Crossfit Invictus is run by CJ Martin, a good friend of mine and someone that has made a huge impact on me as a trainer. I picked his affiliate as the only one i am going to review, first because he did this huge write up which keeps me from having to work too much secondly, he does something simple everyday: Offers excellence in everything he does. You will see how he does it with his training but until you have spent time at Invictus you won’t get how else he provides excellence.
Something that i haven’t seen anyone else make a point to do is, do something new to the gym every week. This seems little but i guarantee if your clients see you investing in them and their facility they will feel much better about investing in you long term.

In the beginning (jan 2009), Invictus was mainly beginning crossfitters and athletes for that matter. Many of the clients had little exposure to anything athletic so CJ viewed his programming as something very simple and easy to understand. I think this was a great idea and is still working very well for him as it would for more advanced athletes. The beautiful thing about his programming is that once his clients get used to it they come to expect the strength work as part of Crossfit. The biggest deficiency i see in crossfit is strength training so if you can get beginners to see the value, you have made your job much easier.

As a program, I love it. As a gym, I love it. If you get the chance to go check it out, please do.
Now, enjoy CJ’s review of his own program.

Goals and Objectives:
I don’t mean to sound like a smart ass, but the objective of our program is to increase our athletes’ work capacity over broad time and modal domains. We might go about doing that a bit differently than the main site or some of the other CrossFit affiliates, but we believe whole-heartedly that fitness should be defined by that standard.

Beyond that, our goal as a fitness facility is to provide a comprehensive approach to health and wellness. We are uniquely situated to be able to affect our athletes’ lives through more than just workouts, and we try to take advantage of that opportunity by providing nutrition counseling, Paleo/Zone meal delivery (through Mmmm Good Meals), and a network of professionals who help keep our athletes feeling their best (we have a massage therapist, ART practitioner, Rolfing/Tui Na practitioner and an acupuncturist that service our members for a discounted rate). We understand that achieving optimal performance means MUCH more than learning the nine foundational movements of CrossFit, and as professional coaches we have a duty to learn how to address dysfunction so that our athletes can be as biomechanically efficient as possible and so they are not in danger of missing training days due to injury. That belief and commitment to continuous education informs much of what we do at CrossFit Invictus.

How We Achieve Our Objective:
If you asked me, I would say that we just do CrossFit. But there seems to be a lot of varied perspectives about what CrossFit is, so I often default to saying that CrossFit is the meat of our sandwich. It provides the substance for what we do day in and day out, but we bookend each of our 60 minute sessions with supplemental skill and strength work, as well as a lot of mobility work. I think the perspective that CrossFit is simply the “Met-Con” workout that has a stopwatch attached to it is crazy, but we hear that misconception often. CrossFit’s foundational principles are centered around well-executed functional movement (think consistency before intensity and striving for virtuosity), so we try to put some focus there and provide athletes with tools to move better. I also read the CrossFit foundational documents to contemplate some strength or skill-specific work before a short couplet of functional movements, so when folks refer to our programming as a “strength-bias” program, I just say “sure.” But I guess that’s what we’re calling it now.

To be Continued…