The Compound: Part One
The 2026/2027 season of Misfit Affiliate programming kicks off May 4th. We’ve planned the full year, mapped out the progressions, and built everything with a clear direction in mind. Phase one of that season is eight weeks long. It has a name with more meaning than I originally planned for.
Let me explain what we built, why we built it, and how to sell it to your gym.
Why We Do Seasons
I want to start here because this is the part that makes everything else work better.
Planning a full season gives us a macro perspective. We can see where we’re trying to take athletes twelve months from now and build backward from there. Each phase has a job. Each phase sets up the next one. The Compound is phase one of that arc. Everything athletes build in these eight weeks is going to show up later in the year, and when it does, the buy-in that felt abstract in May is going to feel very concrete.
That structure also gives you something to sell. Not “we’re doing deadlifts this month,” but “this is the foundation of what we’re building this year.” Those are very different conversations to have with your members, and one of them keeps people around a lot longer than the other.
Without the structure, training starts to feel like being dropped in the middle of a cornfield with no road in sight. You’ll wander. Your members will wander. Eight weeks at a time, with a clear bias and a clear name, gives you a road. Six weeks in, when the deadlifts are moving better and the strict pull-ups are starting to look like strict pull-ups, you can say, “See? That’s what happens when we follow the road.” That’s the retention play. Not a gimmick. Just progress people can actually see.
Where the Name Comes From
I happened upon a triple meaning on this one, which I’ll take.
The original image came from the kind of gym I grew up training in. Black walls. Dim lights. A few bars, some plates, and a floor. The kind of place that exists for one reason. People call those places compounds. There’s an energy to that word. You go there to work.
Then the obvious one: the deadlift and the bench press are two of the most popular and effective compound lifts in existence. Check, check.
And then the one I like most. Compounding. The process of combining, mixing, and altering elements to create a new whole. That’s exactly what this phase is doing. We are taking foundational movement, foundational strength, foundational aerobic capacity, and mixing them together over eight weeks to create a better, more complete athlete on the other side.
That’s not a tagline. That’s what happens when you actually follow a program.
If you want to shut off half the lights in your gym during the deadlift sessions and throw on some Metallica, I am fully on board. If that’s your vibe, it’s not a joke. If it’s not, you get the idea.
What a Week Looks Like
Here’s the skeleton: heavy deadlift with PAP on alternating weeks, bench press paired with conditioning on the other weeks, strict pulling and strict pressing, rotating through as gymnastics strength work, running one to two times per week, and Murph prep on Sundays.
That’s it. Before you overthink it, that’s a week of CrossFit done well. Let me go piece by piece.
Deadlift plus PAP. On the weeks where deadlift is the lift only day, athletes are going to pull a heavy set and then immediately do something explosive. A bike sprint. A broad jump. A vertical leap. PAP stands for post-activation potentiation, which sounds complicated and isn’t. You do something heavy, and the nervous system gets fired up. You take advantage of that by immediately doing something explosive while the tissues are primed. The result is power output you might not otherwise access.
What I love about PAP in the affiliate setting is that it works for everyone. The beginner who doesn’t know what it feels like to be powerful yet? PAP teaches them. You cannot lift something truly heavy and then jump slowly. It’s physically impossible. So you prove to them that they have another gear, right there in the session. The advanced athlete who’s already good at recruiting motor units? Makes them more powerful and stronger. And the athlete who only goes at one speed, no matter what? This is the thing that starts to crack that open.
Bench press paired with conditioning. The bench press doesn’t carry the same central nervous system demand as the deadlift, so we pair it with a conditioning piece on those weeks. Lift only bench days, by about the fourth week, tend to have a few members wandering around wondering what to do with themselves. We solve that by pairing it. And before anyone raises an eyebrow: CrossFitters should want a stronger bench press. The foundational pressing strength required to be good on a wall or on a pull-up bar starts with your ability to press in the horizontal plane. The back has to be strong for the bench to be strong. And a strong back is the foundation of everything that happens overhead. These things are not separate.
Strict pulling and pressing. This is the gymnastics bias of the phase, and it alternates weeks between strict pull-ups and strict handstand pushups. The scale for a strict handstand pushup is never a kipping handstand pushup. The scale for a strict pull-up is never a kipping pull-up. We need to build the foundational strength, and there is no shortcut through the kipping version.
Full range of motion is the thing I need you to be loudest about as a coach. Not 14 ab mats for the handstand pushup. Not a barely-there chin over the bar. The range of motion is where the adaptation lives. It is also the hardest part to enforce because athletes want to check the box and move on. Your job is to make the range of motion non-negotiable and then teach them why. Athletes who develop real strength through full range of motion are the ones who eventually become freakish at the kipping versions. The sequence matters. Do not skip it.
Isometrics are worth their weight in gold here. Dead hangs, handstand holds, the top of a pushup, a plank. These positions are moving the needle on shoulder health, traction, and mobility in ways that the dynamic versions can’t fully replicate. It’s hard to build a structured isometric program into a one-hour class, but threading them into warm-ups and accessory work is absolutely doable. Eccentrics too. Slow lowering on the pull-up, controlled descent on the pushup. Physical therapists use eccentrics for rehab. We use them for development. They’re the same movement. The adaptation is the same.
Running one to two times per week. Yes, we’re still doing monostructural conditioning. Yes, we’ve gotten better at disguising it. No, that’s not dishonest. It’s programming. The shift over the last twelve to eighteen months has been toward integrating the aerobic bias into mixed modal pieces rather than isolating it. It’s still there. It’s still bringing the heat. It’s just more digestible and it produces more GPP. You are doing CrossFit. It just looks like CrossFit.
The coaching point on running is pacing. A lot of your members are going to torch the first quarter mile of a 20-minute workout and spend the rest of it in survival mode. Coach them to back off at the start. Tell them the watch doesn’t lie. A 5:45 pace in minute one of a 20-minute workout is not a strategy. It’s a choice they’re going to regret loudly and publicly. Help them before they make it.
Sundays: Murph prep. The engine programming is no longer a separate side program. It’s Day 7. That means when you’re on a programming partner and you see the full week, it’s right there. Some of you already had a Sunday class. Some of you are adding one. Either way, make sure your members understand that seven days of programming available does not mean seven days of training required. Talk about rest. Talk about the difference between what’s on the schedule and what their body actually needs in a given week. The puzzle piece of Murph prep on top of bench pressing and pull-ups is a square peg in a round hole by design. That’s not a bug. It’s Murph. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable and slightly chaotic. That’s the whole point of it.
The Lift Only Day Conversation
I want to spend a minute here because this is where affiliate gyms lose the game.
You will have members who don’t like lift only days. They will be vocal about it. Some of them will add a hundred pounds to their deadlift over two years and keep complaining the whole time. Let them. The solution is not to remove the lift only day. The solution is to get so good at coaching one that people can’t help but be engaged.
If you or someone on your coaching staff is uncomfortable with a lift only day, that’s the information. Not a reason to cut the day. A reason to develop the skill. Go take a lift only class from a coach who does it well. Buy them a coffee and ask how they think about the hour. Watch how they build a warm-up, how they sequence the coaching cues, how they keep people moving and focused. A well-run lift only day is one of the best hours you can offer your members. It’s a focused, technical hour where you have the time to actually teach. Most coaches don’t have that time on a standard MetCon day.
The coaches who think a lift only day isn’t worth their time are usually the ones who haven’t figured out how to fill it. The coaches who love it are the ones who ran out of things to cover and had to talk faster. That gap is coachable. Go close it.
The same applies to your members. They don’t like what they don’t understand. Once they understand that these are the days that build the platform everything else runs on, they stop complaining. And when they come back around to the phase a year later and they see what they can do now that they couldn’t do before, the complaining stops permanently.
The Big Picture
The Compound is step one. Part two will move to the back squat. We’re building sequentially. Everything in this phase sets the table for what comes after it.
The athletes who trust the road will be in a completely different place eight weeks from now. Not because the programming is magic. Because compounding works. One good week added to another good week added to another good week, with the right foundation underneath all of it, produces athletes who are genuinely harder to beat.
That’s the goal. That’s always been the goal. Go build your compound.
The 2026/2027 season starts Monday, May 4th with The Compound: Part One. Two-week free trials are available through StreamFit, Push Press, and SugarWOD. If you want a PDF preview or want to set up a call, reach out directly at coach@misfitathletics.com and we’ll get it done.
See you Monday.
– Drew (& Hunter, Kyle, and Paige)