The Lay of the Land

Reading through a CF Affiliates’ Page post on members cheering during conditioners before today’s conditioner got me to thinking now would be a good time to put out some thoughts on expectations in here.  If that sounds ominous, stay with me because I think you’ll find this pretty useful.

When I was training in a CrossFit gym, we were close enough to Boston to experience a fairly high degree of turnover–students moving in and out of the school year, folks changing jobs and schedules, the wintertime reducing morning classes to people crazy enough to walk through Mission Hill in the dark (happily, I was).  So my experience there as an athlete was in part defined by a ton of cheerleading (some  instructors insisted you not put your equipment away until everyone was done with the conditioning) and at least 10-15 minutes of reteaching movements, sometimes to folks that could do them in their sleep, before metcons lest anyone get left behind.

I’m not complaining–I loved it there, as many of you know, and I think that setup was absolutely perfect for its trainers and community.  I’ve taken a lot of what I learned there and brought it here.  Some has stuck, like getting names on the board and letting folks know that working together is part of the deal here, and some has not, like burpees for lateness and mandated cheering (though of course we love when folks yell for each other!).

A concept that I think is fairly unique to our gym is the idea that we are working off a fairly discrete pool of movements for conditioning.  I like this for many reasons, not the least of which is that I want you doing things you don’t have to think a ton about when you’re being asked to move violently and with dispatch.  More to the point logistically, especially since the great majority of you have been here forever (thank you for that, we love you, please keep coming!), this means we don’t have to spend 5-10 minutes bringing movements up from Point A for the conditioner.  This doesn’t mean we won’t do guided drills occasionally as we see fit, but it does mean we expect that those of you who have been with us for a while to have working knowledge of the following movements that we teach in On-Ramp:

Squats, Presses and Push Presses (barbell and dumbbell), Bench, Rows (barbell and dumbbell), Deadlifts, KB Swings, Power Cleans, DB Cleans, DB Snatches, Pushups, Situps, and Ring Rows.

These movements, along with running, carrying, rowing, and pushing, do comprise and will comprise the majority of our conditioners over the time.  If you’re unfamiliar with anything you see above, or out of practice, take some time on a Tuesday, Thurs, or Saturday during Cardio/Makeup/Open Gym time to come in and get with one of us for some practice and progressions so that you can get these movements into your toolbox for conditioning.

Of course, as always, we will give you feedback and look to fine tune these things as you are performing them, but we want and expect the working knowledge to be there so we can teach up!

Thanks for reading.  As always hit me up with any questions.

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