This past weekend the five fittest men and five fittest women in the world had an opportunity to compete against at the CrossFit Games. “The Games” essentially represent our sports world championships. It’s an opportunity for the rest of us in watch the very best in the sport do their thing. Other than watching some real good fitness and spending some time on the couch, why do we really need the Games? After all, Crossfit is for everyone!

During our daily wods at 306, we do all kinds of movements. We do all kinds of time frames, rep schemes, intervals and domains. That is Crossfit at it’s essence. Jason does an amazing job of programming and our coaches do an amazing job adjusting so every single person who comes in to the gym gets the desired stimulus.

Approaching two years ago our community gained an angel. Benjamin Sawatzky passed away from cancer and the loss to Chad, Carla and the rest of the Sawatzky family was, and continues to be, unimaginable. As our community does when members are in pain or in need, we rallied around them for support. We created a hero WOD for Ben and had a completely packed house to perform his workout, “Benji”. Since that time I have grown closer to Chad and i am fortunate to call him a “friend”. I share this with his permission.

It’s coming! Throughout all of the CoVid shut down and limitations there have been quite a few online competitions announced and ran by different facilities around the world. Some of the athletes at 306 have competed in several different competitions during this time and had great success. Jay and myself have had the opportunity to both participate in and watch other athletes partake and we have took the good and the “not-so-good” from each of them and started brain storming.

The ring muscle up. It’s one of those movements that everyone in the gym looks at with awe and aspires to get. It’s a beautiful display of strength, skill and technique. It requires all three of those in order to execute. There are all kinds of drills out there to help you build the strength and/or awareness of being on the rings in order to work towards the end result.

CoVid. It’s been a real bummer on everyone. As much as it has been a bummer on all of us adults, i think it has been more of a bummer on the kids. Their school stopped suddenly (probably not the worst thing in the world to most of them but...), they weren’t able to go out and play with friends and then most of their regular activities and sports were cancelled. They’re left with empty pop bottles and rocks to play with! Ok. Well maybe not quite but if your kids are anything like mine, they need something to do!

I had to scroll back through my list of blog titles to see if I had shared this before. I was looking for a simple nutrition tip to write a blog on for tonight and thought I had for sure already covered this. Turns out, I haven’t. It’s the most simple, basic nutrition tip I give to just about anyone I do personal training or goal setting with. It is one that is easy to follow, easy to understand and ease to execute. No fancy measuring. No reading labels. No counting calories.

In our last blog I shared a video from CrossFit Invictus’ Jared Enderton on the “uppercutting the bar” as we perform a snatch. It was a good, simple video with great instruction and break down of exactly what he means and why to do it. If you haven’t already, go back to the last blog and give the attached video a watch.

Tomorrow is Wednesday and (spoiler alert so stop right here if you don’t want to know what the WOD is going to be) we are returning to Weightlifting Wednesday this week. We have spent the last couple months of lifting days going through and testing our deadlift and then our squat clean. Progressing on, next up is the snatch.

I wanted to kind of carry on from last blog where we talked about being “the competitive gym”. Before you go any further in this one, if you havent’ read that blog, please go back there first and give it a quick read so you know exactly where I am coming from.

Today after a class at the gym I had a conversation with a member who kind of laughed off the comment of “I heard 306 was the ‘competitive’ gym”. I want to take a quick second and address that comment and answer the question of:

Is 306 a competitive gym?

In one word; yes. 306 is a competitive gym but not in the way you may think.

In every class at 306, you will hear a coach talk about movement patterns. How to move safely, effectively and efficiently through range of motion for a particular movement. As the points are listed there, is a hierarchy. First, we need to make sure you move safely. You can’t keep coming in to train if you are hurt. Second is effectively. You need to be effective in reaching a given standard (hip crease the knee in bottom of a squat for example) so you can repeat your efforts in the future and see progress. Then we want to improve the efficiency of our movement so we can do it faster, longer, further, etc; depending on the desired outcome.

I wanted to make a real quick blog post about my friend Shelley. Shelley came to me with a specific goal a couple of months ago. She knew what she wanted to accomplish and she had set herself a timeline to achieve it by. From the very start of her journey towards her goal, she was set up for success.

You start Crossfit on a journey to get more healthy. You start training three times a week. You start watching what you eat. You start sleeping better. The number on the scale is getting smaller and smaller. Your waist line is getting smaller and smaller. You’re killing it! You are encouraged to be able to see your progress in those numbers each day. Life is good. One day after a workout you step on the scale and the number didn’t change. You go back to the gym the next day and train some more. The number staring you in the face on the scale still didn’t change. Over the course of a few days you start to get discouraged, motivation drops and you feel like what you are doing isn’t working.

You may have noticed myself and Coach Beau wearing a simplistically plain “smart watch” on our wrists over the past few months. I have noted it on at least two other member’s wrist as well. This simple little device is called a “WHOOP”. It’s essentially a really fancy version of a FitBit or Apple Watch without any smart watch features. It’s designed for one purpose. To track a whole bunch of biomarkers and it does that very well. I won’t get in to any of the details on what it does but if you’re interested, track down myself or Coach Beau at the gym and we’ll be happy to show you in detail…