in your lifestyle because you can Squat Snatch your body weight..

BUT, we do train those movements in our CrossFit-program as they can have other added benefits:

In fitness we measure your INTENSITY as a measure of Power Output, and in a simplified way your power output can be measured by how many times in a given time you are moving an object (either your self or yourself and an external load) from point A to point B.
This means that when you for instance are performing a Squat Snatch you are moving for instance 40kg from the floor to over head in the fastest possible way = your power output can become high if you do many of these = your intensity increases = your FITNESS INCREASES!

The same thing goes for a muscle up where we have the biggest range of motion in regards of pulling gymnastics = bigger power output compared to a pull up or toes to bar.
But here's a cool way to think about it: a Burpee Pull Up has essentially the same functions, pushing and pulling, and it actually moves you through a bigger range of motion than a muscle up = if we can't do muscle ups, we're likely to be able to create a similar power output with a simpler movement.

If we really geek out here we can now also start understanding why getting stronger can help us increase our fitness:
If your technique improves and you are getting stronger, you'll one day be able to move for instance 60kg in those Squat Snatches as fast as you did with 40kg previously = a 50% higher power output = a much higher intensity = even better results.

Now there is also the other added benefit of these advanced skills: THEY ARE FUN!
Mastering an advanced movement that you never thought you could do is a great way to build confidence and yes, that "first muscle up-feeling" is hard to beat.

So, there is a time and place to develop skill & strength, but it's important to understand that for that to have the desired effect of increasing your fitness you need to simultaneously develop all areas of your fitness, including your base conditioning. Otherwise you'll one day be able to do that 60kg Squat Snatch, once, and then needing a break..

Are there times when I SHOULD focus on for instance Skill Development/Strength/Conditioning more than anything else?

Yes, if you do have a desire to compete in any Functional Fitness sport (like CrossFit or HYROX), and especially if you have a specific weaker area that needs to be brought up to a higher level to allow you to compete at a higher level.
But there are also certain times when an aspiring competitive athlete can/should focus on development of specific areas, even if they are relatively well rounded - here's a few examples:

• Competitive CrossFitters.
  These athletes NEED to develop high level Skills AND high levels of Strength as we often see that those are differentiating factors when it comes to the Quarter Finals & Semi Finals of the CrossFit season as an example.
• HYROX Athletes.
  These athletes needs to develop a big Running capacity and as such an added focus on just running can be beneficial. Additional they might need to focus specifically on developing Strength directly correlated to for instance Lunges, Wall Balls and the dreaded Sleds.
• Other Endurance Athletes.
  Depending on the exact sport these athletes needs to develop a specific capacity in Running (Runners & Triathletes), Cycling (Cyclists & Triathletes), Swimming (Swimmers & Triathletes) etc. 

BUT, what's important to note is that all these athletes still needs to be WELL ROUNDED (within the realm of their sport), or they wont be winning any trophies regardless.
A CrossFit athlete that can Snatch a house and do 30 Unbroken Muscle Ups wont be standing at the top of the podium if they can't run 5km in a respectable time and/or lack the base conditioning/mental fitness to do 100 fast unbroken Burpees - those simpler areas of fitness often gets neglected in the pursuit of more "impressive Skills/Strength features" and then comes back and haunts such athletes when they get tested in a broader environment.

But what if I'm like 99% of the people going to a Gym, just looking for more general fitness - surely a little "squat cycle" can't hurt?

Well actually, it can. Not saying that you will automatically get hurt but you will likely hurt your overall outcome if you focus too much on one area..
You see if your program has a big bias towards for example strength development, you will likely see that your strength numbers goes up - but in return you'll sacrifice time and energy that could've been used to build more general fitness, and in return your capacity to improve that will decline. 

And besides that, why did you sign up to go to the Gym initially? We're quite certain that it wasn't to "add 20% to my back squat in 3 months" or "master that super complex [insert gymnastic movement of choice]"?
No, you're likely to have started going to your gym of choice because you just wanted some general fitness, lose/gain some weight, have a proper stress relief from your daily life - and if that's the case, try not to over focus on the things that doesn't matter when it comes to you actually reaching those goals!

Now that said, there definitely is a time for development of Skill & Strength for most people that want to "just get more fit" too, what we are talking about is just making sure that we don't over focus on those two areas versus your general fitness.

You see even though it's cool to get that first pull up/bar muscle up/etc, it shouldn't come at the cost of your effort to improve your ability to run, jump, lift odd objects, and perform other tasks that makes you FIT for life. 
We also think that we, in our sport, sometimes gets over focused on those higher level of skills like muscle ups as an example as they often are seen as "the holy grail of fitness" - but we argue that when it comes to developing fitness, a burpee pull up can be at least as efficient as a bar muscle up - if not more efficient actually..

In our PEAK programs we spend time developing Skills & Strength, often before a workout in our CrossFit-programs as an example, but we still ensure that the majority of the time in training is spent developing fitness with movements that are appropriate for each athletes CURRENT experience level rather than trying to force the development of higher skills/heavier loads. Those things seems to come with time anyway as with our approach we see that the Consistency focus helping athletes get stronger and more skill-ful over time!

So, unless "being competitive" is your goal, we highly recommend you to continue focusing on developing a board base of fitness, don't stress too much about fast tracking your skills or strength development and rather enjoy the journey of seeing those two areas improving naturally over time.

Oh, and if you do have a specific area in mind that you think needs a bit of extra love, follow the below:

Tips for how to smartly target weaker areas of your fitness!

NB: You can use our Super Human Functionality Project data to see how you stack up with your pure strength vs gymnastics vs cardio & conditioning to give you more direction for the below:

• Need more Strength?
  Try to push your loads in workouts up slightly, and sacrifice for instance the higher level of skills to allow yourself to focus on the strength development. 
  In our PEAK CrossFit program that can mean doing a heavier load than you would, and avoiding going for an "RX+" gymnastic movement even if you can.
• Need more Skills? 
  Choose ONE movement of the day where you work close to your limit in regards to skill capacity and focus on that ONLY as the challenging part of that workout = go with lighter loads/efforts in all other movements to allow that focus movement to get your full... focus.
• Need more Basic Conditioning?
  Work with the SIMPLEST variation of gymnastic skills and light loads for weightlifting to allow yourself to focus on moving the whole time and thus maximising your intensity in the WOD.

This approach works equally well if you are doing our CrossFit-, HYROX-, or PEAK SWEAT-WODs as those choices can be correlated to any movements in all of those programs.

In short this is a very long way to explain a simple truth: YOU GET GOOD AT WHAT YOU FOCUS ON, BUT IF YOU OVER FOCUS ON ONE AREA YOU MIGHT END UP "BAD" AT EVERYTHING ELSE.

So make sure you focus on what you actually really need, and not what looks cool on Instagram, and we're pretty sure you'll enjoy your broad and continuous results that will come your way!

Your Team at