I love Alyssa and I usually also love what she has to say. I’ve thought this for a very long time, so glad she has put it into words. I do believe in retesting Benchmarks though, which will have RX and scaled numbers but for training we don’t need it. Yesterday wod had an RX and Scaled number, but I decided not to use it. If I would have put that down, Jay would have found it way too easy, same with Jeff and Peter and a few others. This way, everyone had a great workout and had the right stimulus. Makes sense?
Do you know why you are still using RX?
When I ask that in coaching workshops, I usually get a gym full of people looking at me as if I were eating kittens, then a bunch of tilted heads, then shrugged shoulders. Then the rueful admission that they have no idea why they are still using RX. Just, well, isn’t that what CrossFit is? That’s what we’ve always done.
Sure, when we opened Rocket CrossFit, we used RX just like everyone else. After about three years, we realized that RX wasn’t a useful tool for building community, so we started shying away. About a year after that we realized (embarrassingly late, really) that RX isn’t useful in training either.
Why? Because we are a GPP gym. Our mission as a gym is to help the largest number of people be the fittest they want to be. But those people are all different, they’re all starting in different places, and they all have different goals.
crossfitpickering.com 