James was well known within the CrossFit community as the champion of the inaugural CrossFit Games as well as the coach to many athletes competing at a high level in the sport.Īt that point in time, I wrote my own training, but I would read the Big Dawgs blog and try to understand some of the "whys" behind the complicated prescriptions of tempos and work-to-rest ratios. Throughout this process of research, I started following along with James FitzGerald's "Big Dawgs Blog" and being confused at the contrast between the somewhat silly name and the extremely technical training prescriptions that made no sense to me. I remember downloading a PDF of Zatsiorsky's "Science and Practice of Strength Training" and somehow managing to read that thing on my Kindle – which is insane and a testament to an attention span that I think I no longer have. I started reading dense training manuals from Yuri Verkhoshansky, Vladimir Zatsiorsky and Louie Simmons.
In typical information hoarder practice, I began to search out as much as I could find on the principles of program design. I first started coaching in CrossFit back in 2010, and at some point in 2011, I transitioned into the role of writing programming for the gym that I was working at.