My first Home GYM!
As i was starting to put together a curriculum for my new gym i realized that my knowledge is no where near the collective knowledge YA’LL have.
Some important questions i have been asking are:
- What was your intro to CF like?
- Was it responsible and gradual or abrupt and violent or something completely different?
- What was the process and why do you continue to train?
- Is your current program sustainable long term? (1 year, 5 years, 50 years…)
- Are you held accountable? By who or what?
Obviously i want to use this in developing my gym but i also think getting a dialogue between everyone started will help freshen your training. Its hard to think about sustainability because what we do is so stressful to our minds and bodies. I have seen great examples of how to make a program like CF sustainable but have also see the total opposite in practice.
So, lets chat. I will put together a post with my answers to the above questions but i want to hear from you first.
Thank You.
Lessee, 44YO male, 5ft 6in, 150 lbs.
At the tail end of 2007, I stumbled onto CF via Jeff Martone’s site. I had gotten soft and deconditioned, and needed a program that would be interesting. As a committed family man, I needed something time-efficient. I was already a believer in multi-joint work, but couldn’t stay motivated and interested. So, CF was perfect. A lot of the WoDs were stuff I felt I couldn’t attempt at the time. I dove in head-first, though, with 400 lunges (My legs were worthless for the next week and a half!)
I worked in the garage, and then went to CF Mansfield when it opened. I’m back in the garage now, due to scheduling issues. I’m doing Coach Rut’s online version of MEBB. The regular, planned strength training is an important portion of my training, as I’m naturally scrawny. Every bit of strength I gain is hard-fought for.
I believe it’s sustainable, although now that I’m back on my own staying motivated is an issue. Other than “get stronger,” I do lack specific goals. To freshen things up, I’ve just this week started tinkering with incorporating Coach Sommer’s gymnastics work. I enjoy lifting in the garage, but met-con stuff isn’t fun on my own. As you have probably guessed, no, I’m not really held accountable.
I hope this helps; good luck with your business planning.
Intro to CF came from a Men’s Health article in 08. My first several months I did scaled WODs from mainsite, not following the 3-on-1-off model. Once I felt I could handle something harder I started following mainsite rx’d.
This went well for a while but I was not getting stonger. Thankfully I found CFFB and loved that programming. Having the regular strength work was an excellent addition. I did scale the weight on some of the daily WODS to make them faster (trying to hit that 5-15 min. range).
Recently I followed a 6 week linear progression (inspiration from 70′sbig) and got much stonger before stalling on several lifts. I am now looking at doing short cycles of mainsite (plan on 4 weeks) followed by linear progression or CFFB (4-6 weeks). I think this will be the most sustainalbe long term approach for me as I can alternate conditioning with strength work and not get burned out or stalled on one or the other.
I train solo so my only real accountability is my training log. After competing at the BCS games recently I’ve started focusing on my mental approach to each workout. I think I can really make some physical improvements by focusing on a competition mentality on a daily basis.
My intro to CF came after reading an article in Men’s Health that referenced Gym Jones. This eventually led me to HQ. My first experience with CF involved the CF warmup to which I was immediately exhausted and left the globo gym I was in at the time. My next wod was Murph. It took me every bit of an hour and I felt dead physically but mentally I felt as if some secret to life had just been given to me. Needless to say I never looked back.
3.5 years later and I’m a trainer trying to help others experience the same thing. My current programming is rather strength biased with the oly lifts and some short metcons worked-in. Sustainable? I doubt it, but it should take me through the next few weeks fine.
My mind and my notebook are all the accountability that I need. Plus, being a trainer, I have to be able to pull out my A game at any given moment so that keeps me in check.
Training, now, is just part of life, just like Paleo. I enjoy the technical aspects of the oly-lifts and all things involving the rings. Where I once trained for aesthetics, I now train for performance based goals. That keeps things fresh for me.
The first time I was introduced, it was by a friend and it was via email. I was travelling a lot for work, plus working a ton of hours, and I was wholly out of shape. much different from my days of playing rugby or racing my bike. I figured if I could find something that I could “knock out quickly” I would stick with it.
I joined crossfit central and I was one of their first clients (well in the first 50), and I started to see changes immediately. I followed what I could when I was travelling but my diet sucked bad. I got hooked and started collecting equipment in my garage and while I was making gains my diet still sucked and I was doing too much…so I stopped making progress.
Last year I had 3 knee surgeries and a shoulder surgery and weighed in before my last surgery at 240#. 6 months of crutches, with NO physical activity takes a toll.. I never stopped learning/ reading when I was injured so I went nuts during my “rebirth of crossfit” beginning in June of last year. So because I was like a caged animal being let loose, I did too much again. Meaning I followed Mainsite, MEBB, a starting strength progression, etc and I finally started to get my diet under control. So I went from 10 bodyweight squats on July 8 and 240#’s bodyweight to 275 back squat max at 188# today.
While those numbers are nothing to crow about in the CF community, it represents a helluva journey for me personally, because, I believe that my “life” was saved because of this stuff. So know I’m held accountable by Dutch and by some of the guys at Central. And as long as I can progress, in some way, “be better today than I was yesterday” then my program is sustainable. I figure if I have a plan to follow, then I’m more likely to rest smarter than if I just try to figure it out myself.
My goal is to continue to get smarter and stronger (and yes I do have specific goals for my lifts – like a 1K total) given my knee issues, and I’m hoping Dutch/ Dave can help with that. My longer term goal is to start competing in local CF comps, and run an ultra because I shouldn’t be able to walk without a cane, much less squat, run, jump, and lift heavy (for me) shit over my head
Thank you everyone for sharing! Some great stories come out of this and i love hearing them.
Burke,
I am looking forward to working with you even more now!
My intro into CF came about gradually.
My hubby is a Physical Therapist Assistant. In 2005 his application for health insurance was not approved because of his weight and HDL/LDL levels. He knew he needed to change so he started writing his own wo and did them on his lunch hour on the equipment in the clinic. While researching on the internet he came across CFHQ and knew it was what he was looking for. He followed the mainsight wod faithfully as he could with the clinic
equimpent. Then he brought home an olympic weight set and did the WODs at home after work or evening activities, sometimes working outside at night when it was 4 deg temps. After a year he re applied for insurance and got a preferred rating.
He then got hooked up with CrossFit Tulsa crew, now is a trainer there for the morning class, and then goes to work at his full time job.
After watching him for a while, I started working out as I could. I do have some progress, but it’s sporadic because I haven’t been very consistent. I’m a SAH Homeshcooling mom, it’s hard to get to the gym, and I am not hardcore yet to wo outside. Yes I’m still a wimp. But the past month I have been more consistant with either wo at home or the gym. I did a 5k last week, and I am seeing improvement in my backsquat and clean.
My hubby, Jerimiah, writes his own programming for his class, so I follow it as much as possible. I do believe it is sustainable long term, as he likes to get a feel for what works, what doesn’t, and adjust programming accordingly.
My biggest hold up so far is lack of accountability and not getting to the gym regularly, but mainly it’s because I didn’t have the confidence in myself to ask for accountability. I have started keeping a written journal, and that has helped.
My intro to crossfit was very gradual,
Around 2004-2005 I visited my uncle who is an army ranger. We started talking about training because I played lacrosse in High School and he was “big”. He showed me the crossfit website and the workouts looked crazy! Like I think one of the first ones I read about was walk for a mile with your bodyweight on your back? I tried to make my own crossfit to accompany my upper/lower body split routine. I did my own thing for fun for a year, then decided to try .com wods.
After doing that for a while we visited him again. I think this is when he gave me my first kettlebell. He had gotten it for his wife, but she never used it. It was 12kg, small enough to do juggling and other fun conditioning things. After getting this, I started doing H2H style training which transfered over to lacrosse and jiujitsu really well.
I went through high school never able to do heavy squats because I didn’t have a squat rack at my house and the lacrosse team didnt have a strength program, only a conditioning (the coaches were not the brightest). I started inviting friends over and we would do some workout I made up for fun. Right when I started college I did starting strength and saw decent results in gaining weight and increasing my low bar back squat. My goal after I finished the ss cycle was to beat the national collegiate record for my weight class (56kg, 175kg total). Fortunately, through crossfit, I found cathletics and have been following them about three cycles behind for 11 weeks and seen some pretty awesome improvements in such short of time.
I feel this program is fairly sustainible as long as you keep on top of rolling, stretching, icing, ect. (as for any program really). But, I also feel that when following this program you are more suseptible to patellar tendonitis since you basically squat five times a week.
Once again, with no coach, I am only held accountable to the record which keeps me fairly motivated. Also, I have tried to make sure I get at least a 10% increase every 6 weeks on my squats, and at least 5% on everything else. Setting goals like “155 snatch and 205 clean and jerk by the end of summer” also keeps me accountable.
My girlfriend wanted to run a marathon. So I wanted to run a marathon. We trained LSD. I hated it. She hated it. I did research.
I found Gym Jones. I found navyseals.com (now sealfit.com) and enforced changes in our weekday workouts, with LSD on Saturdays. From there, and after we finished the marathon in 4:36 and 4:38, Crossfit bit like meth and I was addicted. For almost a year I conditioned like hell, bought rings and got weird looks at the Uni gym. Katie kept training for marathons. Then I saw Josh Everett do King Kong, and I wanted to be strong enough to do King Kong.
I first heard about CrossFit on the old school rec.climbing usenet discussion group. I think it must have been around the time that Mark Twight was first getting into CF like 2003- 2004 or something. I was looking for ways to get in better shape for rock climbing because I had been working at a computer in grad school and getting progressively unfit and overweight. I checked out the mainsite but nothing made very much sense to me for a while so I just kept up a typical 3 sets of 10 with some stairmaster program for a year or two. Eventually I read the “Start Here” link and understood the part about hitting it hard – so I nearly made myself puke doing cable pulldowns and benchpresses on the plate stack machine thing. This was in a stuffy gym under the swimming pool where I am sure the chlorine saturation in the air exceeded health standards. I found CrossFit Vancouver when I was searching online for an O-lifting coach in my area – they had only been open a few months and at that point the advice for getting into CF was to find an adult gymnastics program and an O-lifting club. I don’t really remember much about the initiation curve once I started training with CF Van – so it must not have been violent or abrupt. I trained there for almost 4 years and then moved away.
I am not really on a current program or accountable to anyone, but that is my own motivation nadir which I am trying to climb out of. I do think that training in functional movements is sustainable indefinitely. I will never forget the mechanics of a decent squat for the rest of my life, and I know that practicing them will help me live a more independent and useful life.
I have also been intrigued by my own (population n=1) experiment of devolving from a reasonably high level of crossfittiness back down to sub-mediocre….seeing what capacities are lost quickly and what sustain. For me at least, the most technical movements are still doable as are heavy 1RMs (eg. I can still do a muscle up, still snatch, clean, squat, jerk and DL about 95% of best ever), I am as if not more flexible than ever, but my metcon capacity is in the toilet, as is stamina. It’s a weird baseline to try and rebuild from, definitely not “starting