Green Protocol (the book) Capacity review
Training History:
Two years ago I got into crossfit and enjoyed that for about 18 months before I started to feel burnt out from the constant high intensity work. I was happy with crossfit, but found that I could only go to 3-4 classes a week before I would start to feel super banged up. I also had a wake up call where I joined a buddy on a big mountain run and got absolutely crushed- my endurance was trash. I had been lulled along thinking I was fit because my 20 minute WODs were improving, but found I couldn't walk uphill for more than an hour before I would start to bonk. Recognizing the shortfall in my training I started trying to add in endurance training to my crossfitting. This is when crossfit really stopped making sense for me.
The complete randomness of the programming would screw up my programming and frustrated me to the point of cancelling my membership. Some days I would show up hoping for a HIT workout and instead get hit with a Heavy deadlift workout, or worse a squat clean session focused on technique and mobility. Other times a HIIT workout would leave me unable to do my threshold run the next day. Just chaos!
I concluded that crossfit stops making sense as soon as you have any kind of specific training goal. For me that goal had shifted to endurance, so I needed to find a more efficient way to get my strength training in other than CrossFit.
I got pretty lazy for the next 6 months (burnout), and didn’t really follow any training plan until I found the tactical barbell programs.
Green protocol seemed to fit my goals perfectly so I picked up the book and started reading.
The Plan:
I started with capacity and built a spreadsheet for my individualized plan so that I could shift deload weeks around to match our planned vacations. I like this approach because it allows me to input my actual known travel schedule and find ways to work around that.
My Compliance:
I fed my plan into Claude, as well as my actual logs from strava and my iphone notes app and asked it to give me a compliance grade, it gave me a B+.
And that’s a fair assessment- I’m kinda a piece of shit. I somewhat regularly drink too much with my buddies and skip workouts because of the headache the next day.
Mistakes I made:
Not getting accurate 1RM’s to start, and scaling up too quickly
Instead of doing a quick testing week to establish accurate 1RM’s I looked at my crossfit app (after 6 months of not really training), and just multiplied those 1RM’s by .7 to set my 1RM.
To my surprise these ended up being mostly too easy. I had maintained more strength than I expected. They felt so easy that once I was a few weeks in I felt the need to adjust them. Since I wasn’t having any soreness at all I thought it would be alright to jump up nearly 20% on all the lifts and try that. That ended up hammering me, and made me so sore I had to skip several run days due to DOMS.
Trying to run the program in a caloric deficit
A few weeks into the program I decided I wanted to lose a little fat and decided to start counting calories and trying to run a slight deficit. Within 5 days I started feeling sick and worn out. I just couldn’t recover well even with a slight deficit. I abandoned the diet, reverting back to my standard diet and immediately started feeling better and making gains again.
Things I did correctly:
Not taking it too seriously
I have a family and a stressful job. I’m not a professional and probably never will be again. Not taking the program too seriously and allowing myself to recover when I feel like I needed to has made me feel like this is a training methodology I'll be able to stick to long term. I can squeeze in these short workouts anywhere in the week I have space, and I found the lifting intensity to be very manageable. I’m SHOCKED to discover that I can make serious gains without doing workouts that make me feel like throwing up or leave me shaking with bambi legs. This program is so much easier than other things I’ve done, and yet it seems to also be the most effective program I’ve ever done!
Learning to enjoy the process
In one of the books he mentions doing strength workouts with the mentality that you are ‘practicing your strength’. That mindset really helped me frame these workouts, I’m so accustomed to the ‘no pain no gain’ mentality that this felt like a breath of fresh air. I don’t have to crush myself to get results anymore.
Additional planning within the framework
One thing I saw as a shortcoming in the Capacity program is that there is no discussion of how to go about increasing your mileage or training time within the bounds laid out in the template.
For example weeks 1-3 have you running 120-210 minutes per week. Then on week 5 you jump up to 210-300 minutes per week. At a 10 minute per mile pace that would have you potentially jumping from 12 miles per week up to 21 miles per week without any kind of ramp up!
Once I understood the goals of the plan, I set a rule for myself that I wouldn’t increase mileage by more than 10% in any week, and tried to stick to that throughout the summer even if it meant deviating from the template a bit. By pushing for 10% mileage increases per week I still felt like I got what I needed out of the program, and never developed injuries.
Plyometrics
A few weeks into the program I started incorporating some easy plyometrics into my strength training warm ups consisting of 5-10 minutes of jumping rope. This made some immediate improvements to my running, my legs felt springier and overall made the running feel easier. 10/10 recommend adding jump rope to your warm ups.
Results:
Added a full inch to my biceps and chest measurements!
A fellow parent at school who didn’t see me all summer commented that they could tell I put on a lot of muscle over the summer!
6 mile run time: 57:40 -> 54:40
Back squat: ~200 -> 265 lbs
Body weight Pull ups: 8 -> 16 reps
Dead lift: ? -> 265 lbs
Bench press: 155 -> 205lbs
Body weight: 185 -> 190 lbs
I’m really happy with my results. I’m just as strong if not stronger than I was while cross fitting, but the day to day workouts are way more tolerable and my endurance is much better. Could I knock out a high intensity Cindy type workout right now? Yes- but maybe not as quickly as I could while cross fitting. But I’m pretty confident if I switched to the breacher template for a few weeks I could actually perform better at these WODs then I ever did while cross fitting since I’d be starting with more strength and endurance base than I ever had.
I am pretty disappointed with my run time change. I may try the time trial again later this week to see if that was just due to fatigue from last week's unplanned trail runs. I really thought I might be able to hold an 8 min/ mile pace throughout but that felt pretty far out of reach. The effort felt weird since I haven’t even tried to run fast for the last almost 3 months! Maybe that’s to be expected with this type of program. I am curious if anyone else has experienced lackluster run time improvement during capacity.
Other notes:
I almost skipped capacity. The benchmark seemed easy and I passed the benchmark during my initial assessment without even pushing hard. I’m glad I didn’t! I think jumping into velocity would have gotten me injured since I was only running about 12 miles per week at that time. The first week of velocity has you clocking about 22 miles! That’s nothing to sneeze at and justifies a slow ramp up.
HEAT- holy smokes this summer was hot. My runs regularly turned into complete suffer tests due to the heat. My LSS runs were almost certainly at too high of an intensity due to the heat. I almost always just kept running as slow as I could even if I knew my heart rate was probably too high.
What I’m going to do moving forward:
I’m planning on rolling this straight into the velocity program. I have a specific trail run I want to train for and put up a decent time on, and I still want to improve my 6 mile time to be less than 48 minutes.
I live in a very mountainous area so I’m considering adding some elements of Scott Johnston's Training for the Uphill Athlete into my training. He recommends tracking both mileage and vertical gain on a weekly basis which I think would help me prepare for my specific goal well. He also has some recommended muscular endurance protocols for mountain runners that I may try to incorporate into my training eventually. Still tbd on that.
Planned fighter cluster:
BSS, OHP, WPU + 1 working set of deadlift per week
I’m considering adding the ab triad from TB3 in as part of a burn down session on weight training days.
During this strength block I want to be a bit more intentional about forcing progression on a 3/6 week basis as needed. I think this will make it easier for me to start with conservative training maxes but still develop strength well throughout the 17 week long block.
I’m considering alternating OHP with normal bench press because I’m generally bad at bench press and don’t want to lose the gains I’ve made so far. Anyone experimented with this?