Your work-out program should not be random!  

Sometimes people get confused and criticize WODs for being random or get confused thinking a random WOD generator is fine to use for a work-out program.  Our goal at WODatHome.com is General Physical Preparedness (GPP) and this does not come about by randomly selecting work-outs.

Let’s be clear, through GPP, our goal is to be good at as many things as possible under the fitness umbrella.  By training properly, we do not want any aspect of our fitness to reasonably limit us in any way.  Say we took every type of work-out and put it in a hat, sprints, rowing, powerlifting, gymnastics, parkour, Olympic weightlifting, Yoga, long distance cycling, etc..  Our goal is that if any one work-out was drawn at random, we would want to be able to perform the work-out reasonably well.  Say a marathon runner pulls something out of the hat.  They would have a very, very small chance of pulling something they are good at, the long distance run.  If they pulled a one-rep max back squat, tire flips, or gymnastics tumbling, they would be in trouble.  If we drew a bunch of different work-outs, our goal would be to beat the marathon runner on everything except their specialty, long, endurance work-outs.  GPP can be used to assist the specialty athlete, but we are not trying to be the very best at any one thing because another aspect of our fitness would have to suffer.  We want to be good at as many things as possible.

This is where the confusion comes in.  People confuse our goal of being able to perform reasonably well at any random task with how we train to do capable of that.  If we were to randomly draw work-outs to perform each day, our programming would become inefficient and accidentally biased because of the laws of probability.  Let’s say you flip a coin 100 times.  Probability says you will likely have runs of 6 or more of the same flip in a row, multiple times, within the 100 flips.  For this analogy, let’s make heads upper body and tails lower body work-out days.  If you were to randomly draw between these two types of days, within a few months, you could have an entire week where you did upper body every single day.  This is not a smart or effective way to train and will likely cause overtraining as randomness does not take into account the past.

For GPP, within our programming, we need to work on every aspect of our fitness.  As we find things we are lacking, flexibility, strength, endurance, etc., then we want to use that information to target our weaknesses.  We want to include every type of exercise and time durations possible in our program and want we want to be sure we are not over-training any part of our bodies.  Certain movements need certain recovery time and if we are randomly picking work-outs, then our program will be inefficient and redundant at times.

Long story short, if your work-out program is random, then you are missing the big picture.