CrossFit founder, Greg Glassman once said, “Men will die for points.”
Nothing could be more true.
Let’s say I have you do a workout like Fran:
21 Thrusters (95# for guys/ 65# for gals)
21 Pull Ups
15 Thrusters
15 Pull Ups
9 Thrusters
9 Pull Ups
If I told you, “Hey, just finish it. No time, no hurry.” This would give you a pretty good workout. You’d build some strength because you might do strict type pull ups. Overall, at any pace you’d do more work than 90% of people going to the average gym.
Now imagine that I have you do the same workout “for time.” AND I have you right next to guys or gals of your same age, build, athletic prowess, etc…
It’s a totally different hit!
In the latter scenario, you’re gasping for air, fighting for every rep and pushing yourself to your limit. Even if you’re not the “competitive” type, we find people generally push harder when they’ve got someone to compare themselves to. It’s healthy, it’s fun and it tells you where your fitness stands. Win or lose, you’re likely motivated to improve.
At CFW, we enjoy the friendly competition for sure! Currently, we’re on the tail-end of competing in the Reebok CrossFit Games. The last two years we’ve taken a team to the Life As Rx’d Throwdown in Dallas and had a blast!
We’ve also held our own “in house” competition every spring called The Sven Challenge. The 3rd annual Sven Challenge is slated to go down April 21st from 8am to 1pm. If you’re interested in competing (and all of you should be) you’ll need to start getting your teams together. You’ll need a team of 3 – men, women or mixed. The workouts will be scaled evenly for men and women. Last year a team of all girls won the contest, somehow :-). We’ll see what goes down in year 3!
Stay tuned for more details and the official Sven registration.
