ventura – Lighthouse Fitness | Ventura's Micro Gym

Evaluating Our Fitness Program

By Colin|2018-11-18T10:40:25-08:00November 18th, 2018|Training, Uncategorized|

by Colin Jenkins

I believe physical fitness should help us on 3 fronts:

Look Better (the reason most of us get into fitness… at least initially)
Feel Better (improved health, energy, and quality of life)
Perform Better (physically and mentally perform better at what you enjoy doing, especially as you age)

When I evaluate the effectiveness of our fitness program, I consider how well we are helping everyone improve in these three areas. I have always been very self-critical, and am constantly trying to figure out how we can do things better… which is probably why our program has changed so much and so often.

This year marks the 10th year since I opened my first fitness facility in Ventura. 10 years is time to build just enough knowledge and experience to become… dogmatic, thick-headed, and less willing to adapt or change. I believe as coaches gain experience they become better in some ways, but less willing to evolve in many others.

My lifetime of jokes about people getting older has made me hyper-aware of this fact and so I place an enormous emphasis on never staying stagnant in our programming. Whereas s0me may believe the more they learn, the more they know… I believe the more I learn, the more I know I don’t know.

Even though I am extremely proud of what we’ve created so far, and how it has changed over time to become the unique program it is… I still believe old habits, antiquated ways of thinking, and stubbornness plague me and prevent our program from making further evolutions to get everyone looking, feeling, and performing better.

I think about my habits, and try to really evaluate if they are “something I do because it is the best possible thing for our program” or if is “something I do because I have created a habit of doing it based on outdated fitness trends and science”.

Let me throw an few examples of how I question our program your way…

Touch-and-Go Deadlifts (ie… bouncing the weight up and down during workouts)
Is this really benefiting how we look, feel, and perform outside the gym? Or is it used simply as an artifact from CrossFit where the goal was competitive work capacity within the gym? How does the “bounce” in any way improve your fitness? Would you be stronger, fitter and healthier if we didn’t bounce? Would not bouncing deadlifts decrease injury rates?

Double Unders
Is the cost of developing the skill worth the results we get from the exercise? Would weighted thick jump ropes provide more of a benefit? Is the coordination something we should spend more of our time in the hour we have on? Should we provide additional alternatives other than single-unders?

Don’t worry, Double Unders aren’t going anywhere anytime soon… although bouncing deadlifts are probably on the way out. I just wanted to share some of these questions. I think this way about mobility, and preventative exercises, gymnastics skills, benchmark workouts, keeping score on all workouts, etc…

I think our program still has quite a way to evolve. And I think the more it does, the less like CrossFit it is going to look. And overtime, I believe you are going to look better, feel better, and perform better because of it.

Death to “RX”

By Colin|2018-08-14T12:14:49-07:00January 6th, 2017|News|

by Colin Jenkins

When I started teaching CrossFit back in 2007, it was a small fringe fitness program that almost no one knew about it.

At 19 years old, I traveled down to Ventura (I was attending UCSB at the time) and opened up the first CrossFit affiliate in Ventura County with my student loans.

Why would I take such a risk?

Why would I open up a CrossFit facility at such a young age with no proof that anyone would ever be interested in joining it?

I was probably more confident than I had any right to be, but I KNEW CrossFit was going to be successful for one simple fact… it was more effective than any other fitness program out there.

Over the years, I’ve watched as CrossFit has grown from ~100 affiliates to now over 10,000.

I’ve seen it transition from a fringe program no one knew about, to a household name used in television shows, movies, and top-selling books!

Over these years, though education and experience, I eventually came to realize that CrossFit is not the most effective fitness program.

Not even close!

What I found through writing customized programs for individuals, was that I was able to achieve:

– Much Faster Results
– Better Long-term Results
– Far less Injuries

When I sold my CrossFit gym a few years ago, one of my reasons was because I had become so focused on writing programs for individuals around the world, that I had really lost my interest in group classes.

That was until I had a new thought.

What if I could develop a group class program that could achieve the same results as my custom programs did for my individual clients?

That thought swirled around in my mind for over a year.

But it wasn’t until I started coaching at a local CrossFit affiliate again, that I really saw the potential in it and it slowly began to consume my thoughts.

As many of you have experienced with our program, I took everything that was great about CrossFit and got rid of all the crap!

And the biggest turd of the them all… is the concept of “RX”.

The concept of “RX” is that everyday, everyone tries their hardest to “achieve RX”…. then if they do, they can compare with each other and try to beat each other’s scores.

So it seems good if your goal is to create as competitive an experience as possible.

But there are HUGE problems.

Problem #1:
Workouts should have a purpose or goal in mind. If everyone is shooting for some “arbitrary” set of reps and weights that as written as RX, then most people will have completely missed the intended purpose of the workout. And when they miss the intended purpose of the workout, results are slowed and often non-existent for long-term members.

Problem #2:
RX leads to higher injury rates since members have less guidance to the weights and volume appropriate for themselves. CrossFit injuries rates are WAY too high. If you ask a typical CrossFit affiliate what their injury rates are, they either don’t know it (no one likes to track numbers that make you look bad), or they say it is no more than any other sport.

“No more than any other sport” is fine if you plan on competing in CrossFit as a sport, but I think that is completely unacceptable for the everyday person who is just trying to lose weight, get stronger, feel better, or be better prepared for their job and life! Injuries should be extremely RARE if your not training to place in a competition!

Problem #3:
RX leads to wasted time. We run hour classes, and believe it or not, and hour is not very long to get in a complete warm-up and workout. If people always try to do workouts as “RX”, that means often someone will be taking much longer on the workout than others.

Now this isn’t inherently bad, until you consider that if everyone had been given the appropriate weights/reps/movements to achieve the PURPOSE of the workout for themselves, then everyone would finish the workout at around the same time.

Which means there is less wasted time waiting for the “slowest” person to finish… which means MORE TIME in the hour to better coach movements, get more sets done, warm-up better, or work on mobility!

…..

When I first took a risk in opening a CrossFit gym, I had confidence because I knew the program was the best at the time.

I’m taking a risk now opening a new facility here in Ventura because I am CONFIDENT in our BluePrint Fitness System being even better.

“DEATH TO RX!”