January 2025
Christmas Holiday Schedule:
Monday, Dec 23: Classes at 5:30 AM, 11:30 AM, and 4 PM
Tuesday, Dec 24th: Rowing and a Christmas movie at 9 AM. Bring a little Christmas treat to share!
Wednesday, Dec 25th: Closed for Christmas
Thursday, Dec 26th: One class at 11:30 AM
Friday, Dec 27th: Once class at 11:30 AM
Tuesday, Dec 31st: Classes at 5:30 AM, 11:30 AM, and 4 PM
Wednesday, Jan 1st: Once class at 11:30 AM
From the Desk of the Gorilla:
As we close out 2024, it’s time to refocus and get real about 2025. This isn’t just a New Year’s resolution—it’s a mission to make it our healthiest year yet. And here’s the thing: your fitness isn’t just about you.
There are 50 to 250 people in your orbit—family, friends, coworkers—counting on you to be your best. Someone out there needs you to show up strong, and you can’t let them down. It’s bigger than just you.
Every workout you crush, every solid nutrition decision you make, you’re standing on the front line in the fight against metabolic disease. Together, we’re not just changing ourselves; we’re impacting everyone around us.
We’ve charted an exciting course for the HOG to kick off 2025! Starting in January, we’ll dive into the Whole Life Challenge—a six-week nutrition challenge we’ve done for years. If you haven’t tried it before, it’s a fantastic way to jumpstart your year and set the tone for success.
So set your targets and dial it in. One quarter of a century down, three quarters to go. The work we put in now is shaping the future—for ourselves and for everyone who depends on us.
Let’s get after it. It’s bigger than us.
-Steve
The Iron Pen
I hope everyone is enjoying all the special workouts in December: Hot Wheels, 12 Days of Christmas, rowing to a movie, and a special surprise…Linda on the day after Christmas! Linda is one of the classic girl WODs that uses your bodyweight to determine the weight on the bar for a descending ladder of deadlift, bench press, and power cleans. It’s untenable to run it in a normal class, so we are gonna tackle it the day after Christmas when you (probably) don’t have to go to work.
During the first full week of January we will embark on our next strength cycle: Push Press. And I’m going to throw in a special dash of abdominal accessory work on our strength days (Monday). This is mostly because I know everyone loves ab accessory work, and it does have value. But before you get too excited, please hear me loud and clear: There is no amount of ab exercises that will give you visible abs. That only happens when you consistently control what you eat for 3 months or more. As long as we are all eyes wide open about that, then I’m happy to play along with the charade that GHD situps will give you a six-pack.
I am really encouraged by the positive response to skill days on Thursday, and you will see that format repeated often. I will also be programming strict pullups on Thursdays in January, because it’s never a bad time to get better at strict pullups, or earn your first strict pullup.
Strict gymnastics strength takes about a decade to build. Skills like ring muscle ups, squat snatch, and double unders can also take a frustratingly long time to learn. But competency in these movements results in huge rewards to our physical ability. And for that reason we choose to sometimes slow down and “do the hard things because they are hard,” as President Kennedy said.
In his article “What is Fitness?” Greg Glassman argued there are ten general physical skills: endurance, flexibility, coordination, stamina, power, agility, strength, speed, balance, and accuracy. I intend for us to train all ten. Many years later Mark Rippetoe added “Of the ten general physical skills, I argue that strength is *the most* general.” And that’s a good elevator pitch for why we spend so much time on strength. Go read “What is Fitness,” at the link above. It’s 22 years old and still spittin’ fire.
So on the occasional days when we slow down to work on a skill, or build strength, or try a new and unfamiliar movement, I encourage you to embrace it. For that is every bit as “CrossFit” as 20 minutes of sweating through burpees, thrusters, and double unders. And more important than whether it meets some arbitrary definition–it makes us better humans. Stronger. Smarter. More capable. Harder to kill.
-Jeff