Episode 1533 - 2023 CrossFit Games Takeaways

Dr. Kelly Benfey // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete faculty member Kelly Benfey discusses her experience competing at the 2023 CrossFit Games, the role of rehabilitation providers in competitive sport, and the capacity of the human body for exercise as it ages.

Take a listen to the episode or read the episode transcription below.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

00:00 INTRO What's up everybody? Before we get rolling, I'd love to share a bit about Jane, the practice management software that we love and use here at ICE who are also our show sponsor. Jane knows that collecting new patient info, their consent and signatures can be a time consuming process, but with their automated forms, it does not have to be. With Jane, you can assign intake forms to specific treatments or practitioners, and Jane takes care of sending the correct form out to your patients. Save even more time by requesting a credit card on file through your intake forms with the help of Jane Payments, their integrated PCI compliant payment solution. Conveniently, Jane will actually prompt your patients to fill out their intake form 24 hours before their appointment if they have not done so already. If you're looking to streamline your intake form collection, head over to jane.app slash physical therapy, book a one-on-one demo with a member of the Jane team. They'll be able to show you the features I just mentioned and answer any other questions you may have. Don't forget, if you do sign up, use the code ICEPT1MO for a one month grace period applied to your new account. Thanks everybody, enjoy the show.

01:33 KELLY BENFEY Good morning and welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. It's Fitness Athlete Friday and my name is Kelly Benfey. I just wrapped up an amazing CrossFit season where I got to compete at the CrossFit Games. And so what we're going to get to talk about this Fitness Athlete Friday is going to be a couple takeaways from the CrossFit Games that I think are relevant in the rehab space. Before we jump into that, though, within our Fitness Athlete crew, we have a couple of online courses coming up that I just want to bring to your attention. So we just wrapped up an awesome cohort with our clinical management of the Fitness Athlete Essential Foundations course online. And so our next course is going to be kicking off in a few weeks on September 11th. That course always fills up. So if you're thinking about it, please jump in with us, grab your spot right now. And then if you've already taken that and you're looking to continue developing your skill set, our Advanced Concepts course that's only offered two times a year is also starting September 17th. So rarer opportunity to hop in on that one. So if you've been looking to take this course, that's going to get started quite soon. And then we have a handful of live courses for the remainder of the year. So all of that information is going to be on PTice.com, PTonice.com. So we hope to catch you live on the road. I'd love to see you all. So we'll be getting back on the road for the remainder of this year to finish strong. So let's get into our topic. Of course, I could talk about this stuff all day if you know me. So we're talking CrossFit Games takeaways. A couple of things that I experienced and found were relevant in the rehab space. This is Fitness Athlete Friday, so we get to geek out on all things, CrossFit Games, CrossFit competition, all that good stuff. So number one, I have five different things that we'll kind of work through. 03:35 HUMAN CAPABILITY So number one, I always leave the CrossFit Games feeling absolutely motivated and inspired by what the human is actually capable of doing. So I really it was it was just such an honor to be on the same field as some of these amazing, amazing athletes, be behind the scenes and all that good stuff. So a couple highlights that I saw now just to I competed in the team division. So it actually didn't allow me to watch as much as the individual competition. I'm still working through catching up on that all the live the live coverage that they had. But I got to be within the team division. So one of the athletes in the team division, she clean and jerked 250 pounds and then a couple hours later ran a 5K, 4.5 ish K, 5K in under 20 minutes. So it just always impresses me that people can excel in things that I also excel in the strength events, yet also push their aerobic capacity and monostructural skills to an insane level as well. So it was just absolutely mind blowing to see athletes also just I know how hard we worked on my team and just having other athletes really push the boundaries. I find to be super inspiring as a competitive athlete. And then moving moving towards almost even debatably more inspiring. 04:11 OLDER ADULTS PUSHING BOUNDARIES The age group divisions are always just such a blast to watch. I wish they had a little bit more coverage because arguably that's more these are more the athletes that are relatable and even more inspiring. For example, the 60 plus division, I believe the 60 60 to 64 division, both men and women had bar muscle ups in their last event. So these are our older adults crushing it, doing high skill level at a very high competitive level. Just absolutely amazing. And like I had the opportunity, my mom came and watch. She's going to watch me and have a blast, obviously, but she's not necessarily going to see like watch me and think, oh, wow, that's something I can do. She's going to see something in her age division and then become inspired of, hey, maybe I'm going to start my barbell class in my gym, for example. So I just think the human capabilities, even in our older adult divisions, is just as important as what the individual and team athletes are doing. The professional athletes, if you will. And then we also have the adaptive visions that are starting to grow and the upper extremity adaptive athletes were performing rope climbs. Rope climbs are hard enough when you have two upper extremities to grip onto the rope with. They were doing it with one and we're also sealing our lower adaptive lower extremity adaptive divisions, doing things like box jumps and maxing out their clean and jerk and snatch and really just taking no opportunity to have an excuse to not push their fitness forward and continue to be athletic and competitive in their sport. So I absolutely love seeing those. I wish I got to see a little bit more of it. I wish we got to view a little bit more of it on the broadcast, so hopefully we'll be able to continue pushing that forward. I just saw a couple posts of highlighting those athletes, so keep keep those in the forefront of your mind. That's what's really inspiring to more people, I think, in this world, in our country. OK, so the next three points that I want to kind of work through all kind of build off of each other. 09:20 INJURY RATES & PROGRAMMING So one thing that I thought was really relevant this year at the Games was the programming. And like I said, I have paid attention a lot to a lot more detail of our team division programming, but I just wanted to bring your attention as a rehab professional, as a movement specialist that's working with athletes all the time. I think it was important to note this. So just a couple examples. So in our competition, we had four days of competition. On day one, we had overhead squats at 135 pounds and 95 pounds. Then day two, we had a one rep, one rep max snatch. And then on day three, we had more snatches at 185 pounds and 135 pounds with running. So that's back to back days that we're seeing a barbell shoulder stability type exercise that is very demanding on the shoulders. In general programming, we would probably look to spread the frequency out of when we're doing things like overhead squat and snatching. Being able to do those back to back days can challenge the shoulder and challenges your ability to recover and perform repeatedly. Another thing that I noticed as on our day two, we had a strict ring muscle up to a front support hold. So going through that pole to deep press and hold at the top of the unstable rings is really challenging for the shoulders. And then right into day three, we had 30 synchro ring muscle ups on the long straps, which are tough. And then 63 more parallet bar dips. So that's a lot of vertical pressing for the shoulder to get through back to back days. And so I've personally experienced issues with pressing with shoulder pain. I've worked with a handful of athletes that recently have been that's a common theme in our clinic that I'm working with. So that is I remember if I was in the middle of having a flare up of that shoulder pain presentation, it would be really hard to be able to do that back to back days because you can always push through one workout. Adrenaline is a really strong drug, I would say that helps