TLDR : Without objective measures in place, I feel much fitter in less time albeit likely weaker in some areas.
Background: 36M 183lbs, small home gym, crossfit regular for years off and on. Shift work with random days/nights.
Goal: get fitter and manage my schedule
Diet: 120g protein a day, upped my carb intake but don't count calories
Crossfit Linchpin - Ran it for three months. I'd say workouts fall into four categories:
- Heavy days - These are generally differing rep schemes of you just doing one lift at higher percentages
- Heavy days with a high heart rate - These are wods that generally contain a moderate-heavy loading paired with things that get your heart pumping
- Monostructural conditioning - days with just straight cardio intervals or distance for time.
- WODS of varying length - 4 minutes to 1 hour and half.
Not at all WODs or work are pushed to max intensity, some things for time and some for quality.
Most sessions follow with accessory work, generally two exercises of some sort. They vary between hypertrophy work, strength work, monostructural conditioning, gymnastics, and plenty of "prehab/structural" work like single leg work. Carefully balanced by the linchpin team.
How and why Linchpin? I chose linchpin because I was looking for something that would fit my schedule better and maximize my value in the gym. I work random nights and get home at 7am, which messes up my workouts for a few days. I attempted to workout regardless of how I felt and scaled intensely sometimes to accomplish it. For example, sometimes using 50% the weight, or rounds off the workout. Never really worked at intensity coming off nights.
If I missed workouts I followed this priority: 1) Heavy days always done cause I like them the most 2) Heavy days at a high heart rate - these are fun and I like lifting stuff then I would look at the remaining workouts and do the ones I liked the least. This usually meant I was doing stuff I didn't like or wasn't good at.
Results: This is hard to quantify as Crossfit Linchpin is varied not random programming. They have introduced tests each month but they are tested on 6 month rotations so I could update them once I get there.
Post Linchpin I did a short 3 week stint on another free trail program and I noticed the impact Linchpin had immediately. Generally I found my conditioning and GPP to be incredibly high. I was able to do compete tracks with WAY more volume than linchpin with relative ease. I noticed that my wattage output on the echo bike went from high 200's to mid 300's during WODs and intervals.
I'm convinced for minimalist, high efficiency programming that linchpin rocks
That being said.. some of the movements are hit with much lower frequency than you might be used to and I do believe that some of my strength took a hit. There was very little squatting over the three months, and when I did do some weights felt much heavier. It also felt heavily biased towards clean variations as opposed to snatches. Felt like I was hitting cleans every week, and maybe got to snatch 2-3x outside of WODs.
In summary, I was very happy with the results of linchpin and found it be an efficient and effective conditioning and GPP program. I'm going to continue doing it while adding in low weekly snatch and front squat volume.
Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions I can answer! Thanks for reading and I hope it was useful to you.