Orla Tvedt has coached CrossFit athletes at the collegiate level for six years. We asked her to walk us through the volume-related mistakes she sees most often in student programming.
Volume as the misunderstood variable
Q: What is the most misunderstood part of periodization for students?
Orla: Volume. Students read that elite athletes train twice a day and assume more is always better. But elite athletes have years of adaptation behind them. A student in their first structured program adding two extra metcons per week is not training harder, they are accumulating fatigue without the recovery capacity to process it. Volume needs to match the training age of the athlete, not their ambition.
When intensity and volume collide
Q: Does this create problems with intensity management too?
Orla: Always. When volume is too high, athletes cannot hit the intensity targets that actually drive adaptation. So they end up doing a lot of medium-effort work, which is the least productive zone in CrossFit. A well-structured mesocycle might have you doing fewer total workouts but hitting genuinely hard efforts on the days that matter. Students find that counterintuitive because rest days feel like lost progress.
Practical signs you have the volume wrong
Q: How does a student know they have the volume wrong?
Orla: Three signals. First, your performance drops in week three of a four-week block instead of peaking. Second, your sleep quality gets worse despite feeling tired. Third, your motivation to train disappears around mid-cycle. Any one of those is worth paying attention to. All three together means you need to cut volume by roughly a third and reassess.
Orla Tvedt works with student athletic programs and writes about evidence-based CrossFit programming.