Choosing the Right Weights

How often do your members rely on your memory and knowledge of their level to decide what they can and cannot do? What their warmup for a deadlift should be? What their max snatch is? If they should do the WOD Rx’d or scaled? The list of questions goes on and new members especially, will, and should, have all of these types of questions. However, as your members grow and integrate into the community they should begin to know what they are capable of, how they should warmup and what level WOD they should go for. If they don’t, you need to implement a program for them to start doing this. This knowledge is important not only for your own time constraints, but also for their progress. If they are always relying on you to determine what they can do, they will never find their true limits and will stall in their athletic progress.

So what is the best way to help your members know what their athletic abilities are?

Journal! Make them write every workout down, track every lift they perform and note all the modifications they do for each workout. You can even create a page of skills and progressions, where they can check off each progression as they attain it, so they know what to do for new WODs. Then, a workout that involves pullups, HSPUs, double-unders and deadlifts is a simple matter of flipping to this chart and reading off that their pullups are on the green band, HSPUs need 3 ab mats, they are doing triple the DU count as singles and their deadlift weight will be 125lbs. Think of how much time this will save everyone in setup since you won’t have a line of members waiting to ask you what they should do! If you have specific skill progressions you would like to track, make sure to let us know and we can create a new page template for your journals free of charge.

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