Teaching to the Test

What if all that mattered was your Fran time?  Like, come time when the bell tolled for you and you walked to the pearly gates, you only got admitted if you could go Rxed and get a sub 3 minute time.  Harsh judgement, right?

Happily, it’s not all that matters but a speedy Fran time is a pretty excellent indicator of general athletic ability.  So what would happen if we taught to the test – that is to say what would happen if all we did was train to get a better Fran time?

We’d do lots of thrusters and pull ups, I suppose.  Then we’d discover that we actually needed to break the thruster movement into components and work some front squats and push presses as well.  After that we’d begin to consider the fact that you’ve actually got to clean the bar at least three times so we’d better go ahead and train the clean and at that point you might as well train the dead lift too… and we better throw in some tabata style running sprints so that we can sustain that high of intensity and… do you see where this is leading?  If we were really teaching to the test properly, we’d end up doing CrossFit.