One of the most important aspects of our organization is the program.  What are the athletes going to do every day when they come through the door?  From the first moment class starts until the final breakdown every part of class is planned well in advance.  I am going to use this article to talk about how and why we choose to do what we do day in and day out in class, and then next week I am going to talk about how we decide what our supplemental programs will do.  I hope that this gives some insight into why we do what we do and shows you that there is a method to the madness.

With the holidays coming up there are lots of opportunities to eat.  From Halloween parties, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas parties, football tailgates, and everything in between there are a lot of things going on that can throw you off of your routine.  I want to give you a few tips to help you make some good decisions over the holidays.

What is the biggest mistake that we see in the gym on a consistent basis?  There are a lot of things we could point to as coaches that we could say are mistakes (or maybe not the best way of doing things is a better way to put it) but they are all symptoms of the same cause.  Short term thinking.  Most people make decisions without thinking about how it will affect them in the long term.  Let me break down what that looks like in the gym setting and give you 3 examples of how you can apply it to your life.

One of the biggest decisions an athlete makes during a workout is what weight to use.  Each workout has an intended stimulus and choosing the wrong weight can keep the athlete from getting the type of workout that was meant for that day.  When an athlete picks a weight that is too heavy for a workout  they end up setting themselves up for not getting as much out of a workout as they could.  I want to explain to you how we choose our weights at our gyms for each athlete and also give you three reasons why you should go lighter.

So you want to start working out.  Maybe you are tired of feeling tired and sluggish.  Maybe you have put on 30 pounds in the last five years and your spouse is worried about you.  Maybe your doctor told you that you need to start exercising. Whatever the reason is you know you need to start doing something.  But it is very overwhelming. There are a million different options these days. Maybe you can just start running a few times a week.  Maybe you will try an at home workout program. You google gyms close to you and 20 pop up that all look different and offer different options.  You read some articles that all seem to be contradictory. After doing your research you aren't any closer to what you should be doing. You want to just quit.

I know your pain.  Starting a new routine can be incredibly hard.  With so much information out there these days it is easy to get information overload.  I want to help you determine what you should be doing. This is the guide that I wish I could have read when I started my fitness journey.  Hopefully this will help you get where you want to be.   

We are the sum of our habits.  What we do over and over is what we will become over time.  If you want to be fit and healthy then you have to have fit and healthy habits.  In order to have fit and healthy habits you make to make the hard choices for a while.  But it's not a lot of hard choices.  There are a few critical points in each day that set the tone of the day.  If you make the right choice it will set you up to succeed.  If you make the wrong choice it will set you up to fail. I want to walk you through what a day of bad choices looks like and then show you how making a few better choices can make all the difference in the long term.

It's easy to live a hard life but hard to live an easy life.  Read that again.  What do I mean by that?  If you make the easy choices every day then your life is going to be hard.  If you make the hard choices every day, however, then your life is going to be a lot easier.  This applies to every area of life (finances, work, relationships, etc.) but I want to explore what that looks like for your health and fitness.

Beginning in January of this year we changed how we did our programming.  Since we opened we had followed the general CrossFit way of writing a workout, which is writing a workout for the top athletes in the gym and then scaling the weight, movement, and reps down to the rest of the athletes.  When you did the workout you would get an Rx by your name if you did the workout as written, or you would get the modifications listed if you did the workout scaled.  We saw over time that this did not best serve our members for several different reasons.  With progress in mind we switched our daily program into three tracks-Fitness, Performance, and Competition, with each track having a different goal.  Since we have made the switch we have seen a big increase in attendance, results, and overall positivity day to day.  We are very happy with how things have gone and will continue to do this type of programming going forward. I want to use this article to walk you through how you pick your tracks and how that might change over your time at our gyms.

Over the last 5 years we have done a Beach Body Challenge at our gyms, with the goal being not necessarily helping our members to lose weight but to teach them diet principles that they can apply to their life well after the challenge is over.  Our goal is to teach them what they need to be focusing on and how to get where they want to go with their health and fitness.  We recently finished this year's challenge and our participants had the most success of any challenge to date.  We really feel like we have come up with something that can not only help someone make a short term change, but can help them to develop habits that will last well after the challenge is over. I want to use this article to walk through the basics of the challenge and show what habits we think that if our athletes develop will help them have long term success.  

The first key to success in the gym is consistency.  You have to come consistently to get results.  If you aren't getting the results then the first thing you need to look at is how often you are coming.  If your gym tracks your attendance then have them check how often you have been coming.  Most people overestimate how often the train.  If you aren't averaging at least 4 days a week in the gym then you need to bump up your consistency.  If you ARE averaging 4 days a week and still aren't happy with your results, then you need to look at other areas.  I'm going to talk about 5 ways that you can maximize your results in the gym.  If you want to speed up your progress, break through a plateau, or just make sure that you are getting as fit as you possibly can, then take a look at these 5 areas.