See your Abs and make all of your dreams come true!!

Sorry, for the click bait title! Well not actually, but while you’re here, take a moment to get inspired about the CrossFit Open, or more importantly convinced to sign up if you haven’t already!

Are you on the fence? I hope that in the gym we’ve done a good enough job of explaining what the CrossFit Open is, so I’ll save you that explanation. A simple YouTube search of “What is the CrossFit Open?” Will net you tons of videos to answer the question.

You’ve probably even been engaged in some discussion of why you should do the Open, so again, I’m not going into the ‘why’ of all of it. Nope, I’m skipping straight away to refute your excuses for not officially participating in the Open! I’ve heard them all. You’ll need to be more creative to give me a fresh excuse that I haven’t lost sleep over.

“I’m too new, I haven’t been doing CrossFit long enough.” — Yes I can hear your fear, and no it’s not valid. To the novice, you already come to CrossFit knowing very little and having experienced just a preview of all we do at CrossFit. You’ve already proven and continue to prove that lack of knowledge or experience hasn’t been a barrier to your training! It is actually especially important for the novice to participate in the Open their first year so we can see the wild progress in year two. One of the most common things I hear from this group after the Open is, “I should have signed up”.

“I do HIT class, NOT CrossFit!” Sorry, HIT class, but you aren’t off the hook either! Yes there may be a barbell, yes there could potentially be running in the form of short shuttles, yes your judge will hold you to a standard, and yes you’ll be keeping score. Since we got that out of the way, know that we believe the Open to be such a positive experience that’d we be serious A-Holes if we didn’t share that experience with you. Scientific studies can be cut short if it becomes clear that whatever is being studied is so effective and important that it would be unethical to continue denying whatever it is to a control or placebo group. I don’t imagine any of you would offer Christmas to just some of your children.

“I can’t Rx all of the workouts.” Similar reply to the first excuse. If you’re worried about completing the Open workouts Rx’d, it’s likely that you already don’t Rx every workout and are having a great time at CrossFit. If you record your scores, you can already see improvements in your fitness, but there’s something special about achieving a movement goal in the Open and especially if it’s a movement that stopped you in your tracks the previous year!

Hopefully you can see the theme! Nobody is off the hook here! When I’m at church, people’s conversation with me often naturally goes towards why they can’t work out, or how they shouldn’t do CrossFit (unprompted by me). Now at church, I’m gracious and let people save face; I mean they brought it up, and if asked what they ought to do for fitness and health, my answer is CrossFit without hesitation. For you though, no grace here. There’s not an excuse you’ll hear us concede!