Chris Sinagoga | Saturday, December 2, 2017 at 8:02AM If anyone still has the email I sent out for the Summer 2011 back in the Fieldhouse, you'll find a part in there about attendance. The message has been the same and repeated since: just show up! We'll take care of the rest. And I have yet to see anyone go against the trend of their results following the same trajectory of their attendance. The Athlete of the Summer people are microcosms of that.
The interesting part about about this adaptation is it's a lot less physical than you think, especially in the early days.
Josh Howey was a Summer 2017 rookie who came in with the second-least body awareness and control of the group. By the end of the Summer it was improved after good attendance, but then he took September and most of October off because football practice was right smack in the middle of the afternoon. He came back at the end of October and his first workout back was a max effort back squat. Here's how it looked:
Not great with 65 pounds. But he was here almost every day, and here's what he looked like 12 days later on his max effort front squat:
Not bad with 75 pounds!
It's hard to know for sure, but I would assume the time it takes someone's muscles to gain 10 pounds of contractile potential is a lot longer than 12 days. So my guess, and other coaches I talk to agree, that this adaptation happens between the ears. We teach movement above all else with CrossFit, and the Champions Club, in specific, emphasizes that about as much as any other gym I've seen. The pathways from your brain to your arms, legs, and midline needs to be continually reinforced, and every time a movement is completed it's like hitting Save on a Word document. Between the first video and the second, Josh probably did 300 squats in the form of air squats, front squats, burpees, deadlifts, and box jumps (all variations of squatting). With that repitition he was able to show more control over his body, and that expressed itself in a little more weight and a much cleaner-looking movement. Watching Nick Bewick through Fundamentals and going from not being able to hollow rock on Day 1 to doing 4 cycles of Tabata on Day 7 is another example.
Movement = skill. Skill = reps. Reps = attendance. Attendance = get your lazy butt to the gym!
