S05E154 - Unveiling Bison Brawl 2024: Hosting a Successful CrossFit Competition

Ready to uncover the secrets of hosting a successful CrossFit competition? Join coach David Syvertsen @davesy85 on the unveiling of the Bison Brawl, set for October 5th, 2024. Hear firsthand about the initial challenges and triumphs of bringing this event to life. This episode brings insight to the decision-making process behind three divisions—scaled, masters (40+), and RX—designed to ensure inclusivity and cater to a diverse range of athletes. You’ll get an insider's look at the meticulous planning stages and what participants can expect, including crucial details like age verification for masters athletes.

But that's just the beginning! Discover the vital role volunteers play in the success of CrossFit events and why community support is indispensable. We will delve into the reasons behind opting for a team-based format this year, aimed at fostering a fun, community-oriented atmosphere while retaining the competitive edge. Plus, we share valuable tips on choosing the right competition partner and programming balanced workouts that reflect core CrossFit principles. Whether you’re a seasoned competitor or considering your first contest, this episode promises to enrich your Bison Brawl journey from start to finish.

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

S05E154 - Unveiling Bison Brawl 2024: Hosting a Successful CrossFit Competition

TRANSCRIPT

David Syvertsen Host

00:05

Hey everybody, welcome to the Herd Fit Podcast with Dr Sam Re and myself, coach David Syverson. This podcast is aimed at helping anyone and everyone looking to enhance their healthy lifestyle through fitness, nutrition and, most importantly, mindset. All right, welcome back to the Herd Fit Podcast. I am Coach David Syerson and I am here with nobody. I am doing my first ever solo Herd Fit Podcast here on a Thursday night, just finished up a beginner session with someone new and I have the 615 WOD finishing up two doors down for me, finishing up two rooms, two doors down for me.

00:47

And the reason I'm doing this right now is this is going to be step one of a chronicle of the bison brawl, a competition that we just announced today on our Instagram. It is going to be a intra gym competition where other people from other gyms, other athletes, will be coming here to compete on October 5th 2024. This is the first partner competition Bison is ever running. This is actually the first competition we are running since 2018. And what I'm going to do right now, over the summer and then in the fall, is kind of give you guys an inside look at what it takes to run something and a lot of the thought processes behind running a competition, the why, the what, the who, the how and kind of respond to what goes wrong in these things. Because I think a lot of you guys out there might want to run a competition, whether it's for your own gym, or do what we're doing and bring some people to your gym and run, hopefully, a really good, safe, fun event. But the challenges to do this are so much deeper and so much bigger than I think outsiders really truly understand. That's why I've been competing for years. I always like to use CrossFit 908. Shout out to Tim and Aaron They've run so many dozens of competitions at this point and I think they have set the bar for running what a real quality competition is, and I know that I've been to other competitions over the past 10 to 12 years. There's good and bad and there's ugly and there's just a lot of organization, a lot of communication and a lot of planning that needs to go wrong. But also you need to have good, conditioned responses to adversity, and I think that those guys handled it as well as anyone.

02:31

I've been talking to them about potentially doing this for a couple of years now and we felt that this was the right time to do this because A we've done it in the past. We had a couple of really good experiences doing it, both from a Bison perspective and a CrossFit community perspective, and with some of the changes here at Bison, we felt that this was the right time to kind of make a move like this at our new space, which I shouldn't call new anymore. We've been here five years but we have not run a competition here, and there's a few reasons that I'm going to get into why we haven't done that and why we have decided to do it this year. But I just want to encourage you guys to really kind of tone in and listen to what I'm going to be talking about in regard to what the bison brawl is again October 5th 2024 and kind of ride along with me over the next few months, because we're going to kind of touch in on this now, july, september and then after the competition in October. So what is this thing? It's a team of two competitions, same gender. So you're going to have two males on a team or two females on a team and basically there's going to be three divisions. You have scaled, you have masters, 40 plus years old We'll talk about that in a little bit. And then we have the RX division.

03:46

In the past, based on logistics and trying to keep things simple, we've run RX only competitions, so we are adding a layer of intensity and complexity to this by creating three different divisions, um, and within those three divisions, all of them will be given three workouts to do over the course of the morning and afternoon, and there might be four scores, though. How does that work? Three workouts, four scores We'll talk about that in a little bit. Why are we going to three divisions? We want this to be as inclusive as possible, and when you create an RX only competition, it is easier to plan it, and planning is such a big part of running a competition. We are putting Bison's reputation out on the line, and the more layers of complexity you add to this, such as multiple divisions, the more margin there is for error, and we decided as a group that we're going to choose inclusivity more than simplicity, and we hope that it works out for us.

04:50

But what we're really excited about is that this is going to open more doors. I'll talk about that in a little bit, about opening doors for athletes that I've never competed for before, but today we have decided that we're going to go scaled Masters of 40 plus and ARCS. How are we going to check that someone is actually a Masters athlete? The rule will be on October 5th how old are you? And we are going to ask the 40 plus year old divisions and athletes to bring an ID and at your check-in table you will have to prove via ID that you are a 40-plus-year-old athlete.

05:27

There was some debate whether we make the Masters Division 35 years old or 40 years old, and I'm a 38-years-old athlete. I do not like to compete against 20-year-olds anymore, but I will if I have to. We just did at 908 a little bit ago. But there's two reasons behind that. One of them was we feel that the market of 40 plus year old masters athletes is big enough to have their own division and we also feel that it is going to give more athletes above that age line the thought that, hey, maybe I can go there and hang or win. There's a big gap between 35-plus-year-old athletes and 40-plus-year-old athletes in master sport. If you don't believe me, go look at some of the scores from quarterfinals and semifinals. The gap is pretty big. That's where a lot of us start to really feel some of these physical changes. So that decision was based on two reasons we do feel the market is big enough of 40 plus year olds and we feel that the margin is big enough between 35 and 40 year olds to you know to say that there is a significant difference.

06:34

And we also want to be able to feed, number wise, the RX division. So, dave, what are you going to do if you don't have enough teams sign up for masters, scaled or RX? That is always a fear with these things and that's going to be the next thing I really kind of dive into about how the competition scene has seemed to start dying. But that is something that we have a minimum of teams it's likely going to be 8 to 10 that if we do not fill one of those divisions, we will open up more registrations for the other divisions and we might cancel that division out. Example if we have 25 teams sign up for Scaled, 24 teams sign up for RX and six teams sign up for the Masters division, we will likely cancel out the Masters division and we will give them the opportunity to join either Scaled or RX. Because I don't want to have I I don't have a great feel for competitions that have two or three teams in a division and hey, it's no one's fault that that's the case, but it kind of it can kind of hinder some of the other divisions if you cut them off from competing. So that's going to be a number that we kind of keep track on.

07:44

So why are we doing this here at bison? What's the point of running a competition? And I've been asking myself that for a couple of weeks now and I'm sure I will be asking myself that, uh, many times over the summer, because it's stressful, it's added stress. I can assure you this. We are not doing this for money. We're not really viewing this as income. Maybe the fancy business guys can view this as a marketing opportunity, but really, my main reason behind this is twofold. I want to serve the CrossFit community beyond just Bison. I want Bison to be involved, obviously for a lot of reasons, but I want to help those that are kind of using CrossFit sport to bond people together.

08:30

And I can remember when I started back in 2011, the local competition scene in CrossFit was massive and I do think that was like the boom era of CrossFit. You had a lot of people in their 20s and 30s still able and really kind of looking at this new, fresh sport as something that they really wanted to get involved in, and back then you would have a competition at least every month. I can remember a stage where every two or three weeks there was a new competition to sign up for, and a few of us, we signed up for all of them. I think there was one year I signed up for seven competitions and if there was anything within a two hour drive, my buddies and I from CrossFit Hoboken and the early days of CrossFit Bison, we were in like, and that was, those were the heydays. That's when life was a lot simpler, you know, you didn't have kids, the business wasn't as busy and it was just CrossFit or die all the time, and I don't know if that is ever going to come back, to be honest with you. So I think the longer we get away from the inception of CrossFit, the more likely you're going to have people that are simply just not that into it anymore. They're kind of borderline, sick of it. Fitness is a fad industry. It always has been, it always will be.

09:50

I do not believe CrossFit is dying, contrary to what some like to believe, but I do think the competition scene is starting to die off a little bit. We are seeing numbers increase a little bit with the CrossFit Open, but they're nothing near the peak that we saw in 2018. I have some personal thoughts on why I think that is. One of them is the demographic that CrossFit was most attractive to back in 2012 to 2018. We are simply 10 to 15 years older and the older you get, the more people are going to start dropping off because it's harder on the body. The recovery is not there and for a lot of us, life has changed so much that you cannot make training the priority that you used to be able to, and there's not enough money borderline no money in it. So if the passion is not there, the competition scene will die.

10:41

I also think part of the reason why the competition scene has died is that a lot of CrossFit box owners and a lot of CrossFit coaches have gotten away from the competition scene and because they've gotten away from it, they don't want to push it on others, and I know that I personally have always been very into the competition scene. I love challenging myself. It's not for extrinsic reasons. I'm actually taking a step back this year, but I'm still as into it as I ever have been, either as a coach, a spectator or someone that actually still wants to go out there and just kind of challenge himself and have some fun with other people, and I want to use this competition as proof of. Even though I'm not really in that competition scene for at least the next year maybe forever, we'll see I still very much believe in the power of it and that's why Bison is going to be doing this. I want to help that local competition scene make a comeback.

11:40

I can't tell you how many competitions I've been to in the state of New Jersey over the past two to three years. Since COVID, where I've been to, the numbers used to be 100 to 150 athletes. It's now 30 to 60. It's really cut in half. I know a lot of competitions in this immediate era. They've canceled their competitions after marketing, after releasing wads, after taking registrations, and they've canceled them because there was quote lack of interest. They didn't get enough people that want to sign up, and there's a lot of reasons why people won't sign up on certain dates, certain workouts, but I think the macro level of thought that I have on this is people just don't want to compete anymore like they used to. There's always some of the fire breathers, the rebels out there that want to do it, and I love being around those people just for the simple fact that they like to challenge themselves. But the actual scene itself has died down and I want to see if Bison can be at the forefront.

12:40

We have a huge competitive presence at many competitions Asbury 908, to name a couple over the past year, where the people that ran those competitions have reached out to me and said Dude, your gym, they come, they bring it, you guys roll deep. We had 75 athletes qualify for quarterfinals and I'll tell you what most people, most of them, they don't sign up for competitions, they're just very fit. But I think the reputation that we have, especially after hosting the 23.2 announcement, in addition to some of the other factors I just talked about, I think it's a responsibility of ours to at least give this a shot. Um, knowing that no results are guaranteed. Um, we have a number that if we don't hit registration wise, we will not run the comp. Uh, but I think that, in combination of our reputation and the fact that there's someone needs to kind of get out in front of this thing, uh, that that's really why I feel there's, someone needs to kind of get out in front of this thing. That's really why I feel there's a strong pull for us to do this. This is also a new challenge for our business, our gym, our coaches, our community. To pull this off a really good competition, you need a ton of help Volunteers, people that are going to come here multiple times throughout the week, including on a Saturday, for 8 to 10 to 12 hours to simply watch people work out.

14:00

I'm talking about the judges, I'm talking about the people that are going to be changing weights and checking people in, and maybe even some medical staff and vendors. These people are coming in and donating all of their time so that athletes can work out. Coming in and donating all of their time so that athletes can work out and it's one of the first things I always want to tell people at the athlete briefing is that none of us get to compete unless these volunteers. None of us get to compete If these volunteers were not here donating their time and I can remember back in 2017, 2018, we had a turnout of anywhere from 40 to 60 people.

14:35

Show up on a Saturday and help us out and represent the bison community, and that's a challenge that I'm going to throw at our entire gym in the coming months that if you're not going to compete which you will have the option to going to talk about that in a sec you, you should be here. You should do something. And if you can't be here that day, you should be here. You should do something. And if you can't be here that day, you should be here during the week helping set up, you know, maybe offering cleanup the next day or help market it on social media. Talk to your friends that do CrossFit in the area and see if they'll come out and compete and support the competition. And that's a challenge for us as a group that I'm willing to to take on myself and I hope, uh, the community is as well.

15:15

Um, another reason would be that I want to elevate, uh, athletes that are kind of on the outside of competing but they're not sure if this is for them. Um, I've watched this more times than I can count over the past decade, where someone has done CrossFit and they're kind of. They see the CrossFit games or they see CrossFit competitions or quarterfinals from a distance and in the back of their head they're wondering I wonder what I could do in this environment Would I like this? And they sign up for a competition because they felt supported from their own community. They show up, they crush it, they have fun and the rest is history. They take off from there. Take off from there as an athlete, as a person, as a CrossFitter. Their entire aura about them within the gym is different. Because they signed up for the competition, not because they won, not because they got on the podium, not because someone made an Instagram post about them. It's because it's one of the most unique tests of physical and mental fitness that you can have.

16:10

If you really do it right and a competition opens the door. If nobody runs a competition, that door is never going to be opened. And if there is a decline in CrossFit from a macro perspective, from a fitness program perspective, I believe it is directly correlated to a lack of gym owners trying to run competitions at their gym. And I think that if we do this correctly and we are going to do it correctly it's going to open doors. If it's one person or 50 people, I think this is going to open doors for people, to give them a different perspective on CrossFit and what the community is all about. So the next decision that we had to make was is this going to be a team competition, partner, team of three, team of four or an individual? And the past bison competitions they were called the bison classic.

16:59

Some of you guys have competed at that that are listening we made them individual and full transparency. It's easier to run when it's individual, less logistics need to be planned out, the workouts are easier to plan. But there is a vibe at the individual comp that I am not personally against, but I do think many are that it's a little too intense, it's a little too competitive and you're never going to get me to say something's too competitive. I think we need more of it, but that's a story for another time. But I know, in terms of serving the community, opening doors like I just talked about, and making this a fun, community-based day, team competitions, partner competitions they have a way of doing that. Don't get me wrong. It's going to be intense.

17:51

The last competition I was at, back at 908 berkeley heights to manarin. I mean, my hands were bleeding, I was sore for a few, a few days I couldn't feel my chest after the ski bench press workout and that that was max intensity. Uh, for me that day and many others, but it was still had a kind of like a fun foundation to it because you were out there with someone in most cases it's a friend or training partner, in some cases it's a spouse and when you're not out there alone with all eyes on you, there's a little less pressure. Now there is always pressure to perform well for your teammate or teammates, I should say but it's a different kind of pressure. So whenever people ask me, hey, dave, should I do a team competition or an individual, my response for the past five to six years has always been the same, because I've done plenty of both. Uh, team is much more fun, individual is a better fitness test. So when you're on a team, based on programming, there are ways you can hide some of your deficiencies. Um, you know, that's why some athletes do really well they are superstars on teams and I would call them specialists but you put them in an individual competition and they don't do well because they have holes that really do expose them.

19:07

Um, so we we decided to go team this year because we have a little bit more space to work with and our then than our old gym. And it comes back to what I've already talked about. We want a new challenge, we want to try something new, and if that gets more people in the door but it also makes it a more fun community-based event, I'm all for it. So that was the decision that we made to make it a team slash partner competition. We did keep it same gender. I do think mixing up the genders a little bit is interesting and in some ways is more fun and a little less pressure. But we opted to err on the side of let's keep this as simple and as logistically simple, as easy as we can, and we just didn't want to go down the path of putting multiple barbells and multiple dumbbells on the floor for every single zone and even some of our pull-up bar situation at the gym, where we have all varying heights in every zone. It might get a little dicey if you were with mixed gender because, generally speaking, the men and women that are on a team together they don't use the same height pull-up bar and that could have caused some issues for us Not saying that there's going to be pull-ups in the workout.

20:20

But you never know. What can you expect as an athlete, as a spectator, as a coach. I can assure you this. We take judging in this gym very serious. I think we have a reputation that way, maybe in some eyes in a negative sense. We have a reputation that way. Maybe in some eyes in a negative sense. We will tell you on a random Wednesday in October that you're not squatting low enough on a wall and you might have been cross-sitting for eight years and had a really bad night of sleep last night, or you're in a personal rut. We're still going to tell you that you're not hitting the standard. If you don't clap your hands at the top of the burpee behind your head, you're not really doing a burpee and that's as coach speak. It gets old, but I do think it matters when the open comes around, when serious competitions come around. My wife and I we've always said that the worst nightmare as a coach and owner of a gym that's been around for this kind of time 10-plus years now is that we have an athlete that shows up to a competition and does nothing correctly and I've seen this on the other side of it, where it's like what do they teach at that gym? And we want to make sure that at the very least we will have judges here that will hold you to the standard, to a point where you might not even like it.

21:34

Judging in this sport is a huge talking subject. The best judges in the world mess up a lot of things. That was a huge story from the semifinals this past year, an organization that actually prized themselves on being the top judges on the face of the earth when it comes across the sport made massive mistakes and caused some people to cross at games. This year, it's a subject that Andrew Hiller has made a big name for himself on just poor judging and poor standards. I can tell you this we won't be perfect, but I can tell you this we will try to be and we will practice and we will communicate with these judges and we will hold them to a standard.

22:11

We will have floating judges in addition to individual judges, meaning you have every pair will have their judge or judges based on the workout, and you'll also have one or two people walking around trying to enforce extra standards and just to have an extra pair of eyes. You can also count on something that I think a lot of competitions fall short on it's a consistent, clean and reliable communication. So if I tell you the workouts are going to come out on July 15th. I'm not saying that yet but it's going to be around then. Um, they will come out July 15th. If I tell you something is coming out by noon, it will come out by noon. If, if I tell you that you're getting a uh, a parking map email the Tuesday night before the competition, you will get a parking map Tuesday night before the competition.

22:57

That is a huge shortcoming of credibility that I've seen a lot of competitions from the outside that if you don't communicate well, it lowers the bar for expectations and it can actually lower the bar for what we expect athletes to act like at the competition. Meaning if we tell you to treat us with respect at the competition but we're not respecting you and your time and the promises we make as people that are running the competition, it makes us look hypocritical and you can't blame an athlete for not respecting you if you're not showing that respect back. So I think you guys can count on a lot of frequent and consistent and timely communication, because I know when you sign up for a comp there's a lot of stuff you want to know with standards and workouts and flow and parking and vendors and where can I sit up, tents, that stuff. We will stay on top for you because we are here to take care of the athletes. So, with that said, as I go through this, my anxiety starts to build, because these are a lot of jobs that you have to take on and, in addition to what we do, I think the one of the moves that we're making here is that we're hiring one of our coaches to essentially run the competition, and I'm going to either you can either call me the, the co-operator, or his assistant, and I'm fine with either. So I'll let him choose.

24:15

But, uh, our coach, adam Ramson, is going to be running this competition. Um, we've had him on multiple times. Um, he's he's been to one of our most downloaded guests, I'm sure. And, uh, when he comes on, sam and I both love having him come on because there's a lot of value in what he says. He's one of those guys that when he talks, everyone's going to listen. He's smart, he's thoughtful, he knows CrossFit, he's passionate, and he's one of those guys that everything he puts his head on, everything he puts his mind to, it's done at a very high level because of how much he cares and how much he expects out of himself. How much he cares and how much he expects out of himself.

24:53

And we talked and we met and we said, hey, can you really commit to doing this? And he's a father and a husband and a teacher and he's a coach here at Bison and he committed to it pretty quickly and I felt just an immediate sense of relief because I know that if I try to do everything, I'm probably going to screw a lot of things up and leave some areas short where I think having Ramson kind of in front of this stuff, especially with some of his background, with just organization of information and data and his knowledge of CrossFit sport and movements and programming, I think that's going to be a huge help for myself, for everyone that's going to be running the competition from their own sector, but also you the athlete. I think the athletes are going to benefit greatly from having Adam involved. So him and I are going to meet a lot. Our next episode that is a chronicle of the bison brawl Um, he will be on and by that time time the workouts will come out. So we're going to kind of dive into, um, some of the background and reasoning behind workouts and what to expect.

25:58

Speaking of that, are we going to release all the workouts. We are. Every workout will be released middle of july. I don't want to give you a date yet, but it will be middle of july and that was right around the time registration will open. So we'll probably open registration a few days after all of the workouts are released. Do we have to do that? We do not. I've competed at many competitions where you don't know the workouts until after you sign up. In some cases, you don't know the workouts until the week of.

26:27

Again, we want to keep things simple here and we want to keep things fair and again, we want to serve the community. There is a time and place to tell people to be ready for anything. I'm a big believer. If you're fit, you should be ready to show up and do anything you want, but, or anything that you're told to do, I should say but we want to. We want this thing to fill up, and I think a lot of times people need to know what the workouts are, or at least what the movements are, and we're still putting together a lot of thoughts in regard to that.

26:56

Um, it's now that we have three divisions. It's not going to be. Hey, here's three good workouts. They have to be scaled appropriately, they have to logistically work and they have to be a good, balanced test of fitness. I can promise, I can assure you that it will be a very balanced fitness test. It's not going to be overly heavy, it's not going to be overly gymnastic based, it's not going to be over the engine based. If you guys know classic CrossFit programming, you know what to expect in this comp. There's going to be a little bit of everything and we are going to test a few out and we're going to try a few things here and there to make sure that there is not a certain kind of athlete that gets more favored than other from a macro perspective In a certain workout. Absolutely, there's going to be an event where a lifter will have a huge advantage, 100%. There's also going to be an event where your body weight mover has a massive advantage and remember CrossFit, the fittest people in the room are jack of all trades, master of none. So you guys can have that to look forward to. We will also do an episode on the programming once it comes out. So just be on the lookout for that, probably towards the end of July. So almost wrapping up here.

28:12

Okay, I was going to try to keep this under a half hour. I think I'm pretty close. Um, choosing a partner, what should you do? Right, if you don't need to know these workouts yet, I'm going to tell you this I I've partnered with people that are friends. Um, I've partnered with a spouse. We're going to do that again someday, hopefully maybe 908 next year, if I can, if I can hang with her at that point.

28:38

But choosing a partner can be a little tricky here and you're going to have to pursue you know your performance or you're gonna have to pursue your experience. You can pursue both. Some of you guys are best friends with you know the best athlete you know, and it's kind of an easy decision at that point, and I think the decision needs to come around. What are you trying to get out of this? If you're looking to sign up and you don't know who to ask or who to partner with, or you're so popular and so many people want to partner with you, I would. I would chase after the experience, because I think, at the end of the day, that's what we're going for. I personally don't care who wins this competition. It's not really going to change my view, positive or negative, based on those kind of results, but I do think that there's a lot to gain by kind of putting yourself in an environment where you can be comfortable and that will elevate your best self. Environment where you can be comfortable and that will elevate your best self. I also like the approach of someone that you're maybe not best friends with and maybe someone that's somewhat new to the competition scene, someone that doesn't really get asked to be partners in partner workouts or they've never been asked to do a partner comp. I think it'd be an awesome thing to you know, I think it'd be an awesome thing to use this as an experience to kind of bring that person along or give them a different perspective of yourself or see if you can find a new perspective of that person.

30:06

I've done that a few times over the past few years and those are some of my favorite competitions. An example was 908 from last year. An example was 908 from last year. I did one with an athlete named Sabrina and I don't think I had ever even worked out with her. I've coached her a few times and respect her as an athlete. She's a lifter, I'm not, so it was a good match from that perspective, but I had a great time with her because we went in, we both love CrossFit, we're both relatively fit and we just had to figure out some things on the fly, even though we didn't know each other. And I took a lot of pride in that day because it was a very different experience. It wasn't me just going choosing my best friend and hoping we have a good time.

30:44

In some cases, I will say this choosing your best friend to work out with probably is going to sell your performance short. So again, am I chasing just the experience or just the performance? And I want you to put some thought into that. I know some of you guys are going to look around the gym and you're just going to try to find the best athlete you can, or the athlete that offsets you the most. Meaning the lifters are going to look for the gymnasts, the gymnasts are going to look for the lifters In this competition. I can tell you this right now that probably will not help you hint, hint, but I'm fine with that because it's going to make you have more fun, but it's probably not going to challenge you the way of kind of looking at it from the other perspective, where you're not just trying to find the best, easiest, clearest path to a layup, and that's what I would call that. So put some thought into that, choose your partner and that's it. So the last thing I want to wrap up with is there's some people out there that have never competed before and they're looking at this of saying like, ah, that's, that's not my thing. You know, I just had someone over our house and she was telling me that I don't even know what a competition is Like.

31:50

Can I scale? Well, here's something you're going to have to know ahead of time. You can't scale the workouts. The workouts are the workouts. So there are scale divisions, but if the scale division has a 55-pound thruster in it, you cannot change that. You can't use dumbbells. You can't use kettlebells. It's a 55-pound thruster. That is the standard. That's what you have to do.

32:11

In some cases, that causes anxiety. You want to walk away, coming from someone that's been in really uncomfortable positions numerous times. It's going to make you a better person and athlete If you put yourself in an uncomfortable situation months out ahead of time and it's going to keep you motivated in the gym. This is a time of year I've been doing this a long time as a coach. July, august, september is a time of year I've been doing this a long time as a coach July, august, september I see almost not everyone, but almost everyone they start to lose their flow a little bit.

32:38

That time of year. It's summer, you're outside, you don't want to go to the gym, you want to go on that walk with your family or go to the pool or go on vacations, drink a little bit more, maybe not pay attention to the diet as much. You come back September hits you like a ton of breaks and you just you don't want a competition on your mind. I get it. I'm not going to judge anyone for that. But if you're someone that hates that up and down flow, back and forth, motivated, not motivated sign up for a competition. It's going to be the voice inside your head for the next few months that you're going to need. And I would really want to encourage anyone that, if you've never competed for, sign up for the scale division. Let's see what you got. You might hate it. Good, check it off. You did it. It's like running a marathon right, you did it, I hated it. See you later. Or if you want to be glass half full, it might open a door that you don't even know exists, it might light a fire in you. I've seen that happen more often than not.

33:34

Someone signs up for something that they don't want to sign up for. It could be the Open. It could be the Bison Bowl, which is our intra-gym competition. Sorry, I think earlier I said it was an intra-gym competition. It's inter-gyms interacting with each other. I've seen people sign up for these things and it's all. All the sudden the fire was lit and it's take it. Take away the performance factor, take away the competitor factor. What this hat, what happens here, is they're just motivated to work out. They're looking at it from a different perspective and they're trying to actually prove to themselves what their bodies can are capable of. And a lot of times you're not going to find out until you put yourself in an environment like that, straight up, you're just not going to find out. So that's going to wrap it up for the first episode about the Bison Brawl, again October 5th 2024.

34:21

It's a Saturday partner competition. I can't wait for it. It's going to be on my mind all summer. I know it's going to be on Adam R's mind all summer and then, as we start to continue to put our volunteers and our staff together. It's going to be something that our gym is going to really kind of come together on and try to give you the best possible product. I want to be the best competition in New Jersey for the fall. It's not a way it's got the spring, so I'm not going to take that from them. They run the. They're the mothership of local competitions. Honestly, we're going to try to match that level in the fall. I think it's important for the gym, I think it's important for us and I think it's important for you. Thank you guys, thank you everybody for taking the time out of your day to listen to the Herd Fit Podcast. Be on the lookout for next week's episode.