February 2025
Coming up!
The CrossFit Open- More info below
CFI Bowling Night- Early March after the Open. Details to follow
From the Desk of the Gorilla:
The CrossFit Open is officially live, and it’s time to throw your name in the hat. Sign-ups are open now, and yeah, it’s $20—but I promise you, I’ve never once regretted spending that $20. I’ve been signing up every year since 2017, when a few folks told me, “Do it, you won’t regret it.” And they were right. I’ve never missed that money, but I’ve gained a hell of a lot of memories. I’ve got a worldwide ranking (not a good one, but a ranking nonetheless), and I’ve pushed myself in ways I never would have without this event.
This year, for the first time, the Open is adding a new community element. The details aren’t fully fleshed out yet, but one thing is clear—your score, your participation, and your effort help put the HOG on the map in the greater CrossFit world. It’s one more way to represent what we’ve built together.
The Open is about more than just a workout. It’s about being part of something bigger. It’s about testing yourself, showing up when it matters, and realizing that every rep you do, every point you log, contributes to a movement that extends far beyond our gym walls. Guess what? Your fitness… it’s bigger than you!
So skip the extra guac, sign up for the Open, and grab some gear to commemorate this year’s battle. We’ve got Open-exclusive apparel available through our Apparel Lab store https://apparellab.chipply.com/CrossfitImpulse/, and you can register for the Open here: https://games.crossfit.com/open/registration
Get in the game, cop some sweet swag from Apparel Lab, chase a PR, and make some damn memories. This is bigger than us. Let’s get after it.
-Steve
The Iron Pen
February has arrived! And here’s what’s in store.
Our new strength cycle will be front squats. The accessory work will be pullups and hamstring work, likely banded hamstring curls. I really like the way front squats pair with pullups. The front squat requires a rigid static hold from the upper back and the pullup requires the most functional known contraction of the upper back. The combination is a potent stimulus that grows your capability in both!
We will continue our pure strength days on Mondays, because nothing starts your week off right like getting stronger in the House of Gainz! On weeks where Monday is a holiday, I have traditionally moved the strength day to Tuesday or Wednesday of that week. Going forward I’m going to try a new process: On weeks where Monday is a holiday we will have our usual holiday workout, and then we will skip the strength cycle that week and pick it up again the next week, right where we left off. The problem I’m solving is that it’s very tough to make the week well-balanced when the holiday workout must precede the strength day. The holiday workout plus the strength day usually leaves either our shoulder or our legs blasted. I’m now going to focus on making the holiday week well-balanced by itself, and then we will jump back into our strength routine the very next week. This should improve both our strength days and our holiday weeks!
Tuesdays and Wednesdays will be long conditioning pieces and classic CrossFit, not necessarily in that order.
Thursdays will be focused on skills and strength. If you train Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then by Thursday it’s tough to keep grinding at full intensity. So these workouts focus on taking a step back and practicing skills. Acquiring physical skills is equally foundational to CrossFit as metabolic conditioning. And physical skills are certainly more important to life. Example: There is little functional difference between someone who can run a 7-minute mile and someone who can run a 6-minute mile. Both people likely enjoy excellent cardiovascular fitness that enables their lives equally well. The only time you can find the difference between them is when you test their 1-mile run. And getting the person from a 7-minute mile down to a 6-minute mile would involve a lot more conditioning training. That person would want to spend Thursdays sweating profusely on the track–not acquiring skills–and for little marginal benefit to his life.
But there is a significant difference in life-capability between someone who can pull his body up and over a fixed obstacle (a bar muscle up) and someone who cannot. There are a million scenarios out in our world that make that feat of skill and strength quite useful. There is a significant difference in life-capability between someone who can climb a rope and someone who cannot. Between someone who can jump athletically and someone who cannot. For this reason, occasionally focusing on skills and strength is a wonderfully necessary use of our training time.
Oh, and there’s Friday. There’s four Fridays in February before we perform our first CrossFit Open workout, 25.1, on Friday February 28th. I will use a couple of those Fridays to get you familiar with the logistics of doing an Open workout at CrossFit Impulse. So when the Open gets here on the last day of the month, you will be comfortable with the format and you can focus on doing your best.
You will also see chinups programmed occasionally over the next few months. I realized recently that I have lost a lot of capability on chinups by always doing my pullups with prone grip. There are great benefits to wrist flexibility and bicep health by doing chinups, which is just a pullup with a supinated grip (grip the pullup bar with palms and fingernails pointed toward your face).
Do you sometimes struggle with anxiety about workouts? I’ll close here with some advice that I give myself literally every week: Abandon your expectations of yourself, and just come to the gym and work. CrossFit is competitive by nature. One of the best things about CrossFit is that it made every day into a competition. This makes us all fitter. But one of the worst things about CrossFit is that it made every day into a competition. After many years, this can make us mentally exhausted.
As a beginner you focus on just coming to the gym and doing what the coach asks of you. You have no idea how it will turn out. You don’t know if Fran is a 20 minute workout or a 2 minute workout. You just show up and work hard. As you progress over a few years this slowly gives way to incessantly playing the workout through your mind. Trying to predict your sets, your level of fatigue, how long you will need to rest–just analyzing the shit out of imaginary exercise. This can give me great anxiety about the workout and how I will perform. I have learned to combat this with one simple trick that doctors don’t want you to know about (not really): I tell myself “I am just going to go to the gym and work as hard as my body feels like working in the moment. Whatever performance falls out is whatever falls out.” And when I do that, I almost always perform really well. In fact, I often feel like working really hard in the moment, and I turn in something close to my best possible performance. And I think that’s only possible because I gave myself permission that I didn’t have to.
Will that work for you? I don’t know. I only live in my head. Maybe you don’t struggle with that at all. But without that technique I wouldn’t have made it 18 years in CrossFit. I would have burned out, and I wouldn’t be as fit as I am today. I hope that tool can help you find some self-compassion that keeps you coming back into the House of Gainz or ANY gym for a lifetime.
Jeff