It’s always nice when someone lets me know they actually read these things, and especially great when they help develop a thought or add some layers to the conversation. After my exploration of what type of fitness we do at Lumos, the estimable Kelly S. replied and rightly brought up something I’d neglected to explore. She said:
“Something about benchmark or measurable or scoring ha – I feel like that’s the piece that connects – work outs that get a score for benchmarking or comparison, vs circuit training.
Some workouts may be that way, but it’s to support stronger results that are measured later.”
Kelly hits on two different ideas: the first is the difference between exercise and training and then in the context of our training at Lumos vs. classic CrossFit, how we approach training and testing.
CrossFit was (and is) certainly unique in the fitness space in offering a fitness philosophy that emphasizes training- fitness that is measurable and repeatable with the goal to improve metrics over time. That’s different from exercising- a more casual approach where one workout has no real context to any other workout- you do something because it’s fun or feels good or gets you sweaty, but with no real connection to what you’ve done in the past or what you’ll do in the future.
Most fitness classes are still like this- an enthusiastic trainer leads people through a workout that isn’t based on any prior metrics, and when you finish you don’t record anything or do anything that will set you up for the next workout. For someone without much training background you might get better over time but your ceiling will be relatively low, it’s nearly impossible to guarantee improvement, and you’re not really working towards anything other than a sort of broad and fuzzy idea of “being in shape.”
CrossFit did a good job of actually training people instead of just getting them sweaty, but they certainly didn’t invent the concept- weightlifters, bodybuilders, endurance athletes, gymnasts and really any fitness/non-ball sport athletes have been training this way for decades.
Most of those athletes, and especially the ones at the highest level, train in a periodized model- they slowly build up aspects of their fitness, test them, and then adjust and restart their progression. It’s a long, slow, two steps forward-one step back- two steps forward process. Repeat that enough times and you’re world class.
That’s actually another point of difference between what we do at Lumos and “classic” CrossFit training- CrossFit doesn’t do periodization, and we do. I mentioned this a bit in last week’s Flex, but CrossFit always emphasized a much more varied (sometimes fully random) format than a classically periodized program. This was one of the first aspects of CrossFit methodology that many gyms, including ours, moved away from. Periodization leads to more predictable results, less chance of injury or burnout, and better overall skill acquisition.
Further, CrossFit has never fully acknowledged the tension between training and testing. A common CrossFit aphorism was “compete every day” or “win every workout”- the goal was to always try and have the fastest time or heaviest lift at your gym. Writing your “score” on the whiteboard at the end of class was part of that ethos- you were expected to try and “win” the class, or beat your rival, or something.
That is not the best way to improve, whether you’re a casual fitness-er or a Games hopeful, and is another thing that many gyms and certainly every competitive CrossFitter quickly realized and modified. We see lots of people fall into this trap, despite our best efforts to dissuade them- they get too caught up in their scores or in beating the person next to them that they actually blunt their overall development in the long term.
When our coaches ask for scores at the end of the workout, it’s just as likely someone says “smiley face”, or our personal fave acronym (coined by Ariana G.) “JHFF”- Just Here For Fun. Someone recently told me about another gym that encourages people to write “training” for some workouts. All of these methods of recording a score denote that the path to getting better is not just a linear climb- there are days when you need to slow down to work on a specific movement, or where you simply need less intensity.
So, Kelly has a great point- much like CrossFit gyms everywhere, we want our members to train and not simply exercise. However, our methodology and value system around the best way to train is wayyyy different. We want people to look past the trees of “winning” each individual workout, towards the forest of their overall athletic and fitness development. While we’re on a wood-based analogy, we can return, once again to Theseus’ ship- a vessel that has been retooled, rebuilt, and refurbished so that while it may broadly approximate its original form if you look closely nearly all of the pieces are different.
