S02E61 HOW TO RUN AN INTRAMURAL CROSSFIT COMPETITION - BISON BOWL VII 2022

This year's Bison Bowl is in the books. After seven intramural competitions, what are the most important factors to running a successful competition for your CrossFit gym members? Dave goes over why a gym should hold their own Bison Bowl and how to develop an event that is now one of the highlights of the year of our gym. Shout out to the athletes @crossfitbison who competed this year!

@crossfittraining @crossfit @crossfitgames #crossfit #sports #exercise #health #movement #crossfitcoach #agoq #clean #fitness #ItAllStartsHere #CrossFitOpen #CrossFit #CrossFitCommunity @CrossFitAffiliates #supportyourlocalbox #crossfitaffiliate #personalizedfitness

S02E61 HOW TO RUN AN INTRAMURAL CF COMP - BISON BOWL 2022

[00:00:00] David Syvertsen: Welcome back to the Herd Fit podcast. I am coach David Syvertsen here with Dr. And coach Sam Rhee. We are here to talk about an episode in regard to running an intramural cross the competition at your box. We are sitting here almost 24 hours after Bison Bowl number seven. So that means we have run seven intramural cross the competitions at our gym.

I believe the first one was, I don't wanna get this wrong. I, I do think it was 2016, 16, 17, 18, 19, nothing in 20. No, it was 15, 2015 was the first time. And so we've, and in that time, this gym has changed so much just enrollment who comes here, who doesn't come here, the talent level, and also the margin between your.

More refined athletes and more begin our athletes. And because of that, like everything about the bison bolt changes compared to what we did yesterday and compared to what we did seven years ago at bison bolt, number one. So we kind of want to dive into what it, what it really entails. What's kind of like behind the scenes, how do you build this kind of thing?

How do you run it? How do you make it fun, but also safe, but also enjoyable for, you know, if you want to consider, you know, the elite athletes in your gym, but also the people that have never done this before. Also, including people that just started cross it months ago, how, how can you make it an equally enjoyable process?

And that's it come? That's a huge part of programming in general with CrossFit is that we should all be everyone in the gym, whether they're new, old, young, old been doing this for a long time, haven't been doing this for a long time, have competitive goals, don't have competitive goals, stimulus and workouts.

And in this case, stimulus in the event should feel the same. and that that's a really challenging task, but it's very doable. So we're gonna kind of dive into a lot of behind the scenes work with the bison and we'll give a lot of examples from our gym, but we'll try not to get too specific there because we know there's a lot of people listening that don't know our people.

So us talking about, you know, Dave Bo getting so good at everything. yeah. They're not gonna know who Dave Bo is, but I do think there's some examples there that we can kind of tie to your gym, that if you ever want to run an event, I will say there's probably two or three events per year. That stand out in my mind at, at bison.

One of 'em is the holiday party. One of 'em is the open party that we run at the gym and the other ones to bison bowl. And I think the gym without those events really kind of would prevent us from coming closer as a group.

[00:02:30] Sam Rhee: You know, I would say you are probably one of the most valuable people in terms of.

Being a resource on how to run an intramural competition. You've done this for, and I've seen everyone except for one, I was outta town for one, but I think I've seen all of the others and you are a one man band. You cover everything from soup to nuts. You handle all of it from the beginning to end. And so this is a good way for others to sort of look at why you should do one mm-hmm how you should do it.

Mm-hmm , you know, logistics, scheduling, planning. Yeah. And you know, the benefits of it. And, and I agree. I think this is the, this is one of the few events our gym looks forward to. Some people will not come out for most, anything

[00:03:13] David Syvertsen: else at the gym, but they'll come out for the bison bowl. Yeah. That's true.

And yeah. So what is the bison bowl? Let, let's talk about this. It's a competition. Alright. So yes, it is a, and we know that we've talked about this on this podcast. 90 plus percent of cross hitters, maybe that number's even higher don't have interest in competing, correct. They don't have interest in the sport.

I was talking about this with someone yesterday after the bison ball, some great conversations after with a lot of different people. And there is no interest. Like we, they don't care about energy systems and active recovery and strict strength and hitting percentages. They just want to come exercise and go home.

And I've said this before. I kind of envy that sometimes I'm looking forward to, you know, taking a step back at some point in the near future from always an over analyzing every little thing. And I always think the answer's right in the middle, you want to have a little bit of both just for the sake of your health and fitness, but with all that said, it's nice to once a year or maybe in some people's cases twice a year, the open and then the bicycle to kind of put yourself in the environment to kind of see what it feels.

And I've seen people do this, they do the bison bowl and it kind of woke up like a new side of them. And it's like, you know what? I kind of really like that. I like being in front of people and competing and pushing myself and trying to beat people. And, you know, we're all giving high fives and smiles after.

It's not like we're in the NFL here trying to rip each other's heads off, but it's all the, the competition. If you take it on responsibly, I think it's so good for you mentally and

[00:04:35] Sam Rhee: physically. I think it has more benefits for the recreational athlete than it does for our more competitive athletes at the gym.

Yeah. Our more competitive athletes at the gym are constantly pushing. They're constantly looking for other outside competitions, other ways to challenge themselves. This is a very safe way for our, like you said, brand new recreational athletes who just come for a, you know, 5:00 PM class. Mm-hmm to be with their friends, try to push a little bit.

And it really, they get the most benefit out of anyone else. So even if you think your gym doesn't have athletes, they're

[00:05:11] David Syvertsen: gonna enjoy this. Yeah. Good. That's a great. So across a competition to me, that is one day. All right. I, I think you need at least three events. It's ideal. If you can have four, but you know, logistics of timing and trying not to keep over here.

I mean, I, I had probably two handfuls of people saying like, yo, I gotta be outta here by 12 tomorrow. So, you know, you just gotta consider, you have to really look at the numbers and see how long your workouts are. But I think the minimum is three. And in those three workouts, you need to make sure that you're testing strength in at least one of them.

And you can test strength so many different ways. I'm not a huge, like one rep max guys, or but there should be a strength test in there. There should be something gymnastic base too, too. And that could be so many different movements. Like, I mean, that could even include burpees. Like I consider burpee's gymnastics, but burpees handstand pushups, muscle ups, pull ups Tobar wall walks like all that.

Stuff's one of those movements or a test of those movements needs to be in there. And then there's to be conditioning component, which in most cases, most workouts in CrossFit have a conditioning component. So that's really what I, I try to break that down first is all right, we're gonna go strengthen one event and you try to switch it up year to year, put gymnastics in an event where like that's gonna expose a weakness or ex show off a strength with a certain group of athletes or a, a team.

And then you have kind of like your, what I would just call mixed modal, like something that has a little bit of everything. And you do try to kind of get all three of those tastes within the competition. So that that's rarely what I mean by CrossFit competition is three workouts and they test all those different forms of fitness and you do get ranked in competition.

There's first place, there's last place. And that's kind of something that makes some people uncomfortable. But again, I think it's good for you to go through that kind of stress or, you know, joy, you know, if you're on the, you're on the top of the podium at the end. So that's what I mean by cross the competition.

Now here's the number one thing that I'm glad we did. And we do, we do this on Saturdays at the gym. Let's get your thoughts on it, Sam. Is we make the teams. We do not let people say, Hey, I want to sign up for the bicycle. And then they go text their two friends and say, Hey, do you guys wanna be on a team for competitions that you travel to all for it?

Yes. You get your, you make your team and you go forward. Right? Matt Malone and I, that we just had on the last couple of weeks, we signed up for a competition competition in September, we travel there, we pick each other, we train together. We go after each for each other, but we would not do that. We're okay here.

That we would, we do not do that at the bicycle, basically what we say. And I suggest anyone that runs this, and I'm gonna tell you why you tell people to sign up as an individual. And then when you're doing this, you say, Hey, do you wanna be RX or skilled? Most people say RX or scale. Like they pick one and then you have a handful.

If not more, say, Hey, I'm fine with either. I'll do RX or scaled. And I'll tell you why. That's really important that it's like huge to have. But Sam real quick thoughts on us doing it that way, where we don't make, we don't let the people here make the teams. Well, the first thing is,

[00:08:14] Sam Rhee: is I'm very glad it's not an individual competition.

Yeah. That it, it is team. And I think any intro box competition should always be team. There should really never be an individual competition. Yeah. And you know what

[00:08:25] David Syvertsen: that is? And that's what the open is. Yeah. Right. That's what the open is for. So that like you get, you get that taste.

[00:08:29] Sam Rhee: Right. The second thing is, is that when I agree with you, that you really need to be able to make up teams and not just have your.

Team up with you, but in order to do that, you have to know your athletes at your gym extremely well. And I think that that's where you shine Dave, because, you know, I mean, most of the time, like this year, maybe we had a ringer in there underestimated somebody, but in general, every year it's amazingly close.

And the reason why is, is that, you know, the capabilities

[00:08:59] David Syvertsen: of all your athletes. Yeah. Like reason number 147, that owners of a gym, or I should say head coach of a gym, but in, in a lot of time, in a lot of cases, they're the same. You have to be very involved and being involved is not coaching for classes a week and just kind of being there to work out every now and then, like, I really think you have to coach and what, and you coach, if you can, if this is possible, you coach the morning you coach the midday, you coach night based on like you have a different schedule almost every day.

Even with that, even further than that, the classes where you work at coach, you try to come and work out with different groups too, because I really think that you can get a different taste for athletes when you're one of the athletes in class working out with or against them. Right. But also when you coach them, you see different things, right.

You're, you're a little bit more aware, but it also, there's a different taste, a different feel when you work out with them and it's that's something I've always tried to be very aware of. Like when I work out with certain classes or certain people, even though I'm very focused on my workout, there's there's good energy or bad energy that comes off a lot of people.

And I, I get that when I work out with them and coaching, you don't really notice that as much on the flip side, when you coach you get to, because you're not working out, you really get to observe. You know, facial reactions emotions, you know, at the beginning of a workout, the middle of the workout, the end of the workout, the days that they're good at the days that they're bad at.

And then you really kind of put all these in all this information in your memory bank, so that when you have, we had a hundred people sign up for this thing, you can really, you know, capabilities, which we'll talk about next. And then, you know, about, but more importantly, you know, about like mental makeup of a lot of these people.

And I don't, I don't wanna say I was avoiding putting certain people together based on personality, but there are certain things that I know could ruin the experience of someone. If they were paired with someone else based on personality. And I don't want that now. I don't always want to run away from it.

Like I try not to put good friends with each other in the bison bowl, which is hard on a gym like this, cuz a lot of people are friends with each other, but you know, there's some, you know, BFF types here where like, all right, cool, you guys, aren't gonna be on the same team. And I want you guys to be with someone that.

You don't work out with on a general, on a regular basis. I had so many people come up to me yesterday, say like, I've never met my teammates before. They've been here three years. , you know, it's and it's like, you, I always view this place as one big community, one big happy family. I'm like, wow. You know what?

There's probably like 90 to a hundred people that don't know another 90 or a hundred people ever because they always come at the same time.

[00:11:30] Sam Rhee: Absolutely. If you go to 6:00 AM, how are you gonna know the six, 15:00 PM class? You're never gonna be there. I always forget about that. You know, I think compatibility in general is good.

I think it's unusual for one person to know the entire gym. And I think some gyms would need a brain trust, like getting the coaches together to help figure it out. I think you're unusually gifted. I hate to say that word like gifted, but you, you have a particular talent at identifying people's mental makeup in terms of their workouts.

And the thing is, is on the scaled side, especially the, the beginner athletes. It's not as hard. To figure out, you know, capabilities and to pair because you know, they're not usually going to be gunning for it. I mean, there are always a few people. Yeah. But it's really on the more competitive side, the more athletic side that you have to sort of work with those people.

Because if you, it, it can cause a problem. If you consistently mess up the par the pairings or the groupings every year, that will, that will build some resentment.

[00:12:31] David Syvertsen: For sure. Absolutely. So now let's talk about how do you make these teams before I get into that though, I want there there's some math involved here and you need to, so basically you need to set up who, again, this is advice for anyone that wants to run this, but for people that have been involved in the bison ball, I do want you guys to know this, how, how not difficult?

I hate saying difficult, but how much thought goes into making the teams? We basically, I think we put this out in June, early June, that the bicycle ball's gonna be July 23rd guys sign up. You have until July, I think I said sixth to sign up. Alright. So three weeks before, why three weeks before. And we need to make teams.

And when we go into the bison process, I do not know if it's gonna be teams of two. If it's gonna be teams of three, if it's gonna be co-ed, if it's gonna be same gender, and if there's gonna be RS and scaled, I don't know we've had, we've done everything. Just so you know, we've done partner comps. Co-ed, we've done partners, same gender.

We've done teams of three, same gender, I think three bison balls in a row. And we've done one year. We did no ax and no scale because the numbers lined up perfectly that we had basically two, a athletes and two scaled athletes on the same team. So four teams of four and I I'm 99% sure. It was two guys, two girls.

Yeah, there was. And like, I love the mixed gender teams. Like I think it brings like a different level of like flavor to it, but logistically it is tougher. So just so you know, when we don't make, we don't make that decision until we see all the numbers. I have a spreadsheet where it goes, RX guys, RX, girls, scaled, guys, scale girls.

And then I also keep the people that are, I call hybrids where they said that, Hey, I'll do. Or in my head, they signed up for scale, but I know they could probably do the RX or they signed up for RX, but I could probably think based on the workouts, they might be better off in scale. And as these people come in one at a time, you put these names in, you just look at the numbers and like your ideal world is like, the numbers were all the same.

They're equal and it almost never happens. And, but it's gotta be a multiple of three. Like if you have 26 RX guys sign up, you can't do team to three, right? It's not visible by three. If you have 19 RX girls sign up, you can't do three or two. Right. And then you say that for every single division. So once you get those numbers signed up, you have to spend like, I would say like a day or two, just making all these different combinations of our, alright, I really need two more RX girls to make it divisible by three.

That's what I needed this year. So I kind of moved the couple people up. Now here's the issue and this is human nature. I'm not coming down on anyone again, advice for if you're ever gonna run this. You have to anticipate people dropping out and that happened. I had six people drop out in the last two weeks.

All credible reasons. No, one's like, I don't feel like doing it. It just like life got in away for some people. All right. Sick family issues, whatever. Right. But I also had three people sign up after the deadline. So like, you, you have to be is so flexible and what helps me a lot. And if you're gonna run a competition that helps you to know I had Sam and I had another coach or two on the male side and I had my wife, Ashley, I called him backups.

these

[00:15:37] Sam Rhee: are all coaches that could fill in,

[00:15:38] David Syvertsen: in a pinch. Yeah. So like, if, so, if I needed one more RX guy, Sam was in and I was very transparent with him about that. And he's a good sport about it. He was in the bison bowl a week before, and then I had multiple guys drop out. So I basically took one team out of the competition and mashed two other teams together.

And Sam was still, I had, you know, a couple people on the fence the day before. On the female side, I had someone join really late, so I took Ashley out. All right. And then I had someone the day before, have to drop out because of a physical issue. So Ashley got put back in credit to Ashley. She found out 12 hour or 18 hours before that she was gonna be competing.

And her team won first place. sleeps with the owner. That's my wife, by the way. All right. So just so you know that it is stressful and like I've had people come up like, oh, I don't know how you do it. It's, it's part of the job. If you're gonna take on this competition and really do this, you have to be ready for adversity.

You can't make a plan for adversity after adversity. Thoughts on that? Yeah.

[00:16:42] Sam Rhee: Flexibility. I have seen you be extremely flexible, like you said, for everything, every aspect. And I think anyone who runs a big comp has to know, like they know how flexible you have to be for all the last minute glitches and issues.

And so if you really actually want to get your hand, you know, feet wet in a comp,

[00:17:00] David Syvertsen: this is a good way of actually sort of prepping for. Yeah. Yeah. So now making the teams right. Physically making the teams now. Right. We got the mental side of that. We got the logistics side out of it. I get asked all the time, like, what do you do?

Do you like rank all the athletes in your gym and just like, kind of make 'em even that way. And I don't I do that more for the open. I like actually make like a power ranking that I will never disclose them publicly to anyone. And I try to make the teams even, but for this, because I know what the workouts or the general flavor of the workouts is going to be.

I try to take skill sets. I try to get a lifter on every team. I try to get a gymnast on every team and I try to get someone that's kind of like, they're not a lifter or gymnast, but they can kind of do a little bit of everything. And they've a good. I tried to put that on. So if you look at all the teams, there's something.

If so, if you wanna label people, there's probably someone now here's the outlier, right? We have outliers guys and girls scaled in RX that they're good at everything they can lift. They have gymnastics and you know, they have great engine. Yes. And that's, you, you do have to plan around that a little bit.

Right. But you know, you never, you're never gonna hear me saying yeah. Put the best athlete in the worst athlete on the same team. It's about the skillset. And it does turn out to be, you know, if teams, if that one superstar, which we have a guy right now in the James, James, Dave Bogue, he's, you know, on a different level than he's ever been.

And that's not me saying it. I had, I probably had five people say that to me after the comp, like you got a sandbag boat next year. I think he's been on the podium 3, 4, 4, 4 or five times. I don't what you have to do leg weights or something. I don't know that guy. He's always been a great lifter. Yeah.

But his hand clean three 30 yesterday. So he. Still a great lifter. Yeah. And

[00:18:38] Sam Rhee: he, his gymnastics capabilities he's come

[00:18:41] David Syvertsen: in and done so much extra additional work on that. Yeah. And his motor has always gotten, been good, but it's gotten better. Yeah. And he's a big guy. Yeah. And, and, and I'll tell you what, in team environments, you need also need to account for this.

When you make your teams. There are, there are certain types of athletes that in a team environment, we talked about this with Matt, Nicole, a couple weeks ago, they shine in that kind of environment. Yeah. Like their, their ultra weakness, which might be 12 to 15 straight minutes of movement, never get exposed in a team competition for the most part in this kind of team comp well competing

[00:19:15] Sam Rhee: well is a skill.

Yes. And it's something that you have, if you, some people have it intrinsically and some people can develop it. If they do a lot of competition, You can tell sort of to a certain degree who will perform well in a competition. And I don't wanna say it's digging deep or, or going that extra mile or whatever you want to call it.

But for some people there is a, an urgency to them in a competition that makes them achieve more than say someone with equal capabilities. Yeah. And it's not a good or bad it's again, it's I feel like it's a skill that can

[00:19:51] David Syvertsen: actually be developed. Yeah. Oh, hell yeah. No, no question about it. There are so many athletes in our gym that whether it was PR in their lift, I think to my count, I'm probably almost positive.

There's more, but I, I think we saw over 12 hanking PRS yesterday. And according to my count again, there's more. But they needed the environment. And that's what Sam means is like sometimes the com competition environment brings your body physically to another level. However, it can go in the other direction.

We get people that are so nervous, they almost lose some like body awareness, coordination and timing. So that's something that can be like, he said, you can get better at that. Just like you can get better at muscles, just like you can get better at lifting, but what do you have to do to get better in that environment?

You have to do it. You have to put yourself in that environment over and over. And I know there's people yesterday that were nervous. Maybe you not feeling well the day before the day of you go in the bathroom every 10 minutes. I'm gonna say this since I die. It's good for you. You know it. It's good for you.

It's good. And just leave it at that. Okay. I don't want, like, I don't think you need to worry too much about how uncomfortable it was or like, oh, I didn't perform well. It's good for you. If you run away from uncomfortable situations for your entire life, you are going to miss out on so much and just leave it at that.

Keep it simple. All right. Now, when you make these. your goal is two thin. My goal is two things. Okay. You, you want as many close races as possible. And we did have that across pretty much every workout like the, the margins were pretty close. Yes. You had one or two workouts where this team excelled, but then they show then the other one you had and then vice versa.

And we, I have the standings in front of me and this, I always look at this like deeper than I probably should. And yes, there are teams that like the, the guys RX team, they won first place in every single event. So you might look at that like, oh, Dave, you made that team, those teams two two, it was two stacked in event one.

I just want to give this can you talk about the events and also do that by first? Yeah. And why you program them the way, the way you did? Sure. So let's go into the first. The first event. Yeah. And we'll talk about why that that's gonna help. Some people run, run their intra mail comp event. One. I usually start the event off with the strength event.

It's not every time, but I would say out of seven years, I, I think five of them started off with the strength. The strength event was nine minutes long. This was the same for RX and scale, by the way, right. Someone on the team had to do a five max hand, clean someone on the team had to do a three at max hand, clean.

Somebody had to do a one rep max. All right, there were no rules on the order of that. It was just five rep, three rep, one rep. And this is why I got this question. So many times the five rep max counted as one weight. So if you hit 200 pounds for five, your score was 200 pounds. It was not 1000. Okay. You were not multiplying it by five.

Okay. Because then that would throw it off strategy and give you unfair advantage for having a huge lifter. Okay. So. That would be that okay then the three. So there's no rules on the order. Okay. But the one rule was, and this is what threw a lot of people off. I noticed this yesterday was you were never allowed to make the bar lighter for anyone, for anything.

All right. Not for one person. The bar, once it's, once it had 135 pounds on it, it was never allowed to go down. So you really had to put a lot of thought and conversation into who's gonna do what lift. And I'm gonna give my advice on what I thought. Some people asked me and I don't think there's a right or wrong answer on it, but this is what I would do.

Nine minutes went fast. Like people were like, holy cow, we're already at the end, you want as many people on your team to lift for the entire nine minutes as possible. Right? So that why? Whenever, if anyone asked me not everyone asked me, but if they asked me, I gave 'em, my, my opinion was I think the heaviest, oh, sorry.

The, the weakest lifter on the team should do one. I think we always, yeah, you say that, but I disagree, but go ahead. We can go into it. Yeah, yeah, no, go ahead. We, but, and because the reason is right. If you have the, the lightest lifter on the team, let's say their one rep max is 1 45. All right guys. And girls scale doesn't matter.

Right. And let's say the stronger lifters can three rep that, and then let's see the strong, like, and five rep that, right. You have like a week lifter, a medium lifter, a heavy lifter, right? You all all get to go up for the full nine minutes. You never, if you have your weakest lifter, do the five rep max, right?

They, this is what Ashley's team did yesterday. She did one set at 1 25, and then I think she tried one 30. It didn't work out right? Because they only gave her 30 seconds to rest before she had to do it again. And 1 25 is very close to her actual five max. So she lifted for a minute and then she was out.

NA tell you, and, and legit had the rest of the time and go into why you don't think that's a good idea because your strongest lifter. If they're like, for example, Dave Bo hit three 30. Are you going to push 'em down to a five rep max number, which is so much lower than his one rep max number, the differential is going to be ginormous.

Depends how good you are at cycling because I bet Bo could hit 2 95 or 2 85 for three, maybe even five. Now that now the thing is yes, his gap Dave's gap between one rep and five rep is maybe it's 50 pounds. Right. But who was the guy on their team that did the fire rep? I think it was Keith not positive, but let's say he, I think he hit 180 5.

What if we said, yo, Keith, what can you hit for one? What if that, what if he could make up that margin? 40

[00:25:25] Sam Rhee: pounds? No way. The weaker lifters can't jump 40 pounds. One, five or a three? No, no, five

[00:25:31] David Syvertsen: to one or five to.

[00:25:33] Sam Rhee: no, I think don't think so. No week lifters is their five rep and their one rep are always very close

[00:25:38] David Syvertsen: to it depends.

So their one asterisk is it depends how good you are at cycling. Like if you're good at cycling, then yes, I do believe you. But if you're not good at cycling, just tell someone, Hey, just go do that one for one rep, you don't even have to cycle shit. You just have to get under the bar and stand up one time.

Then you're done. I think that margin. So like really what you could do, like where we meet in the middle, Sam is everyone should write down their five to three and their one and see if there's and then add 'em all up. Okay. And see where you, like, what is our best one? And then maybe account for maybe another 10 pounds in the competition environment.

Right. I still think, but it wasn't necessarily though numbers might not be that different if you do it my way, but what it does, it gives everyone the opportunity to lift longer. Okay. It,

[00:26:21] Sam Rhee: you you're going for equality

[00:26:23] David Syvertsen: in terms of

[00:26:24] Sam Rhee: effort. Right. But when you're looking for sheer max, Number. Yeah. Give your biggest lifter the most time to get the biggest number.

Right, right. Because their ceiling is always gonna be way higher than a weaker lifter. That's how I feel. Right. But let me ask you this first. Yeah. Why did you choose the hang clean? I have my ideas. Why you chose it? So

[00:26:43] David Syvertsen: tell me why. So the hang clean and this is another thing intramural competition, right?

I mean, a lot of our strength focuses in the intra real comp have been clean or overhead based and probably never gonna do a snatch in an intramural com. Right. So I want it to be a safe movement. And in event two and event three, we were pulling weights off the ground. Right. You had grace and event two we'll, we'll talk about Isabelle and work out too.

And then we had the double dumbbell deadlifts and event three. I don't want to have three workouts where people are pulling weight off the ground. Me personally, like I don't care about that, but I know there's a lot of people in the gym, their backs would not respond well to that. Just like I wouldn't respond well to squatting in every event.

So I wanted to make sure. That it was safe. And I think the hang clean from a strength perspective is one of the safest lifts you can do. Just like the mobility that's required, the positions that you end up in also gives the opportunity for people to use technique. You know, when you watch people cycle, the bar bell bounce the bar off the thighs.

It's like a, it's like a work of art. It's beautiful looking. Right. But also if you are a squatter, you just need to part, pull the bar to your admin and get underneath it. If you're not a squatter, you're gonna have to pull it up a little higher. So I like the, yes, you have to Del the bar to get to the hand clean, but now it's all about, you know, you're never really hinging in that position with the bar going below your knee.

I loved it. I thought

[00:28:02] Sam Rhee: it was the safest movement. Yeah. No one really got injured in it and I have seen people kill and hurt themselves on a one rip max from the ground. Yeah. Yeah. I think. It's one of those movements that beginners it's one of the first ones you learn. Yeah. When you start learning only a hand clean.

Yep. So they felt comfortable with it.

[00:28:18] David Syvertsen: Yep. And because again, you have to, like, what you're talking about is you have to take into account there's people that have been here for six years. They're very good lifters. They're very strong. And there's people that cannot figure out the clean yet. You know, they're, there's not, they're not experienced enough, but the hanking is probably one of the simplest, explosive portrays of strength.

Like you see college football programs like Hank clean is like a staple because there's a lot more margin for error when you're pulling from the ground and even

[00:28:43] Sam Rhee: experienced lifts. I saw them struggle because they don't

[00:28:46] David Syvertsen: do well in the squat mm-hmm and they were trying to power that thing. Yeah. And

[00:28:51] Sam Rhee: dude, listen, you, you, that was a wake

[00:28:54] David Syvertsen: up call.

I think for some people they said, listen, I could have gotten at least 10 or 15 pounds if I had squatted this thing. But all I did was starfish and try to power it up. Ugly. Yep. You to learn. Here's another thing to learn Bo. And I talked about this. There he goes like, and . He was not making a dig at anyone, but he was like the girls, like none of them hook it.

He goes like, that's the number one thing he looks for when he stands behind someone that's lifting is how are they holding the barbell? Is it a normal or are they getting thumb around? And I agree with him, especially. And it's a Hank, especially when you're going three rep five rep, one rep it's still important, but I cannot express to everyone.

How important the hook grip is. Guys, if you don't know what the hook grip is on YouTube right now, right? Thumb goes around the barbell and then your fingers. Grab your, your two, maybe three fingers. Grab that top knuckle. And it's so uncomfortable when you start like your first, I would say 30 workouts with the hook grip.

You're not gonna like it. You're gonna take it stupid. I will say this it's an Olympic lift, right? If you went to an Olympic lifting gym and you didn't hook it, they would not let you lift Berger. Won't let you lift. Yeah, it it's, it's not even like an option. It's a. And I will tell you there's two reasons why it's gonna help.

One of 'em is obvious. One of S not the obvious is that it strengthens your grip on the barbell. Your hand is it's almost like the bar is stuck in your hand, so you never have to deal with man. I can't hold onto it. My grip's not strong enough. It won't happen. It's hooked into your hand hook grip. Okay.

The other one, what's my number one cue that I still use all the time. And I think it's the best cue for a lot of Olympic lifters, knuckles down, knuckles down. when you grab your thumb and you curl those fingers around the bar, it naturally puts your knuckles facing even further down, almost borderline in when I don't do that, you get that slight, slight angle change of your hand.

And when you go for a heavy hand clean, then you hip extend your knuckles start facing forward. The bar goes an extra two inches in front, and I'm telling you this right now that some of the people that I feel saw fail the lifts. I say this all the time in my classes, it's usually one or two. Even

[00:30:52] Sam Rhee: if you don't care about being good at your lift, you have to do it.

I didn't do it for two years into CrossFit. Yeah. And when I finally got around to doing it life

[00:31:02] David Syvertsen: changing. Yeah. No, it, it it's night and day. And that alone's gonna add probably, I would say three to 5%, three to 5% of your list right away. Even if you're

[00:31:10] Sam Rhee: not a good lifter, you don't care. You just show up for class.

Trust me. It will make

[00:31:14] David Syvertsen: your life so much better. Yeah. And just so you know, Ashley told me this yesterday, she doesn't hook her up. She's like, I'm not gonna hook her. Right. And she's like, your hands are bigger. I'm like, well, this is why I don't know if everyone notices this, the men's barbells and the female barbells are different with.

Right. And that's part of the reason is that, yes, I'm generally speaking, female hands are smaller than male hands, but now you have a smaller barbell to wrap your hands around. That margin is now lessened or even dis it disappears. So there's a reason behind that bar being sh thinner to hold onto. And that's, that's the main one and it's also 10 pounds lighter.

So there's just less material that's needed. But that's even if you have a really small hand yeah. You don't have to grab all the way to knuckle. Right. If you just overlap with your fingernail and hold on. Yep. That's all you need. Agreed. So that, that was event one. That was our strength test event two.

Okay. This one, you have to stick with me on this. Okay. I'm gonna go over the workout and RX and scale at the same time. So basically you have three people. All right. So I gave them three workouts, three benchmark, workouts, and CrossFit. Okay. Two of them are working on the workouts at once. So there's always two people partnered up on a workout with one person sitting off to the side.

All right. The first workout was Fran 21, 15 9 thrusters. Pullups the scaled was a lighter barbell and they did jumping pullups right. Once they got done with that, one of them stayed out on the floor obviously. And the, the person resting came out onto the floor and they did Isabel. We made it a little bit lighter again.

Intramural comp, we made it 1 15 75 for the guys in RX and we made it 75, 55 for the scale. Two people take that on. All right. Now the per, now another person comes off the floor. Another person comes back on the third pairing. Now does grace 30 cleaning jerks? We up the weight guys, 1 35 ladies, 95. And then scaled, I believe was 95, 65.

Right? So that was a workout 10 minute running clock. So

[00:33:10] Sam Rhee: two athletes have to do two of the workouts

[00:33:13] David Syvertsen: yeah. Of 'em. So all, no. So all three of the athletes do two of those workouts. No, but

[00:33:17] Sam Rhee: right. So, right. So, but there's always two athletes outta the three

[00:33:20] David Syvertsen: doing two of the, one of the workouts. And you know, you have to split up the work, not down the middle, but like we just made a very simple work requirement.

I'm gonna talk about why we do stuff like this. But also just for the sake of the judges, which I'm sure we'll get to and at the end but yes, Sam is saying that there's two people at each of those workouts with one person standing off to the side, So every

[00:33:38] Sam Rhee: athlete will do at least two work no more,

[00:33:40] David Syvertsen: no more, no less than two workouts.

Yes. Every athlete does two of those workouts. So whatever it times left over, this is where we threw in some gymnastics capacity work, but also strategy. Okay. Was whatever time you have left over in 10 minutes, which I think some people did not finish that, that triplet of workouts mm-hmm most teams did.

And some teams got there, I think with like three to four minutes left, and then some people got there 20 seconds left, right? Whatever time was left over, that's 150 reps. Your team score is currently at 150 reps, whatever time's left over you RX did match chest bar pull-ups you had two people at the rig as many chest bar pu as you can just go back and forth.

The third person was on the rower doing as many cows as they could. So now you're kind of seeing all three people work at once, right? The people doing the pulps are switching back and forth and there was no, no set rotation. You do whatever you want there. So you would combine pullups or chest RX was chest bar scaled was regular pullups to whatever cows were on their monitor at the end of the 10 minutes, those numbers got added to the one 50 score.

So the rep was total rep. The score was total reps. I think

[00:34:49] Sam Rhee: when I saw this, I liked the light barbells, relatively speaking. I liked the fact that they were now, could you have someone do half or like, let's suppose they were doing grace and they're like, I suck at

[00:35:02] David Syvertsen: grace. I can only do five of these reps.

The other athlete has to do 25. You're totally cool with that. Yep. Right. Wait. Yes. So yeah. Is that unfair? You're saying, well, I'm asking. Yeah. So this is the thing about the workout. Isabelle is 1 35 95. If we put Isabelle in that way, I think a lot of teams might have not finished or it would've gotten really ugly.

So again, like what's the number one focus of this, of an intramural comp fun. all right then safety then competition. Well, safety first, then fun. Okay, fine. But both of those are before the, the, the performance aspect, right? Like I want that it be fun and safe before I really care about people's performance.

Right. And we, what we could have done and I chose not to. And I'm gonna tell you, why is you could have said, Hey person, one's gotta do five reps person two's gotta do, and just go back and forth fives. And that would've slowed things down. I mean, Chris farro was in the scale of division. I think he said that he did 28 or 29 of the snatches and he's strong.

And he was able to do it. That's what they strategize. I will say though, it did backfire them on them a little bit and they almost put, and I'm gonna tell you what happened there. But then I had other teams go like singles back and forth, right. Just to keep themselves fresh for that max rep portion. A lot of people.

that if you felt good, going into the max rep portion at the end of the workout, right? You would've gotten a lot more quick reps there where if you went quick on the lifting, the Isabelle and grace, it ruined you for that part. So that when you finally had your opportunity to go fast on the rower and butterfly pull ups or chest of bar pull ups, right.

They were ruined. And what I think, is it unfair to have someone do all those snatches on the surface? Yes, but Tafaro told me that when he, he did the 29 snatches and I think did 24 cleaning jerks, was there a minimum work requirement by any athlete? Everyone that was in any workout had to do one rep that movement.

Okay. So like the minimal requirement was very minimal. Okay. Right. Again, I promise I'll get to why we did it that way. Okay. I don't think it helps that much because Tafaro said when he got to the rower, he had no juice left. And he was paired with someone that couldn't do pullups. So it basically just left one person to herself doing the pullups.

And at some point that's just not, it's not fair. It's not right. You know, you're just, you have, so now you have two people standing at the rate that aren't doing anything, and then you have a really tired rower doing one cow, every 15 seconds basically. And not, maybe not that slow. So I think that it was easier to get fast reps on the max rep portion.

So even if you got there 30 seconds, slower, 45 seconds slower, I still think you accrued more reps in a shorter amount of time. Well, butterfly was the deep key difference maker here, every podium or on the RX women's had butter. Someone who could butterfly. Yep. So here here's, here's the, the hard thing about program.

We can get off track on the workout a little bit, but this has to do with this again, if you're trying to plan something like this, when you're making the teams, we already talked about how important it's for you to know the talent and ability and skill sets of every athlete that's on these teams, right?

As this gym is grown. We've talked about this in time. Alright. If you're gonna go the gym for a long time, this's probably gonna happen to you as well. The, the, the margin between your most capable athletes and your least capable athletes has gotten bigger. And if they all sign up, you have to make this what fun and safe.

You can't put your athletes in really bad positions and tell 'em to do something that they can't do. They're not here for the performance. It's part of it, but they're here for fun. They're here for safe time. They're here for the community. So the reason why I made the minimum work requirement, like I knew how every team could do every single workout scaled girls are, guys.

I knew how it could go. And if they strategized correctly, it would not put one of their athletes in this position where they were just standing around being embarrassed and hurting their team. Right? In every single scale team, there was someone that does not have RX pull. So in my eyes, Hey man, sorry guys.

Like, I'm not gonna be able to have you on the pullups, but you're not allowed to feel bad about that. Why? Because you get to go row and you just go ham on the rower and everybody can row. Everybody can try hard on a rower. You're gonna help your team out. The first place girls team, they didn't do that well on the Ette pullups Ash and legit, Natalia housed the row housed it.

And I, I think, I think she had more than 15 cows, more than any other team on the rower. And they were not the first ones there. I don't think they're they're they're second or third. All right. So keep that in mind that when we program these workouts or when you program a workout for your gym, you need to know who on every team.

Now let's go to the RX. Sam brought up a great point. The, the, the butterfly pull up. If you do Fran partner or no partner with P butterfly, and then without butterfly, it's a minute difference. Just that minimum, maybe even more is the workout is 45 reps of pullups with thrusters, right? 45 butterfly.

Pullups it's about a second per you're looking at about 45 seconds of working period. If you did 45 tipping pullups you're pro you're talking about twice that time. If not even a little bit more, I was wondering why you didn't specify the type of pull up. I almost said no, but, but every team had someone that could do butterflies.

I know there's someone that's gonna say that. Now we did it. That might be related to you. Ashley was on that team. Originally that original team Ashley was on a team and Ashley, I think has some of the best butterflies in our gym. Just speed capacity. Right? And she got taken off a team because someone signed up late and then she got put onto a team that ended up winning that had their athlete come off.

That, you know, if you compare their two butterfly pull ups ashes, light years ahead. So that made the difference in that workout was the butterfly pull ups, not just for the Fran, but for the max rep part. Right. And. I did try to spread the people out that have butterflies. That was one thing when I was making teams was like, do they have butterfly?

Yes. And let's say they didn't have, let's see a team. Didn't have it. People that can do butterflies or a team that kind of had it, but I know they lose it whenever they get tired. That's, you know, a common issue with butterflies. So I was like, all right, let's make sure they have two big lifters on the team.

You know, you, you try to make up for like my goal when I'm making teams is like as many ties as possible. Right. Right. And like, I don't really don't care who wins. Like kidding aside. I don't care at all. I still don't who win cares no offense to the bulls that won. I don't care. But I try to make as many ties as possible.

So if there is a huge gap between team a and team B with butterfly pullups I see if I can lessen that gap with wall walks on the next one or the lifting and, you know, I'm looking at the teams right now. It's like, if things were original, the way like Ashley was with Susan and Brit again, for those that don't know Ashley's missed, but.

Right. And Natalia had Natalia legit had Julia that gap would be, it just that workout alone would be significant. Mm-hmm now Julia would've lived in more weight than national. Like it would've offset a little bit. Mm-hmm but you know, that's the same thing. You could talk about the same thing with the scaled division.

Right? The scaled division had people that could do pull-ups. I even think there's a couple people in scale that could do butterflies mm-hmm right. So when they get to that max rep portion, that's an unfair advantage. So you have to kind of go into the next workout and be like, all right. I think those people are gonna struggle a bit on the engine workout, which was the next one thoughts on that

[00:42:24] Sam Rhee: feedback.

Yeah. You know, listen, some of it is you try to make the playing field as even as possible, but at the end of the day, it's really how hard I honestly believe some of the podium people podium, because they pushed really hard.

[00:42:38] David Syvertsen: One of them like ripped, like nobody's business on

[00:42:42] Sam Rhee: that workout and. I feel like there, if you have a setback or you feel like you're not as capable as another team, that's just the onus on you to really push and do more and try harder.

Yep. I mean, that's, that's part of it. I mean, I understand trying to keep that level playing field, but at the end of the day, yeah, you,

[00:43:01] David Syvertsen: you did your best and oh yeah. Is really up to the athletes to kind of push a little bit. And this is another thing I thought about, like I made some of these workouts, like I had some people gimme negative feedback on the workouts when they came out about like, it's so complicated and it's hard to figure out.

And here's some advice. If you're gonna program a competition, that's intramural based, make it complicated. Why it's gonna make people talk. Like we had people, how many times Sam did we see people meet at the gym with like sheets of paper and strategies and plans. And then I had people come to the bison bowl Saturday morning.

They're like, so wait who's who are my partners? and I, again, I don't care if you came in first or last, I can't say that enough. But what part of my personal goal in the bison bowl is to get people to connect and Strat you can call it strategize. You can call it bond. Like hopefully some new friends were made yesterday.

New training partners were made yesterday. And I think we can talk about butterfly, pull ups and strong lifters. All we want. I think the teams that did well were partially yes, just they did well physically, they executed a plan. Right. I'll get into that a little bit more later. Okay. With the house close, some of these races were with each individual workout, but what is hard to anticipate is how hard are they gonna try it?

Mm-hmm and, you know, we all leave some in the tank, you know, like very rarely does someone come in and give 100% effort, literally three workouts in a row. You know what if, if you gave 97%, you know, that lifting event. So I had John Hartman, Nick Squire and Scott Dowd, there was a threeway tie at the end of this whole thing.

Second, third or fourth. and they, so they were the ends up because the tiebreakers, these guys were the ones that end up in fourth place. Right. And in event one, they tied for first place in the lifts, all of their scores. And I told them yesterday, I was, if one of you lifted five more pounds, five more pounds on your hand, clean, you guys would've went from fourth to second place.

Like there's a, there, there really is. And I'm not telling them that they should have done that. We were joking about it. They're like, oh, I'm gonna lose sleep over this tonight. They're all like the chills guys Evers. Like I don't think they actually care that much, but it goes to show. And this is why like I nerd out, like I could probably do an episode on the standings and just say like, how close things were.

If you do just try a little harder, it can make all the difference in the world.

[00:45:23] Sam Rhee: Well, it's really nice that the reason why this worked is because it, you give athletes the ability. And the opportunity to invest themselves as much more, as little as you, as you want into this. Right. Right. Right. So the people who really wanted to invest a lot of time, really focus on it, prep,

[00:45:42] David Syvertsen: you know, practice, they got a lot

[00:45:44] Sam Rhee: out of it.

And then the people who were either really busy or it wasn't the biggest priorities.

[00:45:49] David Syvertsen: And they showed up and said, okay, what are the workouts? And what am I supposed to do? They got

[00:45:53] Sam Rhee: a lot out of it too. Mm-hmm so you didn't the fact that the workouts were complicated, didn't make it so that the people who showed up couldn't do it.

Right. Right. I mean, that's what Squire do. And

[00:46:03] David Syvertsen: Hartman did basically. Yeah. And they did great.

[00:46:06] Sam Rhee: I mean, they're very talented

[00:46:07] David Syvertsen: athletes. Mm-hmm but I really enjoyed watching the athletes that were very nervous. Didn't have a lot of experience, really prep meet people, practice. Mm-hmm you have to give people that opportunity before the comp yeah.

It's not a rule, not a rule to do that, but I think it helps for more, the ways in one performance, a fun to. And community building three mm-hmm is just give them the opportunity to be it. But again, it's not a rule. All right. So workout three, the final workout of the day. Stay with me again. All right.

The fortunately the reps scheme is the same. Everything's the same. Just the, the weights are a little different all and scaled and guys, girls person one, you have to do 30 double dumbbell deadlifts, 30 box jump overs, six wall walks. All right, person two. You have to do the same volume, but you're cutting into two rounds.

15 double dumbbell deadlifts, 15 box jump overs, three wall walks. You have to do two rounds of that person. Two person three. You have to split that work into three sets, 10 double double that. 10 box, jump overs, two wall walks. So it's it's

[00:47:15] Sam Rhee: right. So it's always easier for the next athlete because it's split up

[00:47:18] David Syvertsen: into more sets.

Yeah. It split up into more sets. So like you, you, you can push faster because you're not doing so many repetitive moving patterns

[00:47:24] Sam Rhee: over and over and in between the, the reps or in, in between each athlete.

[00:47:28] David Syvertsen: Yeah. So there's three workouts, right? We just give you three workouts athlete, one athlete, two athlete, three.

After each one of those, you have all three of you come out onto the floor and do 12 sync row bar facing burpees where basically Syncro means you're all laying on the ground at the same time. We took out any sort of standard it's so annoying right now, jump over, step up. We just take it over the bar.

And I think that's what the burpy over bar might turn into step, jump leap, one foot,

[00:47:50] Sam Rhee: two foot, whatever. And it's still a pain in the ass because you have to wait for all three to touch their chest on the ground. Yep. Which there were actually still

[00:47:57] David Syvertsen: a fair number of no reps because of that. Yeah, absolutely.

Yep. So that, that was the workout and it was a 13 minute cap. And just based on my look right here, there were. I mean, we had 29 total teams, 30 total teams. There was, I think almost half of them did not finish that workout. And we, we extended the calf from 12 to 13, still, you know, a lot of teams. It was very common that this missed out on that last set of burpees.

So, you know, this workout, I'm looking at first and second place guys and girls RX. All right. They were first and second place on the podium for guys and girls RX. So like every, that's another fun to look at if you ever want to nerd out like games, quarter final semifinals, the teams that do the best in a certain kind of workout.

Is there any correlation between that and the actual final standings, like take the other events out of it. It's the same result. And first place, second place RX men, first place, second place RX girls were the teams that finished on the podium at the end. And then even in the scale division second and third in this event, Finished first and second in the scale division.

So this is that what this tells me, this is what, the, what those are the most, you know, CrossFit test and, you know, and it kind of is right. You're moving weight, you're moving your body weight. There's a gymnastics there skill and that burpy component. I love having Synco bar facing burpees in a team competition, intramural team competition, because it's really one of the only opportunities where all three people have to work at one doing the same exact thing.

And that I really like watching that. And like, it's one of my favorite things to watch is not, who's slow, who's fast. Like, do they support each other? Are they young at each other? You know, the person that's not shorting that much, but also think about the workout that we just talked about. Those burpees are really hard for someone because they just did that nasty 30, 36 total sum of movements right before.

So now you have two fresh people coming onto the floor. And there's teamwork and there's understanding and almost like empathy that you need to have for the person that just came outta that workout. But also keep in mind athletes two and three in that workout have to do burpees, then go do their triplet and then come back and do more burpees.

That's a really tough combo. So again, you have to really, I love this one from a teamwork perspective because there's a few different ways to skin this one. And I'll give you my opinion. Let's hear your opinion, right. Is I think that one comes down to two things. Do you have someone that's really, really good at wall walks?

Like they can bang out six in a row at the same time. Do you have someone that really, really struggles with them? Like once they get to two, they start to tap out almost. So that's the first thing you get to figure out. And then, so if you have a really good wall Walker, I would just say, Hey, just put them first.

Even if they're the best engine athlete, because. You want the per you don't want to get stuck there. We saw a couple people on that set of six. It took them over a minute to do those like a minute 30. And that's like, it's a time suck in these team workouts. You want the shortest amount of time where no one's doing anything.

That that's how you do well in team comps. And if you strategize correctly and the capacity is there, that should be the case, but there's one asterisk. And this is where it got thrown off. You have to have the two athletes athletes, two and three, the people that are going second, they it's, they they're the ones that have to do burpees, workout, burpees.

That first person only has to do workout then burpees thoughts. Yep. The two rate limiting steps that I

[00:51:31] Sam Rhee: saw were wall walks and the burpees mm-hmm and the people that were athletes two and three, they got super slow on those burpees. Yeah. That, that, that workout

[00:51:41] David Syvertsen: taxes you. Yeah. And it's tough.

[00:51:44] Sam Rhee: It's really tough.

So you really have to figure out what your wall walk pace is. Mm-hmm and then. Just figure out that, listen, you're gonna have to slow down for that athlete two and three and you're right. You have to have some empathy. I saw

[00:51:57] David Syvertsen: some athletes out there and they were just like, that athlete was dying on those Syncro, baring, burpees, they, and the other athletes.

[00:52:06] Sam Rhee: Thank God. You didn't have any other standard

[00:52:07] David Syvertsen: other than just, you know, chest. And they go up. Right. Because literally they get over. And that third athlete that had just done the workout was still lying on the other side and they're waiting

[00:52:17] Sam Rhee: for them to step over.

[00:52:19] David Syvertsen: That was that was tough. Yeah, that was it's tough to watch.

And like, again, that's where it's some people's worst nightmare. Like they feel like they're bringing other people down. And again, this is where like just having such a good group of people. Like we're so blessed with the people at our gym. Yes. There are some people come here with like, you know, tunnel vision.

They wanna win. They're a little on the two intense side, which is, again, I don't look down on those people at all. Just always be respectful. That's always your number one rule here. But then you have some people here that are like scared shitless, you know, and, and you don't wanna. You know, we're off too many feathers there, but again, we talked about this earlier.

It's good to be uncomfortable and it's good to be stressed out every now and then when it comes to that, it makes you push a little further. And if you're always striving for comfort, you're gonna lose. So that, that's where I love that combination. Here's one thing I wasn't gonna talk about this, but I'm gonna talk about it.

The wall walk standard. So in the open that tape, that's furthest away from the wall. You're starting position and that's in open. You have to have to touch, have to touch the tape, right? And you get your feet on the wall. You walk yourself back to your point RX. We did the open standard 10 inches from the wall scaled.

We made it a lot tougher. I think the scaled wall walk its way too easy for the open. So I made a line 40 inches from the wall and made them walk back to it again, touch it and come back. Here's. So that was tougher for the scale credit to those guys. You guys crush it. I had so many people come up, I can't do this.

We worked with them for two minutes, part of the workout and what happens, their fitness took over. You can do things that you don't think you could do. We worked on it, little bit of technique work. There is a lot more skill in the wall. Walk that people think a lot more and so much. And that's why I love it.

And they got it come back and they're like, oh my God, I did it. I'm like, all right, cool. Now you gotta do four more but like, so I made the wall walk standard harder on the way back to your starting position you had to, and at the start you had to get the hands in front of the line, not to the line.

And really at the end of the day, it's only probably a three to five inch difference in terms of how far you need to move your hands. And I think this is where the open standards gonna change too. If I'm wrong, I'll tell you if for right, I'll tell you , but what I don't like about wall walks in the open is it turns into a skill on the way back to the wall.

And then when you're going back to your starting line, it turns into just like flop, like just get your hands and there's no skill. There's no core tension. And the fact that we made people go an extra three to five inches. Doesn't sound like a lot, but it is, it made it so hard to keep your feet on the wall because you're when you're in that almost hollow position, feet are in front hands are in front of you.

Feet are still like grasping the wall. Your midline gets smoked. That was so much harder. And people literally protested in the middle of the workout. They said, oh, you came up to me halfway, the record, like Dave, I'm getting killed. What's the, I mean, I think if they do do that, I would pray that they don't have a lot of wall walks in the open because that's a very, very challenging movement.

It is. And I just, I don't know. I go back and forth. Like I always, I, I want people to get the most out of a certain movement for their fitness. And like, I just think that on the wall walk it's more than about going back. Everyone focuses on going back. Like I think if you really put some attention on going back to the wall, you just get more fitness out of it.

All right. I'm not gonna say like easy or harder. Good for you, bad for you. And you just get more fitness out of it. That's that's the goal here. So I'm looking back on it. I told Ash Ashley yesterday. I was like, I don't know if I should have done that. So I'm still kind of like reflecting on that a little bit, because it really made it almost too hard for some people, the short people.

Yeah. Like that's where the, the hype difference. Kind of through a, off a little bit. So anyway, that, that workout I saw teams do it a lot of different ways. There was a pretty wide margin, like, like the first place girls team was 1143. And then there was a, there was multiple teams in that same, that, so 1143.

So they finished a minute 17 before the cat. And then there were teams that didn't did not get to the last set of bar facing burpees. So like you just think about that. That's a pretty significant gap. Like maybe even a three minute gap and same thing with the guys, guys. First place in that event was 1152.

And then there was also another same, same thing, three, four teams that did not get to the last set of bar facing burpees. Scaled 10 49 was first place. And then I had another five teams that did not finish or get to the last set of the bar facing burpees. So what do you think Sam is? Why, why is there bigger separation network than the others burpees and like will to grit basically just desire wanting to get through it?

You know, you really have to

[00:56:49] Sam Rhee: suffer a little bit to, to get through

[00:56:51] David Syvertsen: all those yeah, those burpees. Yeah. The ability and willingness to suffer. And, you know, we talk about this after the open every year that I think that one of the most important components to getting better across it, arguably the most important.

And especially if you have a performance goal for the open, you have to get better at moving your body. And I think that's where you see like people with buries. They really struggle really is, oh, you're not moving exterior load. There's not a ton of skill with that movement. There is skill with the wall walk, but I always think there should be more intensity and thought put into.

Getting better at moving your body weight than lifting heavy weights. I think this was when I saw some athletes.

[00:57:29] Sam Rhee: They don't like doing burpees, so they don't push themselves in workouts doing burpees. Mm-hmm this time they had to, because they felt obligated because they had to partners to work

[00:57:39] David Syvertsen: with. And I saw them.

So they, I told a couple people I've never seen you do so many burpees so quickly. In my life. And maybe you should try to try these workouts with a little more urgency when you have burpee

[00:57:54] Sam Rhee: workouts. Yep. Because it really is about building fitness. And if you

[00:57:58] David Syvertsen: just say I hate burpees and I'm gonna go slow.

There's so much fitness in a burpee. Yeah. So much. Good timing. Tomorrow's workout. Max, burpees that out. I'm a little tired. I don't know if I'll yeah. Sam and I are really sore from yesterday's workouts. Let me ask you this.

[00:58:12] Sam Rhee: So what, how did you come up with these three workouts? Did you find a template somewhere?

Did you just came up, you know, out of your head or what did you

[00:58:21] David Syvertsen: use in order to figure out that this is what you wanted to do? No template template. I mean, I hate to say, like, we all get our ideas from other people like that that's life in general, but there's no template for me on this. Like, I would love to maybe even create like a, almost like a little business of people that.

Run a competition, but they show to, to program things like I love programming. I love programming comp workouts, especially. I just love doing it. So if anyone's out there that wants some help on that, reach out to us, I'd be more than happy to do that. And maybe I'll create templates at some point, but there, here, here's what you do.

Like we talked about macro level strength, some gymnastics, and then some engine and then try some mix model. Right? These actual particular workouts, you have to know the logistics of your gym. All right. Like what equipment do you have? How many pull up bars you have? How big do you want your heats to be?

What time do you want to finish by? So the length of the workouts, right? So you start thinking about that first is what time do I wanna be done by? And generally we've done this till one 30 before we've done this at 12, 12. Seems like a good time to cut it off. So you work backwards from what you had? Yes.

And then figured it out. Yep. It's actually how I set the gym up too. I see. So, yeah, what time do we want to finish by how many heats are we gonna have? All right. And then, so, but you don't even know because you

[00:59:36] Sam Rhee: don't even know how many people you have before you send out

[00:59:38] David Syvertsen: the workouts. Right? The workouts are like macro level.

Like, like we're like, all right, we're gonna probably do some sort of like Graceville, Fran. Ashley helped me out that. And then, you know, we write down like the movements that we want to do mm-hmm I probably should have started off with that list list movements. Yeah. These are the movements we want to do.

Mm-hmm and then we kind of mash 'em together. I love to get, you know, some cross it in there, like hero workouts or a girl workout. I always think that's cool to do every now and then mm-hmm and I always say lifting event always takes about an hour, right? If not less. So now you really basically have about three hours to work with, so you just figure out what movements do you wanna do?

How much time are you gonna have to have to use, give yourself some margin, give or take, and then. I like to use different equipment, but then you have to look into what equipment, right? Did you notice that all the guys lifted at the same time? Here's a, here's a good example. Someone you gotta think deep about this.

Right? The first event was a lifting event. All the guys RX lifted together. Mm-hmm all the girls RX lifted together in the same heat. And the scale had to do two divisions. All right. Two heats, sorry. Two heats. Yes. And then for events, two and three, we had to make it three girls, four guys. And then the next one was four girls, four guys, or guy teams.

And the reason behind that was the way we have our rigs set up in the gym. And I think every gym should do this again. It's in the middle, it's in the middle, but you also have a lot of different height pull up bars. We have basically three different Heights at our gym. We have low, we have medium, we have height.

Mm-hmm most of the girls use low. Some can use medium. Most of the guys use medium, our tall guys use high and there's a couple shorter guys that use low, right. We don't have enough low barbells or even medium up pullup sorry, low pullup bars and then medium pullup bars for all the girls to go at once mm-hmm and then we don't have enough medium for all the guys who at once.

So we had to split that up into two different mixed, mixed gender. I see heats. Yeah. Right. So that's how we set those up. And then the lanes, the way our gym is set up is all every gym deals with this, like there's certain wall spaces that work certain don't and we wanted to make everything 25 feet away from each other.

So every wall walks space had to be across from the squat rack. And that's where the teams line up for their deadlifts was in the squat rack. Cuz we had a cool standard for that. That actually came up with, yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. And basically the reason, so the lanes had to change parts part, but like I also just know that there isn't a height requirement for wall space.

So we really could just kind of just like throw people into. But then once you start setting that up, if I wanted to do all the guys at once, we wouldn't have enough thumb bells for that. And so we had to just keep that, you know, that kind of mixed gender, I kind of like, there's an advantage to doing all the girls at once is they don't see a score that they can compete with.

It is an advantage to be the second team to look at the first team like, oh, they got that, let's go beat it. You know? So that, that kind of sucks. That's what competition is, you know, suck it up, go faster. But the guys, same thing. And, but the, you didn't need to associate any height requirement for that because everyone on wall walks was the same, just like they did in the open this year.

And we didn't measure everyone out and all you need is wall space. There's no high wall space, low wall space. See, this is where my head is

[01:02:48] Sam Rhee: spinning. And I would, my head would literally explode if I tried to figure all this out, this is why I don't think any, like, there are very few people in the world that can single handedly do all this.

I think most places are gonna need several people to sort of help. Yeah, figure out all of this. It is very, very complicated.

[01:03:06] David Syvertsen: Several people helping with that part of it. It can be, it can be a help, but also can be a detriment. Like if you do have one person that can have like the vision of it, like, I can't tell you how many times I came to the gym, whether it was cleaning the floor and I would stop.

And I would just look like, and I do this all the time. And I plan workouts. Like I it's like some of my favorite time to do like your alone time, where I would just stand in the corner of the gym and I'd just look like, all right, that would work for this. That would work for that. That would for that. And then that would work.

That would not work. We gotta change that person. Like if you have one person, they don't com two people doing that and they don't communicate well, it could throw you off big time. So. so this double

[01:03:40] Sam Rhee: dumbbell deadlift standard. Yeah. Which was you did two, you had two double, I mean two dumbbells. You did your deadlift and then you had a band around the rig that they had to stand up in their back, had to touch when they were standing up to it.

Yeah.

[01:03:55] David Syvertsen: So genius. Yeah. So I'm not taking the credit for that. It was, it was Ashley the, well she's a genius. Yeah. Yeah, she has a smart husband, so, so , but the, the the issue, like we talk about this on the podcast. We talk about this coaches all the time. There's certain movements in our gym that people just don't uphold standards.

They're not trying to, they're just trying to go so fast and it's easy to get away with certain things. Deadlifts is one of them, people don't stand all the way up, especially when it's light, you know, those dumbbells, I wouldn't say they were like really light, but they, it was not a heavy deadlift. It was a 50 for guys, 35 for girls, 25 for scaled women, 35 for scaled men.

And what makes that dumbbell a little bit more difficult and you really have to kind of. Know, this, that you're going down probably an of three or four inches before your weight touches the ground and come back up. Maybe it might even only be two or three inches, but there's a timing component to touch and go Ted lifts that so many people with the barbell are used to, right?

You hinge, you get that rubber on the ground. You come back up because, and it Turks. It takes a certain amount of time because of the deadlift you're dumbbell, double dumbbell, deadlift. You're going down a little further. So the timing just takes longer so that you have this timing on the way up, that you just never really fully get that extension feeling where the hips are extended and the shoulders go back.

So what we did was we in the squat rack, we took a red band that stretched across from up across from Jay hook to Jay hook. And we told you where your feet had to be. And at the top of your deadlift, it was easy for the judge. You either touched that red band with your back or you didn't. And you know where I think Ash got this idea where.

the 2014 regionals, there was a chipper that had ring dips. It was like a box jump over deadlift wall ball, ring dip, and then back up the ladder and the ring dip standard was go to the bottom shoulders touch. And then at the top, there was a red band that stretched across from strap to strap and your shoulders had to touch it.

She remembered that from 2014, we, what we've always talked about is like, should we do that at the gym? Should we like come up with a stand? Because a lot of people short ring dips as well. I think I do sometimes. And it's, it's that feeling of never actually getting to that ring support. Right. And I think that's where she got it from.

She didn't tell me that, but so it was a really good standard cause the videos that I had on my phone from people doing the. Is exactly what it done with this. Well, it's tactile

[01:06:19] Sam Rhee: feedback. You feel it on your back? Yeah. How easy,

[01:06:22] David Syvertsen: how much easier could you get, right. Yeah. And I, it makes life easy for the judge.

Let's talk about that real quick. Oh yeah. Let's talk about judging and the judges. Yeah.

[01:06:29] Sam Rhee: So what you, how do you

[01:06:30] David Syvertsen: execute that? So when you do a competition like this, you need judges. That's like, I think a lot of people forget about how hard it's to run a public competition, where people come from the outside, you need a lot of volunteers and we just make it a requirement.

For the most part. I don't wanna get into why some people didn't judge, but for the most part, everyone judges, judges an event and even more detailed than that for the most part, you're judging an event right after you worked out. So all the athletes judged. Yes. For the most part, some numbers got thrown off because of the way we had to change up the heats from heat workout one to workout two.

But basically when you're making the heats, you're just kind of going down the chain and saying, all right, if I was in lane two for event, Yeah. If I was in lane two in this heat, I'm just gonna stay right here because now I'm judging the heat that's coming in. You never wanna make someone judge before they have to work out.

Like you have to allow your athletes to warm up. Like that's, that's a no-brainer. So what's the most, the most free time you have in a competition is right after you work out flip side, you're a little uncomfortable breathing, heavy you're dying. And all of a sudden someone comes and gives you a clipboard and said, all right, you gotta count now, but I'd rather someone deal with that than not get to warm up.

So you, we always, you always make it that, you know, and starting a workout out, starting an event out like this is tough because no one just did the workout yet. So everyone, so you take the last heat. I did. I took the last heat and that was the guys, right? For the lifting event. They were the ones that judged the first event of the day.

So that if you are going to make someone judge before they work out, give them at least 40 minutes between that and having to work out so that that's, that's the easiest way to do it. It's actually not that hard to set up. You just need to know like, that's the way to do. Now further than that, it's really hard to judge.

And what's the first thing we say at the athlete briefing don't ever

[01:08:17] Sam Rhee: yell

[01:08:17] David Syvertsen: or complain about your judge. Yeah. Like, and we, we say this at the bison classic too. Like I, oh, I'm huge on that. Like I have no, I, I have no problem, like having a dispute with your judge or asking. And sometimes when you're in, in the heat of the moment, it sounds like you're yelling, but we always say no belittling, no, like, you know, cursing at someone.

If you curse at someone, you just come curse at me. And like, I, I can take it, but there's some people here that were probably more mortified to judge than to work out. Agree.

[01:08:43] Sam Rhee: Yes. It's scary

[01:08:44] David Syvertsen: to judge, especially if someone's very intense. Yeah. And you know, we have some fast moving athletes. Yes. And we've talked about this with you and I it's like, it's hard to judge certain people because they're moving so fast and yes, you're trying to straddle the line.

You know, you don't want to do too much range of motion because it slows you down. Mm-hmm so it's, it's hard to do that. So another thing I did was there are workouts that are hard, harder to judge than others. And if I had the option to do this, there were three people on every team. I just pretended in my head that everyone's gonna judge.

At some point, I tried to take the least experience, CrossFitters people that I know have not done this a lot, judging the open judged in general. I tried to put them on the weight lifting event just because there's less moving parts into over that nine minute period. There's the smallest amount of movement, smallest amount of repetition, right?

Yes. You gotta do some barbell math. But, and then I tried to put my the week, I mean, you could dispute which workout is more complicated to, to count workout two or three. I still think workout two was easier. So I would put like my next, most experienced person on that workout to judge. But again, that can be disputed cause those, you know, maybe those movements are a bit tougher to judge and then I would put my most experienced judge or athlete or person, right.

On workout, number three, judging. And again, you get to control that. And that we're again, blessed with the good people here. Like they just all take it in stride. And we say like, Hey. If you miss your heat to judge, your team gets penalized. So it kind of makes like a team responsibility almost, you know, thoughts on that?

How well, what do you think, how the execution was overall with the judging? I mean, judging is always gonna be never a hundred percent good. You know, I just don't think it's ever going to, I mean, they can't even get that right at the semifinal level. Right. So, you know, here at a local gym, intramural comp again was our focus here, fund safety, then competition.

I don't care that much, but I do walk around. I know you did too. I know Ramsen did even Ash does. Right. Even though she's competing, , especially in the team, closer to her in the standings. okay. And just saying like, Hey, stand up. I can't tell you how times. Like, I don't think I ever know reps someone. Oh, you know what I did.

You and I both did who? I, I when Hawkinson hit his five max. Oh yeah. Oh man. I felt so bad. I

[01:10:49] Sam Rhee: had no wrapped him. Yeah. I had to cuz he stepped outta lane. Yeah. He can't step outta lane. He and he knew he's

[01:10:54] David Syvertsen: a, he's very great. And he was good at all. Yeah, no. Yeah. And like I give him credit. He hit that's he's never hit a five rep like that.

So like in his eyes he just hit a five rep max hand clean, which again, I think I'm looking at his numbers. I think it's over nine 90% of his one rep max, which is really impressive to hang onto that for five reps in a row without bumping the bar off his legs just really impressive. But we made this standard that we have these zones set up our gym that if you and most competitions do this, if you walk forward to an X, like a line on the ground and you touch that line, even if you hit the lift, it doesn't count.

Part of that is that's what Olympic lifting is. They don't let you walk all over the place with the barbell, but B it's I still get stressed about this when we do max lifts and there's people, even 10 feet away from each other. That I don't want someone falling back and someone falling forward and, you know, you can get really messed up with all that weight.

Well, you know,

[01:11:44] Sam Rhee: safety, you are very adamant about logistics and safety. You said don't put your barbell plates anywhere in the front or behind you, right? Yeah. Only to the side. Yeah. So there are, especially in a, in a space where there's so many lifters and so many things are going on. Yeah. You have to adhere to guidelines and rules because you

[01:12:03] David Syvertsen: don't want a problem.

Right. From a safety issue. Right. And like, you know, like I'm friends with a lot of the people here. And like, I don't like, like being, I never want to be the drill Sergeant type. And I know sometimes I come across that way. It's never because I don't want to, like, I think people, like, some people love power and people listening to them and making rules, I would say 95% of our rules are so someone doesn't get hurt.

And like, I do care about a lot about that. So if someone out there like is like, why is he being so like, loud and strict about this it's for that reason? And same thing, we just had to tell our gym. With kids in the gym during classes, like I'm not anti kid, obviously it's more like I've seen this happen where a kid has a ball in their hand, they throw it down to the middle floor and someone's doing, doing heavy clean.

Like, it's not about your kid. It's not about you. It's about the people's safety. It's like our, one of our number one jobs here. So when you have people 10 to 15 feet away from each other, that usually is enough space. But if you let them walk forward or you have plates in front of you plates behind you they're that one time, all it takes is that one time for someone to get really messed up and you're talking about 300 pounds being on your front rack and you fall down or fall into someone else.

That that fact that can happen. So we tie that back to the judging. That's why Sam Adam hit his fifth rep and he was pumped and his, like, his toes touched the line and Sam though wrapped him. And I was walking around the gym and I almost came over to you and said, no, I just put my hand up. And you, you said no rep.

And I was like, so that was kind of like one of my rules. It helps to have, if you're gonna run a competition to have multiple floaters. Whether it's you, whether it's couple of your coaches, just to maybe not necessarily no rep on, but just be like, yo, stand up, like, Hey, like if they hear that voice, they get a little nervous.

That happened a lot. Like I would come over on like that cycling the smash, cycling, the clean jerk, like, you know, couple people got away with the no rep or two. So I would come over and like, you know, just yell. And they probably sounds like I'm coming down at them, but like yell, like stand up, like, wait, pause.

The next rep is perfect. And you know, you do

[01:13:57] Sam Rhee: what you count with the judge in, I did the same thing. I was roaming and the two things I saw most were issues with the wall walk standard. Yep. And the other one was the box jump overs. Mm-hmm because people, or especially the scaled version where

[01:14:13] David Syvertsen: they were stepping over mm-hmm keeping

[01:14:14] Sam Rhee: both feet on top of the box.

Yeah. Briefly. Yeah. And some people are really quick. Yeah. And they're

[01:14:20] David Syvertsen: almost bringing one foot up as they're bringing the other one down. So common. Yeah. And there were a couple of people who, if I saw more than one or two of them, I was like, you gotta keep both feet up on the box and then they would fix it.

They can do it. Yeah. That's not a problem. I actually think I'm more strict with judges during the open. Like I, I get kind of like, really stern during the open. When I, when I tell people like, when you're judging the open, like you have to try very hard to do your best. Right. And the, in this, I tell people to do that, but I'm not really going at judges at all.

Like, I'll go at a judge in the open, especially if I know that they're letting their friends skate by a little bit or their husband or their wife. But I, during this. It's more about keep it safe. Don't make it anything blatantly obvious, because again, what are we here for? Fun, safety than competition. The open to me is, you know, because there it's an individual and there are some people competing there.

You do have to push the competition up a little bit, in my opinion, one of the funny things that

[01:15:14] Sam Rhee: happened yesterday was that while walk stand was

[01:15:16] David Syvertsen: really hard. Yeah. And Kristen Blake I'll name

[01:15:19] Sam Rhee: her was blatantly not following the standard. Like her hands were not even closed. Yeah. And I come over and I was like, that's a no wrap.

And she's like, I can't do this wall walk standard.

[01:15:30] David Syvertsen: And I said, yes, you can just, just give it, put your palms out

[01:15:33] Sam Rhee: there. She had one wall walk left. She, she didn't even come close. She got

[01:15:37] David Syvertsen: up and she dared me to, to make her do it again. She just kept walking and she's like, don't be so judgey. only, only Chris and Blake.

The getaway with yes. I mean, judging is, is a thankless job and it's hard. I, I say it all the time. I think it's harder than competing, harder than working out for sure. and, you know, that's, that's another thing where I, I want to be a little more thankful. Another thing, like thankful to the people for just participating it rather than coming at anyone for it.

Another reason why I care more about the open judging than this is our results here do impact people outside of our gym. Right? We talked about this after the open, like if you let your athletes skate by, or your judges not really have to judge or in the open, it could mess. So with someone that's trying to get to that top 10% bubble, and I'm telling you it's rampant, I bet it's rampant at the quarter final semi-final stage.

So there might be someone that has like this lifelong goal of hitting a top 10% quarter final stage. And because you're always letting things skate by that what you're doing in your gym has a really negative impact on outside the gym, where if we, you know, let something skate by, or I'm not gonna be on top of a judge, that's never judged before.

It really is not affecting anyone outside of our gym that much. Right. If at all. So that's another reason why I'm a little bit more strict there. So I know we need to, to wrap this up soon, but. The one thing I wanted mention

[01:16:55] Sam Rhee: is comments on the execution that the other comp, especially when the transformer blew 10 minutes what was it?

One workout

[01:17:03] David Syvertsen: left into the last event. Yeah. And it was

[01:17:05] Sam Rhee: completely black. There was no heat. There was no AC there was no fans. There's no music, no lights.

[01:17:10] David Syvertsen: It was completely pitch black. Yeah. It was kind of cool. I mean, I got really lucky there. So we were on our last workout and we were in the second to last heat, like literally 30 seconds left in that heat.

And all of a sudden the lights went out and I figured someone shut the lights off all of a sudden. And then I realized the fans were off, the music was off and the clock went off and luckily I looked, it was towards the end of the workout. I looked at the clock right before it went out. And then as I'm looking out to the, the floor, the lights go out and like I knew within five seconds, like what happened?

I, it was like immediate. I had my phone in my hand and I go right to my thing and I just start a stopwatch. And I was, and I just said, all right, there's just 30 seconds left on the clock. Get my phone out. By the time I realized, got my phone out and got the stopwatch going, it probably took me about 10 seconds.

So I just yelled out 20 seconds left 15 and 10, 5, 3, 2, 1 done. And that was the end of that workout. And then we quickly found out that it, like we went and checked out our electric box. Nothing was there. We go outside and there's cop cars everywhere. So something blue PS G was out there. Someone's like, it's gonna take it eight hours.

So not only did we lose lights and the clock, but there was no AC it was very hot outside. We don't run the AC that much at the gym, but we we run it for the com and it still never got below, like 84 degrees, 150 sweaty people in there. And we just decided like at the last, like, just like really quickly, all right, everyone, we're gonna do this last.

Everyone that's judging. Get your phone out and we're gonna, you guys are gonna use a stopwatch. You're gonna be telling your team which was their phones basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I gave everyone a 3, 2, 1 go, I ran 13 minutes on my phone. They all did the same. And I gave clock updates as we went.

It wasn't a huge deal, but if a team finished, they needed to know what time they finished in. So that was the purpose of the people that had the clocks. Remember this was a workout that a lot of people did not teams did not finish. So they were just using me as their clock. But you had a few that did, and because those guys had their stopwatches on their phones, they were able to give an accurate score.

And, you know, that's I've always envisioned this happened in the, in classes like coaching and experience. Like, you know, if the music goes out and it has happened at our gym before Sonos, you know, has given us problems a few times not so much anymore, but it has. You know, we have a backup plan, your worst case there is you don't work out that music.

Like you tell people to suck it up. Right. The clock going out, power going out, it actually has happened once. It's one of the reasons why I always have my phone in my hand. So I'm coaching is if like I can use the clock and give them an approximate time. So that I'm glad that it ended up not being an issue.

I'm glad it happened when it did, because you could tell within minutes how hot it got in there without the AC, oh my God. Dying. Those last set of

[01:19:55] Sam Rhee: athletes.

[01:19:56] David Syvertsen: Really? Yeah. That was a trial by fire. Yeah. Little disadvantage for them. I don't think it really dampen the, the performance that much in the workout, but you could, and also that funny thing about it is you could hear everyone breathing and you don't hear, like, we blast the music here.

Like we play it pretty loud. And the fact that there was no music or fans, like you literally just heard people breathing. I was like, wow, this workout is a little bit tougher than I thought. So, yeah. That's but you know, when you run an intramural comp like that, like I'd probably a lot more stressed out if this was like a local comp people were traveling here.

Sure. Again, we have such a great group of people and it's an intramural thing, but it didn't affect the comp at all. But, you know, tho those, there are certain things that are just so far outta your control that I don't even, you shouldn't even waste that much time stressing out about it. Like you just have to control what you can control and move on from there and, but have plans in your head.

That's my last thing I want to say is have plans for every bad situation that can come up and you might not even be able to think about every bad situation that could come up. But over the past seven years, we've had a lot of bad things happen and a lot of mistakes made and you learn from them, put that, like, I, I have keep notes on my, on my laptop about this worked well, this did not work well.

Like we had people help me set up the gym Friday night and we set up the gym from the back. We set up wad three first, then wad two, then wa one. And like, because of that, it kind of helped with some of the transition stuff. And that was a huge help to have people kind of just help out with that.

That's this does, does not go as smooth without them. The last suggestion I'll give to someone is have someone run the scoring for you? Shout out to Jane, Gerald, Anthony, Gerald, and Jamie Kaja for helping out our scoring retrieving scores, giving, giving them to Jane. And I kept that on, on a Google doc so I could keep stuff on.

I could keep looking at it on my phone to make sure everything was going smooth there. And it was a huge, huge help to have someone run the scoring because I used to do everything myself in the past, and it would take me a good 40 minutes after the comp to figure it out. So it was an amazing endeavor, so complicated knowing more behind the scenes makes it even makes me appreciate just how much goes into it.

And I gotta say kudos to you. I think this is, I mean, I don't know what other boxes do, but if they do anything close, I mean, it was just a tremendous, tremendous event. Yeah. Tremendous, tremendous time guys. I think if anyone out there is trying to find something new to tie your community together, but keep it CrossFit and not getting drunk at a bar, you know, works.

Yeah. Which also works. And we got drunk or some people got drunk after anyway. Always throw that booze in there after this is, I think a must, I'll say I'll, I'll even put that out there that if you're running a gym and you want to tie the group together, whether you have a hundred people sign up or 20 sign up, I think this is a no brainer.

And if you ever need any help, planning that out, reach out to me. You could just message us on Instagram or find me on social media somewhere and I'll help you out. Thanks guys. All right.