***SCHEDULING REMINDER – We are open regular hours today, closed on Thanksgiving Day (running Father Joe’s Thanksgiving 5k), and open for sessions at 8:30 and 10:00 a.m. on both Friday and Saturday.***

Workout of the Day:
Jumping Squats
5-5-5
(Work up to 50% of your 1-RM back squat. Pin the bar to your traps to keep it from crashing down on you when you land. If you’re having discomfort, wrap a towel around the bar.)
and then,
Complete rounds of 20, 15, 10 and 5 reps for time of:
135/95 lb. Jumping Squats
135/95 lb. Overhead Anyhow (from behind the neck or front rack, either is fine)
200 Meter Run

A Sad Development for the CrossFit Community
Written by C.J. Martin

The Black Box Summit was a high point in my CrossFit career. As I wrote about on Monday, it collected some of the brightest, most successful coaches I have had the pleasure of meeting and learning from. Unfortunately, the fallout from the Summit is becoming one of the lowest points in my involvement with the CrossFit community.

To give proper context, let me start by explaining how I fell in love with CrossFit, and what I understand CrossFit to mean.

My coaching career started when I was 14 years old. I was a martial artist, and one of the great things about martial arts is that talented students are given the opportunity to teach regardless of their age. I lived and breathed martial arts. I read everything I could get my hands on, but nothing resonated with me more than Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do. His philosophy, to employ what is most effective and discard that which is not, struck a chord with me.

Fast forward 15 years when I found myself as a lawyer who snuck in an uninspired workout once or twice a week. A colleague introduced me to some website called CrossFit, and it was love at first sight. As I understood it, CrossFit was/is the Jeet Kune Do of fitness – taking the best of everything fitness-related and throwing out the tired methods. I once again found myself absorbed in my hobby. I read every CrossFit article I could get my hands on. I would finish the monthly CF Journal just hours after it was distributed. Once I burned through the CF materials I would search out other sources of information on strength and conditioning methodology. But of everything I have read, nothing has impacted or guided me more than two articles penned by Greg Glassman.

The first, “Scaling Professional Training,” set’s forth the principle by which I run my business. In that article Coach Glassman explains that “the most effective business plan comes from achieving excellence and letting the market bring the money to you.” It makes running my business simple, all I have to do is ask myself whether a proposed change would help me provide the members of my community with a better training experience. If the answer is yes, we’re doing it.

The second, “What is Fitness,” concisely sets forth the most compelling prescription for fitness I have ever seen.

• World Class Fitness in 100 Words – Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports. ~ Greg Glassman

I believe in these principles with all of my heart. What saddens me is that recent events have made me wonder whether the organization that I love dearly, CrossFit, is still as committed to these principles as I am.

Sunday evening, nutrition expert Robb Wolf was fired from the CrossFit Nutrition Certifications. Robb has written about the ordeal here for those interested in learning more. Robb’s description of the events are consistent with what I observed as a participant of the Black Box Summit.

Robb never attacked the “Zone Diet,” he explained that in his experience athletes saw tremendous benefits on an unmeasured diet that focused on food quality, and if quality alone was not optimizing performance he would begin weighing and measuring food to further improve an athlete’s results. Robb’s suggested best approach to nutrition is to “eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.” Apparently this prescription is no longer acceptable to CFHQ, and Robb is no longer welcome.

Robb was not the only expert targeted by HQ staff. Greg Everett, a phenomenal resource for all things related to Olympic weightlifting, was also treated extremely rudely for offering up criticism of the way certain exercises are instructed and performed at CrossFit Level 1 certifications. Other extremely intelligent coaches have been quietly pushed to the fringes of the community or have opted to leave the CrossFit community for suggesting that CrossFit return to its roots of incorporating strength or skill work followed by a short, intense conditioning workout. The CrossFit I fell in love with would have embraced these ideas and used them as an opportunity to evolve as a program. That is not happening.

(Why do I say “return to its roots?”, because that is what is described in “What is Fitness” – “One of our favorite workout patterns is to warm-up and then perform three to five sets of three to five reps of a fundamental lift at a moderately comfortable pace followed by a ten-minute circuit of gymnastics elements at a blistering pace and finally finish with two to ten minutes of high intensity metabolic conditioning.”)

I love CrossFit, and all of my friends and colleagues in the CrossFit system, but my commitment is to ALWAYS strive for excellence in providing my clients with the best facility and program within my capability. I hope that will always be under the CrossFit banner, but this past weekend’s events shook the foundation of what I believe CrossFit to be. The “open-source” model that I fell in love with has become hyper-sensitive to criticism and slow to evolve. I hope that changes very soon.