Oh gosh. I wrote up that whole blog post about programming and forgot to mention something super important.
Something you’ll notice is missing is a shift away from the old school RX designation on the workouts everyday. About four years ago, I adopted a more progression friendly “levels” system that shows L1, L2, L3 and L4, at the bottom of most workouts.
There were a couple of reasons for this.
After classes and while chatting with clients, particularly newer ones, I noticed their tone would be discouraged at their perceived “lack of progress.” When asking them about where this was coming from, they without fail would mention I didn’t do the “real” workout like it was written. Even though they had just sweat, tried, lifted, ran, burpeed, and all the same things, it wasn’t seen as “enough.” All we can do as coaches and as athletes and humans is work as hard as we can within our current state, rest, let our bodies get stronger and come back the next day. Having some random number that I was inventing in my head be discouraging to clients was missing the point and goal for our workouts; help all client progress and be healthier.
The second point is that by writing out the levels, and all of the scaling options, I noticed that both clients and coaches were getting better at scaling their movements and warming up quicker. Seeing the declination of T2B written out over and over is really helpful, so that I know that when my T2B’s finally die off, I know to go to Hanging Knee Raises, and the V-ups, and then Situps. It just becomes second nature and easily thought about. Thus, writing them out this way helped everyone learn how to get a more solid workout in their hour and perhaps in their side workouts at home or with friends. Which is also a perk.
The final one is for the crowd that is more resistant to change, likely because they’ve achieved consistent “RX” status and don’t want it their hard work to go away. Keep in mind that our long-term goal is to keep ya’ll progressing and developing your strength, conditioning, skills, and your overall level of fitness. If you feel like you aren’t progressing as much as you used to at the gym, part of that is because of a mental plateau that often occurs when you hit your goal of RX’ing workouts. Sooo HOORAY!… and also there is always more work to do.
So many times when I see “RX+” programming style the workouts is some hulked out, super duper, Games athletes only style that isn’t as much a natural progression but an invitation for steroids. The L4 option on the board will always be a natural extension and tweak to push and challenge you in the same way you once had to push yourself to grow and get to that mark.
We do still love using SugarWOD and it will have the RX/Scaled split on their for logging purposes because its their app and code. So if you think this whole thing is a load of hooey, then you can still get the checkbox in the app. L3 will be the standard or traditional RX position. I would recommend that you just leave the L designation as your comment each workout so you’ll have easy access to your progressions!