Tightening It Up

Flo and Ilya plotting mischief, no doubt

The past two weeknight classes (Friday of last week and today) have been large, to put it mildly.  The energy that comes from large classes is a great thing, and one of the many benefits of group training (it's quite possibly the primary benefit, in fact).  We don't want the energy that comes from classes of this size to change or diminish in any way.

That being said, the workouts are running long, well past the hour mark, and this has a nasty spillover effect for subsequent classes, greatly reducing the training experience of all involved.  This is our fault and as such, we'd like to make some changes to the structure of our workouts.  Some of them may seem small and cosmetic, but it's our hope that they'll benefit all who train with us.

Our workouts are currently scheduled on a 3 days on, 1 day off format, and they're generally programmed as follows:

Day 1:  Strength + Short Metcon (Part A/Part B)
Day 2:  Strength + Short Metcon (Part A/Part B)
Day 3:  Metcon

The changes we're making affect the first two days of the cycle, since the third day is generally pretty easy to manage in terms of time.

Here are the changes:

1. For Part A/Part B workouts, the general warm-up that happens at the beginning of the class will be cut down to approximately 10 minutes.  This will give you a little more time to get into empty-bar warm-up sets (or bodyweight progressions if we're doing stuff like muscle-ups) and get primed for the strength portion of the workout.  If there's special stuff you need to do prior to working out, we suggest showing up 5-10 minutes early to be able to include that stuff in your repertoire.
2. For the strength portion of the workout, we're changing the workout structure to 3 work sets.  For example, instead of the old notation of Bench Press 5-5-5-5-5 Reps, we're changing to Bench Press 5-5-5 Reps.  This may seem like a notation change, but it's deeper than that.  The reason for the change is that 3 work sets is adequate for the overwhelming majority of folks who train here.  There will, of course, be some warm-up sets that happen prior to the work sets (I highly recommend starting with empty-bar sets).  We definitely don't want you going into a strength workout cold.
3. As an aside, I recommend that people who are new to strength training do the work sets at the same weight (known as sets across) for all 3 sets, and then occasionally test their rep max for that exercise.  If you're looking for a black-and-white rule, it could be this:  Test your rep max for each exercise every tenth time it comes up (9 workouts in a row using 3 sets across, followed by 1 workout testing your rep max).  I realize as I'm typing this rule, that this is very clumsy wording on my part, so ask me for an in-person explanation of this point (including some amazing whiteboard usage) if you want additional information.
4. Most of the Part B workouts will be in the 10- to 15-minute range, which means that we need to be finished with the strength workout by 40 past the hour in most cases, so that we can set up properly for the second workout, explain the standards, talk about scoring the workout, or whatever else needs to happen to adequately prepare.

We'll be keeping a close eye on these changes to workout format, and believe that these small changes will produce a great training effect and a way better training experience at the same time.