Episode 2 - Scaling: The Most Underrated Skill in CrossFit

Scott, a coach at Ironhive, joins Ben to discuss the physical side of CrossFit on the podcast. They clarify that while many think CrossFit is mainly about weight loss or strength, its true goal is broad fitness. CrossFit aims to improve overall fitness by enhancing work capacity across various domains, making individuals adaptable and hard to break. The constantly varied programming mirrors life's unpredictability, preparing individuals for everyday challenges. It emphasizes functional movements to enhance everyday life activities, not just specific exercises or routines. The variability in training helps individuals become fitter and more capable in real-life situations. Hello everyone and welcome back to the official podcast of Ironhive. If you listened to episode one that was Ben on his own talking about nutrition and how CrossFit looks at it. For this episode we thought we'd make a bit more of a conversation so I joined in. For anyone that doesn't know me I'm Scott, I coach here at Ironhive, I've been training in CrossFit for a few years now, I became a CrossFit coach last April. My role is basically to fill the shoes of you folks. I'm here to ask the questions that come up in class or ones people are probably thinking but either don't have the time to ask or didn't think they could ask us so I'm going to fill that role today and me and Ben have a bit of a conversation about stuff. Today we're focusing on the physical side of CrossFit. Last week as I said Ben covered the nutritional side of things so the bottom of the CrossFit pyramid. If you don't know what I'm talking about in terms of nutrition and CrossFit pyramid you should pause here and go back and listen to episode one. We'll wait, it's fine. Welcome back. Now you know all about nutrition and its role in CrossFit and your fitness we're going to talk about the rest of the pyramid which is all the physical stuff and the importance of it. We're also going to get into things like scaling because that's something that people still massively overthink. Hi Ben. Hello. Hey mate. Let's start off, what do people think CrossFit is actually about? Normally their first impressions are assuming that it's somewhere they can both try and get stronger is a very common one we get. A lot of people come to us thinking I need to lose a bit of weight especially around this time of year, that's quite a common one, being the start of the year, people over in Bulldog Fitness they normally think I've put on a few kilos, I want to try and lose a bit of weight so I want to try and find some group classes somewhere where I can go and exercise and just be told what to do and not have to think about it. I'm going to say strength is another one that comes up a lot with CrossFit. I'm going to say I need to get stronger, I'm going to go join CrossFit. None of this is wrong but it's not really the full picture of what CrossFit is about. Those are more sort of outcomes of doing CrossFit as opposed to the goal of what CrossFit is actually trying to achieve when it comes to the physical side of CrossFit. Yes, I agree with that. Definitely on that fat loss one, that was my start of the journey, just like I'm a chunky monkey, I need to not be one anymore and then join CrossFit and then realise there was more to it than just losing the belly fat. Yes, I agree. All right, so if those aren't really the main goals then, what is CrossFit actually trying to improve? So in terms of what CrossFit is actually trying to do, the whole reason why CrossFit was formed as a methodology of training in the first place, from a physical point of view, as I'm just going to focus on physically what we're doing in the gym, CrossFit was originally designed to be essentially broad fitness. So an easier way of explaining that is basically being good at, let's say above average, at lots of different things instead of specialising in any one thing. So for example, again, if you go back to this time of year, people say, I want to lose a little bit of weight, the most common option, the most common direction people go is, I'm going to start running. They're a very, very popular one that most people go for. Whereas with CrossFit, or let's say we're going to start running, that's fine, you probably will lose weight, so if the goal is I want to lose weight, that's good, you might lose a little bit of weight, but if that goal then starts adjusting and you think, actually I want to try and get as fit as I, all round as fit as I can, I want to lose a bit of weight because I just want to get physically fitter, and maybe a little bit stronger as well, if you just start running, and running all the time, you're going to get very, very, very good at running, your aerobic capacity might increase, but what we in the CrossFit world would consider to be fitness, or your all round fitness, wouldn't necessarily increase. So CrossFit would essentially define fitness, and I'm going to use the technical term, it would define fitness as, if increasing work capacity across broad time and mobile domains, which sounds complicated, essentially it means that you're able to move yourself, or move a weight, or move a person, whatever it may be, from one place to another place, and not only can you move that weight from one place to another place, you can do it quickly, or you could move something from one place to another place over 10 meters, or you can move it over 100 meters, or so on, so the idea is you want to try and be as fit, all round as you can, strong, good at running, good at lifting weights, good at moving your own body, a mixture of those things, so that's essentially what CrossFit is trying to achieve in terms of what we're doing in the gym. I like to refer to it, actually originally we got it out of Frey, they used to call it CrossFit, creating people who are hard to break, which is still a thing, they kind of adapted slightly, I like the way it adapted, so they're basically changing to, they want CrossFit to create people who are hard to kill, which I quite like, it sounds dramatic, but it's meaning both from a metabolic health point of view, which is what I was talking about the other week, so like your health markers, your sense of your heart for example, blood pressure, all those normal health markers, so actually essentially making it harder for you to get quite severe, or harder to kill in that sense, but also on a physical point of view, making it harder to kill, trying to make you as strong and as fast or as aerobically fit as you can, so I like that way of looking at it, that's essentially what CrossFit is trying to do, it's about being adaptable, adaptable across lots of different remits, instead of just specialising on any one area of sport or fitness, for lack of a better phrase, yeah I like that, so logically then, the programming is varied all the time, I think it's one of the comments we always get, people asking like, oh is heavy day always on a Wednesday, and running always on a Monday and everything else, and you're always like no, it's going to be varied, so is it deliberate, like the way we do the programming and that variability of the programming, like from what you just said, yeah it is, I mean CrossFit technically is defined as constantly varied functional movements to form that fine density, so the first bit of that is constantly varied functional movements, so yeah for the programming to the, I guess to the, I suppose untrained eye, would look like it's just constantly random, as opposed to constantly varied, there is a method behind the programming, it is designed to make you both stronger and aerobically fitter, but yeah the idea is you keep the training varied, the same way that essentially life would be varied, so we're trying to make people as fit for everyday life as possible, that could be, let's see an example, maybe one day you're running late to a meeting, it could be, or maybe you're on time for the meeting, and the trains were late, and then suddenly you're late for the meeting, you might find that, okay I've got what would be a ten minute walk, I've got five minutes to do it, maybe you're going to have to run to get to that meeting for example, you may not have known you were going to be running that day, when you woke up in the morning, but the idea of CrossFit being constantly varied, is it supposed to re-enact the variance of everyday life, you never know what's going to come up each day, you might find that you could be at the shops, and you might see an elderly person struggling with a heavy item or heavy shopping, whatever it may be, you may not plan to suddenly carry lots and lots of things for that person, and because we do constantly varied functional movements everyday in CrossFit, you are actually then able to, on a whim, go and help that person out, so the idea is, yeah, the programme is constantly varied, like you say, heavy days can change each week as well, if we just had heavy days on the same day every week, let's say we had a heavy day on a Monday, a cardio day on a Tuesday, a CrossFit-y metabolic workout on a Wednesday, which is repeated the same process every week, your body will adapt to that more so than people realise, and you'll find that your body will adapt to it so much to the point where if we mix things up and decide to throw a heavy day on a Friday, after a year of having a heavy day on a Monday for the last however long it's been, you would actually find that your body would probably be more stressed by that, you'd probably notice it from a recovery point of view, but the idea is, yeah, it's constantly varied to emulate life, essentially, is what I would say. Yeah, I think you have like, you've got people that come and train with us that have only certain days that they can train a week, and if everything was the same every week and every day, then they'd lose out on that variability, they'd miss out on some of the stuff we might be doing the other days if we had a strict, but yeah, I like the variability thing, because as I mentioned, when I originally joined this, it was to lose weight, and then sort of gradually, as the years went by, I had the epiphany that, you know, that life stuff, teaching my daughters how to ride their bikes, I can now run alongside them while they're riding their bike without having a cardiac arrest after about 100 metres, or like trying to get myself up into my loft because I'm stupid and I've brought a ladder that's too short, instead of strutting up I can actually pull myself up into the loft, and random things that people don't think to associate with what they do here, is actually real life stuff. Yeah, and actually what you're saying as well, so going away from just the programming being constantly varied, you're mentioning things that are everyday life scenarios, like for example, running alongside your daughter when she's learning to ride a bike, that's like a functional movement, I suppose, for lack of a better word. What we're doing here is functional movement, so I've said already that I'd like to define what they do as constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity. The idea of what I've said already, it's supposed to be emulating everyday life. If we were to look specifically at the programme that we do, you know, you come to the gym, there's no table machines around that you'd see in a pure gym, for example, you won't have, or very rarely, you might have some people, but very rarely have people standing in the corner doing bicep curls. I know we've got some people that might like standing in the corner doing bicep curls, but the idea of what we do in the classes is all functional moving. It's 90% of the time moving your whole body, even if you look at a squat, for example. Yes, it is predominantly legs, but it does require you to be bracing the core, it requires you to be able to move your body in a certain way, as opposed to perhaps an everyday gym where you might sit on a chair with a, I can't remember what it's called, essentially sitting on the chair and you're just raising your leg up and down, up and down, up and down, and all you're doing is isolating one muscle in your leg. Yes, exactly. Which is brilliant, it might make it super, super strong with that one particular movement, and then your leg might look absolutely massive, but then try and squat something heavy and suddenly the leg doesn't work anymore, or the muscles don't work anymore. So yes, I think outside of just the fact that the program is all constantly varied, it's trying to keep the body on its toes, essentially, so that it doesn't get too complacent. Not only is it varied, it's also all functional as well. The reason we do the stuff that we do in the gym is to help you to move more efficiently, to be more mobile, particularly as you come to later years in life as well, we're trying to improve longevity in life, or your quality of living for as long as possible. So the idea of doing air squats now may not seem like a lot, but when you're suddenly 80, 90 years old and you're still able to squat all the way below parallel, that's huge. I mean, it could be something as simple as, when you're older, sitting on the sofa, for example, and actually being able to stand up. There's plenty of old people who can't do that. There's plenty of older people who struggle to walk, for example. We're expecting people as they get older to still be able to run significant distances, and also do it with a load, like a bit of weight as well. So that's why we do things the way we do in the gym. I can't actually remember what the original question was. Do you want me to start? I think that answers it, or I hope that answers it. Yeah, we were talking about why the programming field sometimes moves all over the place, and is it deliberate? Obviously, that's why. Yeah, it is deliberate. So I'll just summarise and say, if training was always to look the same, you'd only be fit for that one thing, so the whole point of what we do is the variation. The variation of it is the point, and it varies. It's not random. There's thought behind it, but the variation is the whole point. Yeah, I agree. I love the functional stuff. I get in chats with people about this stuff, like as you say, people see the squats with the heavy weights, especially the deadlifts with the heavy weights. People have this like, almost like a version, like the deadlifts are this big scary thing, but then when you're actually like, no, just picking something up off the floor. Yeah. I'd also like, whilst we're talking about lifting something heavy, I'd like us to go on a bit of a tangent. Another thing that comes up a lot when it comes to lifting heavy weights, or heavy days, or anything that involves a weight, particularly, I'd say, in the female demographic, is this impression that just by doing a heavy day, or by lifting some weight, suddenly you're going to get super, super bulky, and suddenly be walking around like Ronnie Coleman. That isn't the case. If lifting a heavy weight, or if getting bulky was that easy, like I say, we'd all be walking around like the top bodybuilders in the world. It isn't that simple, but it is very important. It's not that easy to just get bulky, but yeah, lifting weights is very important. Something that we do in CrossFit in particular, other gyms don't, are things like heavy days. You might have other functional fitness gyms, or even just normal gyms, like PT, for example. You will obviously lift weights, but CrossFit, obviously dedicating specific heavy days is something quite unique to what CrossFit does, and what we do, but it is important that with the programming being varied, that stimuluses are varied as well. What I mean by that is if one day you might do a really short sprint style workout, which is really, really high heart rate, super intense, the next day might be slightly less intense on the heart, but a very long duration sort of endurance cardio day, and then the following day is to be just lifting heavy weight. It is important that the heavy lifting is included in that week. Yeah. Being fit, or what we define as fitness, as I said earlier, is work capacity across broad time and mobile domains. In other words, loads of different areas of life and fitness. Strength is a very important one. I still get loads of questions on people saying, or not necessarily insane, or questioning heavy days. I know that we do get some people who try to avoid heavy days a little bit. Might not be scared of getting bulky. Could be loads of different reasons. I know some people don't feel perhaps they get as much out of it. They will be. Strength building doesn't have the same intense feel as perhaps doing SRAM. For those who know what SRAM is, you're going to feel like you've had one hell of a workout when you've done SRAM, compared to perhaps doing five sets of five deadlifts at a certain percentage, for example. The strength training is very important. It's a very important element of the program, which is the heavy day. It's one that, especially for those who only do perhaps three days a week, for example, if they can try and make one of those a heavy day, I would highly recommend it. Yeah. Going to that variable a bit again, it works the other way around as well, because plenty of people, including myself, heavy days are their happy place, whereas a very cardio-heavy running workout is not my happy place. Not Bob's happy place. No, it has to do it, because you've got to be able to build that variability. Is the six-five set. Even a heavy day is the best day of the week. I want to put a pin in that stimulus thing, because I want to come back to that later on. I particularly want to talk about the scaling side of things. Before we get to that, just finishing off this train of thought. We're saying that the program is very deliberate for these specific reasons. We get people that train consistently, but they feel like they're not improving either overall or in one specific area, things like that. Why do you think it feels like that for people? To be fair, there could be loads of factors at play as to why people... There's a difference between feeling like you're not improving and actually not improving. There's many different reasons for both of those. If I just worry as people who know that they are not improving, and not feel like they're not improving, but actually know they're not improving, a lot of that probably comes back to what I was talking about a couple of weeks ago on nutrition, nutrition and recovery, being the foundation of everything that we do. If people are coming to the classes at least, and again, I'd say at a minimum, three times a week, consistently, every week, ideally four to five times a week, if they're doing the class programming, there will be nothing wrong with the programming. Provided the foundations of the pyramid we spoke about before, which is nutrition, but can also include recovery, so your sleep habits, mobility, that sort of thing, with the programming, all those things are all dialed in, there will be improvements happening, pretty much. That's pretty much a standard, even if they can't feel it. Then to flip that question around back to what I pretty much think you were saying before, which is maybe people don't feel like they're improving, sometimes improvements can be happening that aren't perhaps as obvious as other elements of CrossFit. For example, improving in CrossFit, or improving in your fitness, doesn't always look like PBing lifts, doesn't necessarily always look like getting personal records on benchmark workouts. We use those to test, and they can normally show you if improvements are happening, or where perhaps they're maybe not happening, or where weaknesses are. We are quite fortunate that we use Beyond the Whiteboard, and a lot of CrossFit gyms don't use apps. We are quite fortunate that we've got an app, and it does give you lots of data, and you can see if you're improving, and you can digitally track all of that sort of stuff, and all those numbers. We'll just give you an example of someone who may feel like they're not improving, but they probably are improving quite a bit, particularly with newer people. For example, you've come to CrossFit, you've been doing it now for, let's say, five, six months. The first week you came, there was maybe a heavy day. Let's say it was a heavy three-rep clean, for example. Let's say squat clean, to make this even more of a better example. You might find that their first week, they've never done clean, so they've never heard of clean before. They managed to squat clean 42 reps in their first week, for three reps. Then six months start, well, okay, let's keep it there, wait there for a minute. What they might have done is gone on to their whiteboard and logged their three-rep max clean, 40 kilos. What the number doesn't show is that actually they couldn't squat below parallel. They didn't lift the barbell off the floor particularly efficiently. The clean had lots of technical faults. Maybe they did 40 kilos, and perhaps we stopped them and asked them to go lighter, try and work on technique, and so on. Then six months down the line, they've had six months now where they've been really working on that technique. They can now actually squat to full depth before they couldn't, because they couldn't hit the ability for all sorts of reasons. Now they can squat to full depth. They perhaps haven't got physically stronger, but their ability to move themselves has got significantly better. We retest three-rep squat clean, and now actually they're nailing a squat clean, this really good technique on the way up when they hit the bar off the floor. They're catching it in a full squat, and it's really technically sound, but on paper it's still 40 kilos is the heaviest that they can go. It may not look like they're PBing. They may feel like, oh, that's the same as what I did when I first started CrossFit, but actually what the data doesn't show, what they've probably forgotten as well is how they moved the first time they did this compared to how they're moving now. Another example is if you do a workout that's got pull-ups in it. Sometimes people think, okay, they're having a head of doing a couple of pull-ups, for example, is the goal. Maybe we do a workout that's got pull-ups in it when they first start CrossFit. They actually struggle to hold their body weight on the rig, so maybe they do ring rows, for example. Six months down the line, I do another workout that's got pull-ups in it. Actually, they can hold themselves on the rig now. In fact, they can actually do some kick swings. They're able to now do jumping pull-ups more consistently, and they finish that workout, and their score still says, oh, I've done this workout in week one, don't, and six months down the line, still can't do pull-ups. Doesn't necessarily mean there hasn't been improvements. These are just all little examples from a psychological point of view. Sometimes improvements are happening, and you can't necessarily see it happening if you're just looking at the numbers on an app, for example. A bit like people who, sometimes a bit like people who just lose weight. Sometimes they might say, oh, I'm going to try and lose weight. They do all the right things. They're looking in the mirror, and they think, oh, I might be losing weight. The scales might show a bit of weight loss, maybe not as much weight loss as they want, but their whole body shape has completely changed. Then the next time, they might see someone they've not seen for six months, and they'll say, wow, you look totally different. The improvement's huge. Actually, on scales, there's not a lot of improvement, and they don't think there's a lot of improvement, because they're looking at themselves every day. They're not noticing the change as much. The people who are seeing them sporadically every few months are massively noticing the change. It's kind of the same concept. People start moving better. They start unlocking new skills that they couldn't do before, but the change can be quite gradual. They might think that they're not improving, but actually they are improving massively. Also, we're improving as well. If you remember the pyramid, I explained it as at the bottom of the pyramid of nutrition. The first bit above that on the pyramid is metabolic conditioning, which people more commonly know that as your aerobic capacity or your, I believe the word fitness isn't how we define fitness, but people think of that as being fitness, their ability to run at a speed. That stuff will improve normally before the ability to move your body through gymnastic movements, so pull-ups, push-ups, that sort of thing. That stuff will normally always improve before weightlifting, the ability to lift a weight. I think it sometimes comes down to as well making sure that you're tracking the right thing. Looking at the right part. If you're brand new to CrossFit, if you're brand new to this sort of thing, it's making sure that you are looking at it from the right angle and looking at it through the correct lens, I suppose, because there's elements of your fitness that will improve before other parts. Also, it's not linear. It's not the same for every person. Some people will progress at different rates. Yeah. I think, yeah. Let's just say comparison is the thief of joy. You'll get someone who's come to their first class and it's double-unders and they do it straight away, and then someone else in the class has been coming here for three years and still can't do them, but then that person's been coming for three years and they're perfectly squawking 80k. So you can't. Everyone's different. Yeah, the background people are kind of fun as well. If you go to a CrossFit class, it's a first-ever class, and then someone else in that class has been introduced as doing their first-ever class, you don't know what their background is. Their background could be they might have spent their whole childhood doing gymnastics until they were 17 years old, had about five years off, and now they're trying to get back in the gym. They might not say that and they're maybe brand new to CrossFit, but the last thing you're going to want to do is compare yourself to them if you're just starting out your fitness journey as well, because you don't know what their backgrounds are. Everyone's going to improve at different rates, and you can't compare, so you just want to make sure you're focusing on the right things and try and look at it from loads of different angles. Don't just look at it from, is my strength getting better? Is my running time getting better? Are my running times getting better? I still can't do pull-ups, or I still can't do a handstand, or whatever it may be. Just making sure you're looking at it through a different lens and trying your best to remember where you were on day one when you first started. Yeah. The pull-ups, the handstands, that kind of stuff, I think that's a good segue into what we said we were going to talk about in terms of scaling and stuff, because yeah, you're still saying you've got these people that they join and they haven't been after six months, still can't do a pull-up, and certainly feel like, oh no, I'm not progressing because I now can't do a kipping pull-up, or a bar muscle-up, or whatever it might be. Why do you think people hate scaling so much? Scaling? Why is it a dirty word? Yes, it is a dirty word. I think there's different elements to why there could be perhaps a stigma around the word scaling in the prospect world. If I'm being completely honest, there's certainly going to be an element of ego in there. For whatever reason, we'll never know, but if it's someone who might have perhaps self-confidence issues, perhaps you feel a bit of a strong desire to, especially if you're brand new to CrossFit, and I guess you feel a bit of desire to want to try and instantly fit in with everyone else in the class. We're quite fortunate, I think, that Ironhide as a CrossFit gym is a very, very balanced and accessible gym for everybody. There isn't a very, I guess, aggressive competition side of things. Our focus is on improving the everyday person in their all-round fitness. I like to think classes are very, very balanced, and I like to think where we deliver classes is balanced, where there isn't a stigma with scaling. I think the biggest reason is a little bit of ego in there. I also think that scaling is perhaps associated with the idea that you're not doing CrossFit right, or you're failing, perhaps, at CrossFit. I think people see or learn what RX means for the first time. They see RX on the board and assume that RX is the goal. I think there's some people who look at CrossFit and say, I'm not RXing, I'm not doing CrossFit, and that that's what they're striving to get towards. That isn't the case at all. If we were to look at scaling, the problem with scaling, as well, I think, is the word scaling. Scaling, automatically, people assume that that means scaling something back. It's normally the phrase that's used, I'm going to scale that back, I'm going to scale this back. Scaling can also mean scaling it up. Scaling should really be changed to the word adjusting. The idea of scaling is you're adjusting the workout. When we create a workout, or when CrossFit create a workout, when a workout is programmed, it's programmed a certain way, with certain weights in mind, with certain rep schemes in mind, and certain movements in mind. What we use to determine what those weights will be varies depending on what the workout is, depending on what the stimulus is for that workout, which we'll talk about in a bit. But, that's kind of like, I suppose, RX means prescribed. That's maybe that word RX came from. I guess that is the idea is, this is the prescription for the workout. That workout will have a stimulus in mind. If we said a particular workout has got 10 deadlifts, the weight for the deadlift should be 100 kilos, for example, you should be able to be able to do 10 deadlifts unbroken. That is the stimulus for that particular lift in that workout. That's how we've written it. The idea of scaling is, now we've got a group with 10 to 15, maybe 20 people in a class. Now what we do is adjust, or scale, the movement, or the weight, or the workout, so that each person in that class can do that deadlift unbroken for 10 reps. That's the whole point. That could mean scaling the weight back, which I think some people worry a bit. That means, oh, it's not good enough because the RX weight is supposed to be this. It could also mean that we should actually increase the weight for some people. If the workout had deadlifts, let's say pull-ups, for argument's sake, I don't know, 10 deadlifts, 10 pull-ups, to make it really simple, 10 minutes, then you should be able to do anywhere between 8 to 12 rounds. You're looking at that workout, seeing the deadlift weight, seeing the pull-ups, and I'm really good at pull-ups. I can do about 50 of those unbroken. 100 kilos deadlift, that's fine. I can probably do 20 deadlifts unbroken. Then that person should also be scaling. That person is probably going to be getting 20 rounds on the workout, in which case, the whole point of the workout and the significance of the workout is being completely missed. We would suggest to that person, who knows that they can lift that weight more than comfortably, should actually increase the weight. A workout that is RX is not necessarily the goal. It is just written that particular way, and then we adjust accordingly. Not necessarily scaled accordingly, but adjusted accordingly. I think that's worth reiterating as much as possible, that people are to maybe change their perception of what the word scaling means. It doesn't necessarily mean scaling back. It can also mean scaling up. There are plenty of people in CrossFit who don't do that well enough and have a problem with doing that. I think they feel as if, well, no, I can do all the workouts RX. I've essentially completed CrossFit now. That's it. I've reached the goal. That isn't the case. The stimulus of a workout is you get 8 to 12 rounds. You do the workout RX, and you smash it and do 15 to 20 rounds. That doesn't, without being mean, impress coaches. That tells us that you didn't adjust the workout accordingly. You've got the complete wrong stimulus out of that workout. Actually, it means that your progress is going to also be stunted. The idea was that weight should have felt a certain way. You should have been developing a little bit of strength in that workout, as well as the weight impacting the gymnastics side, for example. Without weight felt light for you, it's not going to impact the gymnastics. Your gymnastics under fatigue, for example, won't improve. It can go on and on and on, basically. The idea is that I don't like the word scaling, and I wish the word was adjusting as opposed to scaling. It doesn't really work quite as well. I think it's just reframing. Reframing what scaling means. I've just realized that I've pretty much moved on to what we're going to be talking about next. I was going to ask about, particularly about the stimulus bit, because talking about scaling, obviously coming from someone that was nominated in the Iron Heights Christmas Award as part of the RX or Die category, implies that I may have a reputation for being one of the ones that doesn't understand scaling. I do for the point that there's a difference between pushing yourself to try and achieve a little more than you can, and adjusting to the stimulus of the workout, and actually fulfilling the stimulus of the workout, which I do try to do most of the time. But there might be people listening who don't actually understand what we mean by the stimulus of a workout. Can you elaborate on that a bit, what we mean by that, and why people should scale in line with what the stimulus of a workout is? Yeah. I sort of mentioned it a minute ago, but maybe I can perhaps explain exactly what I mean by stimulus. If you go back to when we talk about the programming, when we say about the programming being constantly varied, a lot of people who have been in contact for a little while will notice that certain workouts will feel a certain way. I kind of elaborated on it earlier. You might get a short, very high-intensity sprint-style workout. You might get a long, endurance-style workout. You might get a hillier. There's a different stimulus to each one. The stimulus is what, I suppose, body adaption or effect that you're going to get from that workout. And then it creates a workout to meet that stimulus in your body. This is the side of the programming that the members won't actually see. The side of the stimulus that the members would see is when we gather around the whiteboard and we say that we're going to do seven rounds for time of whatever it may be, we expect you to finish between 10, 15 minutes. If you're finishing in that window, 99% of the time it would suggest that you've got the weight that you're supposed to use just right, I guess the adjusting of a particular movement just right. It could be a workout with bar muscle-ups in it, for example. You may not be quite there yet with bar muscle-ups. It's making sure that what we adjust that movement to is going to fit within our stimulus. So that's the side of it that perhaps the members would see from a stimulus point of view. As long as you're adjusting things accordingly, we should, a lot of the time, be meeting those stimuluses to make sure your body's getting the right effect from that workout. So that's what scaling means. Even elite level CrossFitters should still be scaling workouts occasionally. From a program point of view, there should be days, and it's intentional, where the RX for that workout is pretty much impossible for nearly everybody, including the elite level. Mm-hmm. And that's intentional to try and even get people who've been in CrossFit a long time, who are very good at it, to get their head around the idea of scaling things based on how they're feeling on the day, based on what they know their capacity is, making them think about what their capacity is, and actually push them a little bit more out of their, I suppose, complacency. And, again, keeping it varied, keeping it on their toes. Suddenly they're going to think, oh, wow, I can't do that weight. What should I do? I've got to think about it now. Maybe I'll try this, and they get to understand their bodies a bit better, and then maybe they push themselves in ways they haven't done so before. They're just used to doing the same RX weights all the time, and that sort of thing. So, yeah, scaling, let's come back to what I talked about before, scaling is not this big horrible thing, or this horrible dirty word in the CrossFit world. It is something that we should all do. Some of us do it better than others. Some of us perhaps do it too much. That happens as well. People can't scale too much. The opposite. They don't think it's a dirty word at all. They think they're confident, though, and actually they want to scale everything, which they could encourage you to try and push yourselves where we know that you can push yourselves. Yeah, rephrase scaling, or rethink scaling to, or think of scaling as not doing less, it's doing the right amount. Yeah. It's adjusting. Yeah, yeah. Basically, it's what it is. Yeah, so if we think about that then, we're saying let's stop worrying about the numbers and comparing to other people and all that kind of stuff. So how should we actually judge whether we're training well? There are different ways, to be fair. I mean, the most obvious way of judging whether you're training well, obviously, is to sit outside of the numbers. Obviously, the first thing to do is to look at numbers. Us using things like the on the whiteboard does help to try and track numbers. But like I said earlier on, numbers don't always give the full picture. One way of knowing if you're training well is actually just showing up to train, to be fair. If you can look at, I'll be honest, for example, in December we did the committed club at the gym where we set people to train. So I've come 12 times in December. Suddenly, people were not so much worrying about what they were doing in the gym, they were thinking about how often they were coming to the gym. Yeah. That is a big step right there. Just being consistent with actually coming to the gym. I said it earlier on as well. Ideally, you want to be striving to come at least three times a week. If you want to see progress, provided you're doing all the other bits that I discussed in the last podcast correctly, if you want to see progress, focus on what I said in the last podcast and make sure you come into the gym at least three times a week. Just looking at that on your team up, for example. I think if you go on the whiteboard, I think you can actually look at your, I'd have to look myself, I think you can actually see your calendar and you can see the days that you've attended because they highlight them. If you look at the highlighted days that you've attended and you can just take a glance at that to see whether or not the consistency is there. If you look at that and you can see, wow, more of that month is highlighted than un-highlighted, you already know the training is going the right way. We're going in the right direction. That's sort of the third part of it. I've got a tribute to that one. On that note, you were saying that sort of first proper six months where I was doing CrossFit consistently, where you were saying you meet up with those people you haven't seen in six months. I thought, yo, what's changed with you? My answer was just, I've just been doing CrossFit three times a week. And they're like, I bet if you've been doing this, you've been doing that. I thought you'd been doing that. No, no, just been consistently doing CrossFit three times a week. That was it. Exactly. People will assume that you've got to do more than that. You don't. I mean, you must speed up the process a little bit, but as long as you're being consistent with three times a week. What you don't want to do is do three times a week for two weeks and then the following week, I only make it once this week. And then, oh, I've got three times a week next week. Oh, the following week, I can't do that. Talk the following week. What you want to do is target minimum three times a week. Every week, everyone will notice progress. Yeah. If you can do more than that, even better. The programming is designed for people to be able to come every day at Ironhide. Maybe not in the case of all CrossFit gyms, but I know the programming here is designed that people can come every day. The stimuluses are adjusted, so yeah, you can come every day. And you'll see progress a little bit quicker. But yeah, at least three times a week. Another way that, especially early on, that you will start to notice improvement in your fitness without necessarily just looking at numbers is how you feel in between sessions. I mean, you're always going to have times where you feel sore. There's no escaping that, unfortunately. I wish you could. But what you do tend to find is you've never done CrossFit before. If you're not from that sort of background whatsoever, then you can't CrossFit for the first time. So, I don't know, a few sessions, a few weeks, a few months perhaps can be quite painful. You might feel a little bit of soreness that you maybe haven't felt before in places that you didn't think you could feel soreness. But you'll tend to find that once you've been doing CrossFit for a little while, your body's started adjusting to the intensity of the workouts that we do. You'll start noticing that the soreness, or maybe just soreness, but your energy levels in between sessions or classes or workouts starts to feel better. People actually do start saying that they feel more energy. So, at the start, they think, oh, that workout knocked me out. I got home, had some food, and was out like a baby for the night, which is good. CrossFit can help improve your sleep. But they do then sometimes find that the following day, they feel a little bit flat. So, they knew they were quite sore. They feel a little bit energy depleted. That's quite normal to start with. And then after, it could be, for some people, weeks. It could be months or some. Suddenly, there's a bit of a bounce. And suddenly, they feel like they've got loads of extra energy that they didn't have before. And suddenly, workouts that would have left them in absolute pieces at the start isn't leaving them feeling quite as sore anymore. So, that's another way of noticing whether or not the training's working. You will always get sore, unfortunately. There will always be an element of soreness. Yeah, yeah. You talked a lot there about the newer members, those that have been doing it for a while. You mentioned about the early acceleration, and sometimes it can plateau out. How people who have been doing it a while keep track of their progress and keep that kind of motivation alive? If you've been doing it for a little while, more than you've been doing it for a little while, because either you're noticing progress, or you've been noticing progress, and you also, it's become a habit, and actually you find that you're really enjoying your training. You're just enjoying coming to the gym. Some people, I know I've coached a lot of people who come to CrossFit, started doing the classes, who actually would quite openly say to me, I hate exercise. I'm just doing it because I know I need to. Actually, the more they start to do it, the more they start to integrate into the community as well. They actually start finding that the weeks where they can't come to the gym, could be illness, could be commitments, could be whatever it may be, suddenly they notice that they miss the gym, or perhaps they actually notice their energy has gone down a little bit. They start feeling a little bit, I suppose, agitated. I don't want to say angry is the wrong word. They start feeling a little bit agitated, and they feel that drive to come back to the gym. That is very, very common in those who've been doing it a little bit longer. When you've been doing it a little bit longer, yes, there can be an element of progress physically slowing down, not stopping. It could be slowing down potentially. It could be for loads of different reasons, but by that point, I suppose as well, there's a lot to be said for the psychological element of training as well. You can track numbers all you want. You can't really track, I suppose, mental health or mental well-being as easily as you can physical numbers. I'd say for those who have been doing CrossFit a little bit longer, there's probably quite a strong psychological element to training as well. If you find that you're missing the gym, and you're not perhaps coming as often, or you find that it's non-negotiable not going to the gym today, that is also another way of tracking your progress in fitness. I'd say trust the gym. Trust the programming. If you find a site you've been doing it for a while and you're not progressing, more than likely it's going to come back to what I said about a couple of weeks ago. It's probably going to come back to the base of the pyramid. Nutrition, recovery. If you've been coming that long, and you're coming every day, progress is stalled. More than likely, something needs tweaking. It's not gone wrong, but it needs tweaking in the base of the pyramid. It might not be food. It could be sleep. It could be stress. It could be work. It could be a new job. It could be all sorts. The base of that pyramid is maybe not quite where it was before or where it needs to be. I'd say more than likely it's probably that. There will be a psychological element to it as well where if you saw that desire to get in the gym daily or every week, that means something's still working. Even if you may not think it is, something's still working. To wrap this up then, we've covered a lot today. You did this last week to help people take something from this that they can start putting into action straight away. If someone was listening to this and just needed to remember one thing, or one thing that they could do differently off the back of this podcast, what do you reckon you should do? Let's go back to scaling. Using scaling as a tool to improve your fitness and not using it as a way to make workouts easier or to think of it as a failure. Use scaling as a tool, is what I would say. Okay. If people like options and they're like, yeah, that's a good one. I want a choice. I want to pick what my one thing is. What are the couple of options do you think there are for people who could have in a takeaway? Thinking of CrossFit as being about broad fitness instead of specialising in any one thing. Trusting. Trusting the process of what we do in the gym. Just trust it. Don't think about it too much. Don't overthink it. The majority of the questions I get from people is just, where am I overthinking? They're thinking, I should do this, I should do that. Am I doing that right? Should I scale this or scale that? Trust us. Trust the coaches. Trust the coaches. If we say, you should be able to do these many reps unbroken, or you should be able to do this movement and it should look like this. Or if we say, that weight should be lighter. Or if we say, you should be going a bit heavier. Trust us. Trust the coaches and trust the programme in the gym. You don't need to do anything different. As long as you're trusting those things and you are focusing on what we spoke about in the first podcast, stick with it. Keep showing up. Kind of goes back to trusting the process. Keep showing up. Keep showing up at least three days a week and just trust. Trust in the process and be patient. Cool. That clears a lot of stuff up, Luke. Hopefully now if anyone listening, if you've ever wondered why the programme looks the way it does, or if you're doing things right, or why we encourage people to scale at certain times, that's hopefully answered those questions. But as always, if you've got any questions on what we've covered today, or you've got questions you want covered in future episodes, send them to us. Call me and Ben in the gym. Tell us. We'll write them down somewhere and maybe get some votes of what some future ones might look like. We've already got the next one in store. Next episode, we're going to talk about the CrossFit Open. What it is, how to approach it, how to get the most out of it, whether you're in it for fun, fitness, get friendly competition, all that sort of stuff. Registrations are now open for those that are keen. But for those that are on the fence or don't really know a lot about CrossFit Open, listen out for the next episode. Thanks for listening. Cool. Thank you, guys.