Interview with Carl Paoli

Thanks to Felix Ledin who got this great interview for the SM-blog. Enjoy and make sure to be excellent at SM (if you follow Carl’s tips, I’m sure you will).

Two weeks ago I visited CrossFit Uppsala to participate at Carl Paoli’s first gymnastics seminar in Sweden. As a former elite level gymnast, he has become a part of the CrossFit platform in teaching people to see and understand both the movements and importance of form in gymnastics. He is often seen in videos on the CrossFit Journal where he teaches said skills.

Carl was kind enough to give me a quick interview after a long day about the importance of form in CrossFit and gymnastic movements, the constant battle between technique and intensity and give some insight into his own philosophy and view of CrossFit and where it’s headed.

 

Felix: Do you have any basic tips for CrossFitt:ers who want to improve their gymnastics; something you usually see is a problem?

Carl: Well, I think, from a gymnastic standpoint, form, and the execution of the movement is everything, but applied to CrossFit, one of the things you’ll want to do is understand what integrity of the movement means, what it means to move well, to make it efficient and to be able to translate it into other thing. I think that’s kind of the take home thing – how well can you move with good positioning in order to execute better performance in competition or general fitness, or just picking up your baby if that’s what you’re doing.

 

So would the most important thing to remember be technique over intensity?

I wouldn’t say that, because intensity is a great way of seeing where certain things happen. We can do everything from a very technical standpoint, but unless we put intensity in the picture it won’t showcase where your real holes are as an athlete or in your basic performance. So intensity is definitely a must, but it’s a constant battle between technique and intensity and how we define that. From a gymnastic standpoint, again, we’re trying to be as sound as we possibly can, but that doesn’t mean we don’t let the wheels fall off once in awhile.

 

If you were to give three tips to an individual competing in SM this October, what would those three tips be?

A: consistency in your practice. Just make sure that you’re consistent throughout the competition, consistent throughout your build-up, and how you come out of it. That’s the big one.

The next one is chase quality. Trust that all the work that you’ve done is going to pay off, so if you’ve worked on technique, stick to that technique, if you have a strategy, stick to that strategy. Trust your method so that consistency and then chasing quality is key.

The third thing is to keep your attitude in check, because immediately you’re going to either think that you’re winning, and that’s not good, or you think that you’re losing – and that’s not good either. So something in the middle. Can you stay true to yourself and really just think “attitude: check”.

 

What is your own training philosophy, do you train a lot of CrossFit?

Yes, I think 90 % of my practise is CrossFit, strength and conditioning of course, and maybe 10% of it is aerial work for snowboarders, skiers, gymnasts, and then there’s of course a percentage of just strict gymnastics. But, 90% is CrossFit and that’s what I spend most of my time doing. I don’t like getting under the barbell but I do it anyway, because I know it makes me better.

 

What inspires you?

That’s a good question. There are a lot of thing that inspire me, but I think one of the things that really inspires me is to make a difference, to make an impact in how things are seen and perceived and executed upon. The CrossFit community really inspires me on how it’s driven by a common thought of wanting to create the best fitness program on the planet, and really come to the consensus of what that means. Then of course there are other coaches out there – specialists – that come onboard and are in the platform and have a lot of good stuff to say that I look up to and I think are fantastic.

 

A question about the recent CrossFit Games: how good do you think the competition was, in terms of fitness, programming, well basically everything?

I think it was great. It’s still superyoung but I think they’re doing a great job of hitting that wide spectrum. One of the things that’s very interesting is that now that they have ten workouts that are set; and they know a couple of days ahead that they’ve [the athletes] ten workouts, they know a couple of the workouts that are going to happen: I think it’s totally legit. I think they hit the whole spectrum where there were fairly heavy loads, there were fairly long distances in some of the workouts, and there was a lot of skill based stuff, so it was well rounded. I think it’s extremely hard to pull off a competition like that, but they’ve done it really well, so I’m pretty impressed.

 

Do you have any advice you would like to give to the Games, from your standpoint?

To be honest with you, the only advice I would say is that don’t stop exploring. Don’t be happy with that you have, you know? Just keep making it better, and I think they’re on that track so it’s pretty cool to see.

 

One last question. in what direction do you think CrossFit is going, both as a sport and as a modality for fitness? Do you see them diverging or merging in the long run?

It definitely looks like it’s diverging, because you see the sport of CrossFit, how you go about it, is a little bit different. But then you see the fitness program is the same thing as the sport, it’s just that the sport is on a given day that you know, and you know what time to be there. You don’t know what the workouts are going to be but you can be generally prepared for it. And if they’ve been programming like they’ve been programming until now, for the Games, I think it’s something you can prepare for. You will always know that there’s something you’ve never done before and you better be very good at learning how to do that. But everything else is pretty general.

 

On the fitness side, I think that, many years ago now – ten years ago – the pendulum had a swing in that direction where we had to step out of the commercial gyms, we had to go and say “hey, what is real here?” and being able to strip the fitness industry away from all of those gadgets and gimmicks and just really stick to the real, raw strength, real, raw endurance and then using body skill and body weight exercises, like gymnastics, has really brought it in full circle. But now, as it starts evolving, more and more people are starting to come in that are specialists, and it’s become a platform for people to discuss this stuff. You realize that there’s an infinite amount of ways to go about it, but there’s nothing that can beat intensity, you know? Intensity is always going to give results in your fitness, and that’s what it is.

When you look at where the sport is standing and where fitness is standing, fitness is the base of your sport. So it doesn’t matter what you’re practising, sport is always applicable back into your fitness because it’s the fitness where you perform the movements, so I never see them diverging, I think they’re only going together. So, for me, from an outsider’s perspective, they may see it, but when you’re in the mix you realize it’s the same, because I do the same workouts with the top athletes out there as I do with my private clients that work at a desk job.

 

Awesome. Thank you for the interview!

You’re welcome!