Complete as many rounds as possible in 15 minutes of:
4 bar muscle-ups
45-lb. dumbbell Turkish get-ups, 6 reps
8 ring push-ups

Workout on Thanksgiving? You betcha! The annual Thanksgiving Day Shit Show Team Workout is an annual tradition at Roots. Sign-up for class!

Workout on Thanksgiving? You betcha! The annual Thanksgiving Day Shit Show Team Workout is an annual tradition at Roots. Sign-up for class!

As we gear up for the start of the 2017 Benchmark Series, we thought we’d take a moment to talk about some of the whys behind the daily “what’s the workout?” and programming at Roots.
Yesterday we discussed that our intent is that our athletes get better at the defined goal of CrossFit – “increasing work capacity across broad time and modal domains.” The programming that enables this is one that is carefully thought out, planned, and hits the mark on variance in a number of different areas.
Shane and I have crafted spreadsheets – that would make your eyes glaze over – so that we can tally information on the upcoming weeks of programming – total reps, total time under tension, time domains, number of times below parallel, light, moderate, heavy, partial hip extension vs. full range of motion, power lifts, Olympic lifts, movements, and relative intensity, to name a few.
After a number of years and analyses, we settled on the mainsite as our primary method of programming, and that was over four years ago.  We believe in the mainsite and we know it works (we’ll talk about that more in another post). We also know it helps keep us honest in our pursuit to deliver a broad, general, and inclusive style of fitness. It’s easy for a person’s own biases to come out in their programming. For example, the complexity of a movement can lead to program biases. It takes a skilled coach to be able to properly warm-up and teach a muscle-up and snatch in the same workout, and provide a scaled option for all within a one hour time frame.  It would be much easier at 5am to say, “eh, let’s just do pull-ups instead of muscle-ups today.” Rather than simply not programming those workouts or movements, we went another route and demanded it of our coaches to develop as trainers. 
Now many of your know that the mainsite programs three days on and one day off.  We fill in on mainsite rest days with our own programming to make for a seven days per week schedule. We’ll talk more about those mainsite rest days and what we do with them tomorrow!
As a quick aside, and to clear up a few questions we hear frequently:
– We do not bias one area of development over another (we don’t do more strength workouts than long ones, we don’t think having a bigger clean and jerk is more important than your ability to walk on your hands)
– We don’t avoid any CrossFit movements
– We don’t program specific kinds of workouts on specific days (for example, Wednesdays are not always “long”)