How many of you know your numbers? You know, like how much is your one rep max back squat? What is your heaviest clean and jerk? I am sure some of you can tell me instantly your numbers or can look in your logbooks to tell me. As for the rest of you, my question of knowing your numbers may be a foreign concept. Alas, we shall change this! Soon we will live in an ideal world where everyone knows what they are currently lifting. I guess I should state that this isn’t just about numbers. Keeping a record of your lifts is important, but keeping a record of your workouts is just as important, for many reasons.
There are quite a few methods for tracking progress in CrossFit, and many reasons to do so.
As far as methods are concerned, the amount of apps out there now are astounding, wodify, beyond the whiteboard, mywod, xfit PR, wodzilla, wodbox Pro, Workout Hero, WOD, paper logbooks, evernote, blah blah blah...I could go on.
Now for reasons?
1) Keeping a workout logbook can help measure your progress! If you don’t know how much you lifted or what your time on the workout was previously, then it is hard to measure any progress. Its also hard for us to troubleshoot you if you feel like you aren't making much progress.
Writing down exactly what weight you used and in what time you completed the workout. That way, next time the workout comes up you can see how much stronger and faster you are
2) A workout logbook can help you set goals. Say a workout, like Fran, comes up on the board. If you have been keeping track of your workouts then you will know what your old Fran time is (if you have done it before). Say your old time was 5:45 with the prescribed amount of weight. That was 4 months ago. You can now set a new goal, say 5:15. By keeping track of your workouts, you can set realistic goals.
3) It will help you to continue to make progress. Often, a lift will come up that says something like ‘Deadlift x 3 @ 85% of your 3-RM.’ This is going to be an awful hard prescription to follow if you have no idea what your 3-Rep Max on the Deadlift is. You have no idea if you lifted 205 x 3 or 225 x 3, a big difference in numbers when trying to make progress in your deadlift. Keeping track of your workouts will also be handy as we continue with testing days in group sessions. We can only have re-testing days if we have something to re-test
4) From our perspective, its a pain in the a$$ to click through all of the results to get the data we want. Especially when people aren't tracking stuff themselves. You can keep personal records, which work well, for you. But when we program, we program for the high end to the low end of our population we have within the gym. So it helps to know what those highs and lows are for everyone.
Now we used to pay for a subscription to beyond on the whiteboard for everyone in the gym, the trouble? no one used it. Now, we are asking for beta testers, 7 people to be specific, to receive a free Beyond the Whiteboard subscription.
I am going to work out some of the kinks in this, because I will also be using a beyond the whiteboard plugin to embed the results directly into the blog.
So before you go posting to comments that you want a subscription, what I need is...
1. Someone who comes into the gym and will log progress 4+ times a week.
2. Someone who is tech savvy enough to use a pretty simple website.
3. You follow our regular CrossFit classes, not the Oly or Strength athlete classes (once I get the kinks worked out we will chat about using this for these classes as well)
If you are interested, post your full name and email address to comments, anyone can do it! I will be picking these names at random by the way.
2014 09 30
