Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Train for a Great Life. This one is Open Magic, week 2. Here we are again. The Open has done its thing masterfully. If Week 1 taught us to push a little harder, week 2 has taught many of us that we're stronger and more capable than we realize. By my tally, we have 25 people who achieve their first pull-up variation One bar muscle-up, 11 chest-to-bar pull-ups, six first pull-ups, five first jumping chest-to-bar pull-ups and two first jumping pull-ups. The jumping variation is both to a six-inch standard, both to a six inch standard. This is outstanding.

Speaker 1: 0:51

I don't have data on this, but we do try to catch when someone achieves these firsts so we can highlight it, and I would guess over the years that we maybe get one to two people every month getting their first pull-up. Think about that for a second. If it's two per month, we just accounted for a year's worth of firsts, and if it's one per month, then it would be two years. That doesn't just happen. I want to dig into this a little bit more, and if you're one of the people who achieved a first, or even if you're one who had hoped to but didn't, you are who I'm talking to today. This is less for the people who have all the movements right up to a muscle up and so on, although I'm sure this will resonate hard with them because they were once in your shoes.

Speaker 1: 1:34

There are so many brilliant little quotes that have come from Greg Glassman, the original founder of CrossFit, one being that we fail at the margins of our experience. Your experience is where you're familiar, where you're comfortable, and the margins are the edges of that comfort zone Skills you have not developed, things that you rarely train or situations that you don't prepare for. Crossfit is known as a general physical preparedness program. It's not here to build a runner, a weightlifter, a cyclist, soccer player or swimmer. It's meant to build someone who has expanded margins to the point of having a body and mind capable of doing what they want with it. To use the soccer example, there is no amount of CrossFit that will build ball handling skills, but you'll absolutely build energy systems that will serve you well on the pitch and you'll be able to run longer, sprint faster and be harder to knock off the ball. Balance, speed, power, right. The application stretches far outside the gym as well.

Speaker 1: 2:41

What happens to the guy that focuses on his career path or business over his health and his family. His margins seep in and those areas we start to see failure. What happens to the mom who pours everything into her kids and loses parts of her that made her who she is? It's hard to get those back and I don't mean these examples to come off in any way misogynistic. They're just too common in how our society has been in decades past and I'm happy to say I do see it changing in a great way. You see dads that are involved with their kids and their family and you see moms that are out there kicking ass and training and working and not just staying at home not that there's anything wrong with that either. With crossfit becoming more and more mainstream over the years, the need for more inclusivity is apparent. But this can be a double-edged sword and I do see it in our gym.

Speaker 1: 3:43

To stay on the pull-up example, sometimes people get comfortable with the jumping pull-up and the ring row and they're not necessarily looking to try a pull-up. It happens much more with gymnastic movements than barbell or strength movements. Think of your deadlift. You can inch your way up for a long time, long, long time. The movement isn't any different the balance and strength and stability required to pull a triple bodyweight deadlift versus a double bodyweight deadlift versus a bodyweight deadlift is very different, but you learn those skills along the way as you progress. The process might not be linear over time, but the path is linear. A jumping pull-up to a pull-up to a chest-to-bar pull-up to a muscle-up is not linear. The progress looks a lot more like a staircase, where you stay on one step for quite some time and then, seemingly out of nowhere, you have the ability to go up a stair and then you have to stay there for a while.

Speaker 1: 4:43

I'm going to use Jen Blanchard as an example from this week. I'm going to use Jen Blanchard as an example from this week. She probably could have gone foundations or scaled for 25.2. The easy choice is foundations, but we got her to try a pull-up. We asked how close she was and she didn't quite know, and so we tried and she wasn't that far off, and so we waited and we tried again, and we waited and we tried again and she got it. She got her first pull-up. My words to her on which workout to choose were that you will not remember doing the foundations workout, but you will remember doing the scaled workout and getting your first pull-up, and so we went scaled super pace. We got to the bar with eight minutes to go and she ended up getting that one pull up again, along with a ton of misses. In terms of a workout to build her fitness, it probably had the least amount of stimulus of any workout all year, but she jumped up a stair and she'll remember the day that she got her first pull-up, with her husband and her son watching. It doesn't mean she'll be doing pull-ups in workouts yet. It'll be lots of ring rows to build back and pulling strength, but she did it. She knows that it's. It's not far off. You know where a workout comes up with low volume pull-ups maybe, and she she does a couple per round right. The open workouts are not regular workouts, they're tests and it's a perfect day to get to the pull-up bar and wait 60 seconds before your first attempt.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Back to the inclusivity part. In In 2015, they introduced the scale division and in 2021, they introduced foundations. Back in 2015, the first year of scaled guess what? 15.3 RX started with Seven muscle-ups on the rings Started right. So you're gonna have people line up and get a score of zero. I remember the announcement people in our gym and all over the world felt a gut punch like, oh, I, like I can't. I can't do it right, that's okay. Like that's the test you're going to come up on every now and then. Margins, do you know how many people got their first muscle up that day? Probably more than any other day in history. I love scaled, I love foundations, I love the inclusivity, but don't get me wrong, I also love pushing the margins. When 25.3 gets announced, talk to your coaches. We're not just here to help get you fit, we're here to push the margins of your experience. See you in the gym.