I’m gonna put out a couple of scenarios. 1) What if the coaches were the fittest people in the gym.  What if we could do 50 muscle-ups in a row, 1000 air squats and overhead squat our bodyweights for 25 reps.  And 2) What if we put a workout on the board calling for exercises that you, at this time, are unable to perform?  Say for example rope climbs, muscle-ups or front levers.

1)  First, if Deidra and myself were the fittest people in the gym, I feel that our focus would be shifted away from building our business and away from building up the fitness of our clients.  Which would be bad, my thinking follows that the fittest people on earth, the most elite athletes, don’t own gyms and aren’t top notch trainers, they work for home depot and live in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center.  You get me?   Second, would us being the fittest people in the gym give us carte blanche to put up whatever heinous nastery we wanted to up on the white board, and hide behind the saying "well if I can do it, you should be able to too, gosh, why are you so weak?" instead of using the white board to challenge you to think about getting more fit.  Doing a few real pull-ups is an achievement, so is getting a muscle-up.  The only reason most of us have pull-ups is because they show up on the board and we’re upset inside at not being able to do pull-ups, so we fixed it.  Now go get muscle-ups!

2) I think I might do this all next week to get you guys to understand this fundamental CrossFit element.  IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO PERFORM THE WORKOUT, we scale it to your ability level now SO THAT LATER YOU’LL HAVE BUILT ENOUGH [insert any of the 10 general physical skills] TO BE ABLE TO DO IT.  Right now I’m not powerful enough to perform a muscle-up, I’m working on my false grip, pull-ups, ring dips, and kipping skills in general while losing more weight so that I can do a freakin’ muscle-up.  By the way when I get one, get ready to freak out 🙂  People have no problem taking less weight on a deadlift, thinking oh, that’s a lot of weight, I’m not that strong I’ll just scale the workout…  But when it calls for muscle-ups and we "scale" the workout to now include twice as many dips and pull-ups people get really bent out of shape…  I’ve got the solution to that problem.  Whenever you scale a load in a weight training movement, DOUBLE THE REPS.  Do you see how crazy that is?  With pull-ups, dips, calisthenics in general people aren’t going to get hurt, if it’s deadlifts, it’s really pretty common that when you’re really tired you get a little lazy and *ouch* your back hurts for a while, this is why doubling the reps on scaled squat cleans, or deadlifts, or overhead squats, is not smart.  But for dips and such it’s great!

AWESOME