Front Squat
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1

The good morning is very similar to the hip extension performed on the GHD.

Pushing Yourself in the Shop

It’s 8pm and you pull up the blog to check out the workout – one of two reactions probably race through your head – “SWEET” or “UHHH.”

In CrossFit, there are a ton of different types of the workout of the day, or the WOD – and they fall into a few main categories and combinations. In order to find your full fitness potential, you have to push yourself in the gym, no matter the type of workout.

The elements of a workout fall into three main categories and are combined to create a workout:

There are short and long workouts and everything in between. This refers to the time domain of the workout. We want athletes to have capacity in every time domain under the sun.

There are a number of different equipment pieces we can incorporate into a workout – from barbells to kettlebells and pull-up bars to rings, there is a wide variety of metal that we can throw into a workout!

And there are many many different movements we incorporate that fall into three main categories – gymnastics movements (moving your bodyweight through time and space), weightlifting movements (moving your body plus an external load), and monostructural movements (your traditional “cardio” movements such as running, rowing, and double-unders).

After reading through these descriptions, there are probably one or two areas where you excel and get excited to complete and a few where you find it hard to get excited. That’s fair – but know that pushing yourself in the gym, no matter what the specific workout of the day is, allows athletes to take full advantage of our program.

For example, many athletes come to CrossFit having very little lifting experience. They may come to a back squat day but their effort across five sets is comfortable or perhaps they don’t put five more pounds on the bar when they could. This seems like a small detail but in a fitness program based on intensity, that amounts to a number of workouts that do not achieve the desired intensity level.

Extrapolate that over months and months and checking the box, rather than pushing yourself in the gym, leads to lowered results. You can’t just walk through the door and expect results, you have to push yourself.

Now, that then begs the question, well what about form and technique, and that right there provides the check point for how hard to push yourself. We don’t obtain more intensity at the expense of form.