The day began with a solved crime, a crime that started last night. As some of you might now, I (Mart) am a fanatic motorsykkel-driver, and to do so, one would need motorsykkel-skoene. What a suprise was it yesterday then, to find my boots missing. It´s a weird thing to ´steal´, since they´re very personal and fit my foot barely, size 45, where the boots left at the gym were 46. Somebody got really messed up after yesterdays workout and decided to squeeze his size 46-feet in my size 44.5 boots and thought that was a good fit haha. Thomas came in early morning this morning, shamefully admitting to accidentally have put the wrong shoes back in his bag. After a very intense and probably confusing workout yesterday, we can´t blame him. Crime solved, good news for all of you who had a sleepless night because of this mystery!
Aaannndd on with the day. We saw some amazing Facebook reactions coming by. We work really hard to make your experience here the best possible, so it´s fantastic to see that it´s appreciated! And more beautiful things happened today. Andreas had an amazing class with our stars of tomorrow, the teens. More skills than heavy heartbeats tonight, with Sumo Deadlifts and Handstand-skillwork on their program. The nice thing here is that when we´re younger, we can adapt and learn a lot faster than when we grow up. A handstand plank today, might mean a handstand tomorrow there. Quick progress, cool to see!
Today the rest of us had a Benchmark, and what Benchmark: JT. It´s the first benchmark ever made in CrossFit, so definitely a memorable one. Shoulders, triceps and chest got the full load today. 45 reps of HSPU, 45 reps on the ring dips and 45 pushups might be a bit much for some people, but with the proper scaling everybody got a nice Chest-pump in. For alpha the workout was just as it says, 21-15-9 on the HSPU, ring dips and push-ups. For bravo there was the option to scale down to banded ring dips, elevated HSPU and push-up on the knees, where there was individual scaling for our charlie-members of today. The cool thing about a workout like JT, is that it gives us coaches plenty of time to practice the ´sexy´stuff of CrossFit, like the HSPU! We got to work on our kick-up to handstand, our kipping technique or some freestanding handstand work! The 20 minutes were well spend. Since it´s our goal to make you walk out our door a little bit better than you were when you walked in, today was a perfect day. Progress, not perfection
The Benchmark of today also teaches us a wise lesson about what a Benchmark is. A lot of people mistake this moment of ´testing´ like; ´I have to kill myself and get the best result possible´. This is absolutely true, but what is the best results? There is a difference between competing and training in this case.
You can come into the gym to compete everyday: go 100% every workout there is, go as fast as possible and go for the fastest time everywhere. The goal is the fastest time. Find those small shortcuts, maybe a little less deep squatting or not a complete extension on the pushup, but it´s still legal so you got the best time.
For some members this is reality, going into the gym, go 100% all out and leave content. But this is the same as a professional football player, only playing soccer-maches everyday of the week, twice a day, and then expects to get better out of it. This would be weird right?
He doesn´t do this. He does training. If we look at training, the main goal of training is to get better out of it. The soccer player practises his corners, his sprinting, his penalty´s, all the small things that add up to the professional he is. If our goal is to get better today than we were yesterday, it might be worth it not going 100% and find every way to get the best time, but really focus on our technique and try to practice and find every way to get better at something.
JT was the perfect benchmark for this. Going 100% would kill your tricep within round number one. We got training in Game-Plan (Ta det rolig is what they say right?), in pacing our movement, in performing really effective HSPU and pretty push-ups. We actually saw people getting better in what we do here today. That´s what we want, we want training, so in the end, when it comes down to competing and leave 100% on the floor, we can go like animals! – Mart
