I think this has to be the first ‘long’ post that I have ever written!
WHY YOU SHOULD LOG YOUR RESULTS
From the Athletes perspective:
We encourage all of you to log your results and performances. You need to be doing this for several reasons, here are some of them:
- It allows you to monitor your own progress be it performance, nutrition, sleep, mood, lifestyle or body composition changes. You cannot tell if you are moving forward if you don’t know where you are now.
- It allows you to set appropriate goals for yourself. It is all too easy to set unrealistic and unachievable goals, knowing your history of performance/weight loss/weight gain over time can help you decide on a realistic and achievable goal with appropriate time frames.
- It allows you to quickly look up the last weight/rep scheme you used on a lift. Quick, we have thrusters today, the Rx is 40kg/25kg or 60% of your 1RM. What did you use last time?
- It allows you to understand how much and what scaling is appropriate for you. 50 pull-ups in a workout? Should you use the green band, purple band, ring rows? What if there are only 25 pull-ups, what then?
- It keeps you motivated. You are reporting to yourself, checking in with yourself.
- It helps to improve compliance and gym attendance. Who wants a blank log book?
- It allows you to monitor and identify what kinds of lifestyle/nutritional/sleep/etc choices affect your performance. Had a non paleo meal last night? How did that affect your workout today? Without logging it you will never know
All of the above contribute to a fitter and healthier you.
From the Coaches perspective, here are a few:
- It allows us to monitor your individual progress be it performance, nutrition, sleep, mood, lifestyle or body composition changes.
- It allows us to monitor the gym populations progress and close the feedback loop.
- It allows us to set appropriate goals for you.
- It allows us to understand how much and what scaling is appropriate for you.
- It enables us to monitor and improve our own program based on your results.
- It enables us to identify weaknesses in our athletes that we can then target.
All of the above contributes to us being able to get you fitter and healthier.
CrossFit is an empirically driven fitness program. The effectiveness of the program (and any fitness program for that matter) is measured by its safety, efficiency and efficacy. Without data however, any claim to being safe, efficient or efficacious cannot be backed up. Furthermore the collection of data has to be observable, measurable and repeatable for us to begin to truly judge our program.
To this end CrossFit Léman has joined Beyond the Whiteboard. Finally, both athletes and coaches can do all of the above in one place!
BTWB has finally given us this opportunity. We can collect all this data for the entire gym and test our program based on your results. The main advantage being that results are now all in one place rather than spread through 200 WODBooks and thousands of scraps of paper! Until now we have been monitoring you and the gym population by recording the test day results written up on the whiteboard. We now have a better way.
We are not asking you to give up your WODBook, scraps of paper, myWOD app etc if you prefer these. But at a minimum log your test day results into BTWB so that we can monitor progress, correct and continuously improve our program. We will inform you which days are considered test days. The test days are the days we pay special attention to range of motion, and special attention to the recording of results, we ask you to write ‘PR’s on the board. These are the days whose workouts will be repeated in the near future, they signal the start of a progression or the end. On average there are four a month.
We selected Beyond The Whiteboard above other online workout tracking and logging systems as they offer some specific advantages to CrossFit. It is set up in such a manner that it helps to create community with the gym with the sharing and posting of results. You can compare your results with the whole world, just the gym or just people like you. You can track your sleep, diet, diary, mobility work, and mood. There is even a free iPhone app which allows you to quickly log results. As coaches we can easily check on progress and performance with graphs and progressions mapping changes. We can request you to weigh-in on certain days and monitor your body composition transformations. Ideally, you will also submit your measurements (squat range of motion, deadlift range of motion, and shoulder to overhead range of motion) and thus generate your power curve across broad time and modal domains! A mouthful for you I am sure, but a gold mine of information for us. Please ask your coaches for help with these measurements if you need it.
You should have received an invitation to join BTWB and if you haven’t please let us know in the comments section or by email and we’ll get one out to you.
Please help us and at a minimum log your test day results into Beyond The Whiteboard.
Request an invitation by clicking here and then click ‘send’.
