CrossFit Charlottesville Updates, Nutrition Challenge Winners and Level 1 Scholarship Winners

Schedule Updates: Summer Hours

Starting on Monday, May 10th, we’ll be transitioning to new summer hours for afternoon classes. Classes will start at 5:30PM and 7PM, they will still last one hour, but we will have more trainers present for the 5:30PM class. If this doesn’t work, we’ll add another class starting around 6:15, but we’re going to test this structure as a more stable way to estimate attendance and provide good trainer to client ratios.

Survey Responses

We really appreciate the survey feedback you gave us a few weeks back. It’s really important for us to improve and make changes based on your suggestions. Overall, we’re doing a lot better than our last survey. You guys like all of our trainers a lot better, you’re overall a lot happier with things, but as expected, we’re not perfect. Here are some points in response to the survey:

• We could do shorter classes, but people don’t warmup and do mobility work on their own. It also eliminates any skill work we want to do.  It’s more a matter of safety and proper skill development than trying to get you out the door. While writing the warmup might work for some people, most people wouldn’t do it and might do it improperly.
• Classes should rarely go over an hour. If they do, we are screwing up and you should let me know whenever that happens.
• We don’t do maxes after on-ramp because most people don’t have enough strength or movement experience in order to safely do a max lift.
• We’re going to try to improve our client to trainer ratio with this new class structure.
• What’s wrong with getting water out of a sink?
• We’re going to continue with a strength bias for as long as we live.
• We’re thinking about adding another oly lifting class sometime mid-week. This would most likely take the place of one of the regularly scheduled CrossFit classes.
• We’ve toyed with the idea of women-centric classes, but given that we have many more women members than men members (and way more than most CrossFit boxes), I don’t know if that really makes any sense.
• Running clinics: thinking about adding these, but our running population is so small and Kyle is the only person certified to teach, so it’s hard to fit it in.
• We’ll add a formal bring a friend days which will be mid-month starting this month. As always, just let us know and we can schedule an introduction whenever is convenient for new people and friends.
• Open house hours are unlikely to happen at this point in time. We do offer private training if you want to work one on one with a trainer.
• Thanks for dealing with our renovation efforts. That was a major suck and we’re happy it’s done.

Equipment Reminders

• Please do not store the rower handles in the latch. There is a rubber band that can get stretched out of they are stored that way. Please make sure they are sitting against the fan casing.
• If you are sweating or worse  on something, please wipe it down when you are done.

General Gym Reminders

• I added an addendum to the rule “Introduce Yourself to Everyone.”  If you don’t know someone’s name in the gym, the entire gym has to do 30 burpees. This will be tested this week. 🙂
• Please RECORD YOUR SCORES on the website and the whiteboard in an easily recognizable format, ensuring you detail how you scaled a workout or if you did the workout RX.

Nutrition Challenge Winners: Bethany and Melly

Honestly this was a pretty hard choice, so we decided to split the award between Bethany and Melly.  Each will receive one month free membership. Congrats guys! Pictures are here if you haven’t seen them.

Level 1 Scholarship Essay Winners: Chris G, Elizabeth B, Ian M

These peeps wrote some awesome essays and we’re happy to give them scholarships to our Level 1 Cert in July.  Congrats!  Here are some excerpts from their essays:

The aspect that I enjoy most is seeing people that have limited athletic or fitness backgrounds join crossfit and find a fitness home. I always would rather cheer on the crossfit newbie struggling to finish a WOD before cheering on an experience crossfitter attempting to get a new a Fran PR. At a good box, everyone is welcome and for that reason the community keeps growing.

I went to the website and was seriously intimidated by the descriptions of the workouts! It took me an entire month to work up the courage to attend one of the free classes. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked and signed up right away. Since then I learned more about my body, fitness, began reading more about success stories and could not wait to see my own results. I did not wait long. Right away I saw strength gains, even though I had always considered myself pretty strong to begin with – heck in just a few months I added over 100 pounds to my CrossFit Total, have added many inches on the range of motion of my hand-stand pushups, have gone from using the small box for box jumps to a box jump max of 32 inches, and can now do a strict pull-up and kipping pull-ups even though I struggled with the green band when I first started. I lost body fat and my clothes became looser, my abs tighter. People commented that I had lost weight. My face thinned out. I had more energy. I was excited to work out. Instead of fearing a movement I could not do, I began to anticipate the days we included and incorporated them into the workouts. I stayed after and worked on weaknesses. I improved. I saw others improving. They saw me improving. We encouraged and congratulated each others’ progress. I quickly made a wonderful new circle of friends.

First, becoming certified means I would be able to share the CrossFit experience with other people. This is more than simply telling people how to squat. Rather, it is a chance to meet new people, open their lives to a whole range of new possibilities, and inspire them. Teaching a new grandmother how to use her hips in order to pick up her new granddaughter. Showing a former collegiate athlete how to back squat properly. Coaching a long-time client through his first muscle-up. No matter the scenario, becoming a certified trainer would allow me to effect positive change in people’s lives by offering useful insight into the CrossFit vision of varied, high-intensity functional movement.