In a previous blog, I wrote about ‘Who/Why, Targets, Goals, and Standards.” Today I would like to focus on the standards component and how it can be utilized to help you close the gap to becoming a stronger version of yourself.
Recently we conducted our quarterly strength assessments. The purpose in these assessments is to help us track and quantify your strength gains. We believe our ARX technology is a great tool for tracking this progression. You can read more about the reasons why here.
One of the main aims of our program is to help you become a stronger version of yourself. We have always encouraged you to try to be just a little better than before. This is still what we encourage you to do.
However, I am also aware that many people are motivated by having numbers of others to compare to. CrossFit founder, Greg Glassman, was famous for saying, “Men will die for numbers.” Placing performance numbers on a white board as a means of comparison during CrossFit was intended to take advantage of ones competitive nature. My experience was that this did result in driving high levels of effort and corresponding results from training. This was great for increasing effort but not so great when the quality of movement suffered as a result. This path often leads to injury.
In our method of training, quality of movement is a priority. Our primary objective of the training is to stimulate positive physical adaptation. Strength is one of those adaptations and we are simply using our assessment as a way to quantify these gains.
We intend to utilize numbers to both challenge and encourage. In many cases we underestimate what we are capable of. You will only rise to the standard you set for yourself. If you consciously set your standard to be less than your best then this is perfectly acceptable. However, if you underestimate your potential and unknowingly set the standard less than your best, we want to challenge you to raise the bar. A great example of this was Roger Bannister being the first to break the 4:00 mile. Before he accomplished this, the “experts” said it was physiologically impossible. After having done it, over 20 people ran a sub 4:00 mile within a year. He simply raised the bar of what was possible.
We are creating two different charts to give you some “numbers” to both challenge and encourage you.
One chart is a tally of the averages of our assessments of our clients. The averages are based on age and combine both male and female numbers. The second chart is the top 10 performances of both male and female.
This is by no means a perfect comparison. Many factors would have to be considered to attain a true comparison from one individual to the next. However, we hope you can find some inspiration from seeing these numbers.
We have also created some videos that you can study while away from the stress of your training to better understand the movement standard that we are aiming for as well.