Who this program is for —
You will get the most from this program if you use it as a coaching development tool. Session plans are much more detailed than typical programming. With every plan, your coaches get: scales, substitutions, modifications, goals for each skill level, coaching tips and strategies, the “why” behind the workout and time breakdowns.

Each plan is a complete roadmap for coaching a class. In other words: This is not just programming. You can find programming for free all over the internet that will save you time and money. This platform is a coaching development tool that also gives you programming.

We believe successful gyms are built on the backs of good coaches who create amazing communities, and we want to support that ecosystem by giving facilities the tools they need to elevate their team. So our number one priority is to develop coaches.

Who this program is NOT for —
This program is not for people who want to outsource their programming so they can automate their facility or step away from the goings on of their facility. Yes, our program can be a major time-saving tool for people who don’t want to spend hours programming anymore, but we don’t want you to think of this program that way because using our session plans is a more active experience. We expect coaches to use them as study guides and owners to use them as a way to level-up their team.

Taz Barber is the session planner for the Gym Program. She’s been actively involved with CrossFit since 2009 as a competitor, gym owner, coach and coach developer. She opened the first CrossFit affiliate in New Zealand, she’s co-led coaching development programs responsible for 60+ coaches, she was on seminar staff (before becoming a mom) and she’s been actively writing session plans for facilities for over 8 years.

Taz also took the extra step of asking Performance Care RX (aka Active Life RX) to audit the programming. You might be familiar with their Bulletproof programs — Bulletproof Shoulders / Hips / Ankles / Etc. We partnered with them because their methodology centers around rehab and regaining functionality. When they look at our session plans, they analyze the ratios of how often members are squatting, hinging, carrying, pressing, pulling, going ground to shoulder, or ground to overhead. They also look at planes of motion and joint loading.

A workout brief that gives you tips and strategies for coaching the workout, like what the stimulus of the day should be, the ‘why’ behind the workout, how to best flow between movements, how to scale or substitute movements, and what goals to set for every athlete (which is dependent on their fitness level).

A structured warmup. We believe a good warmup is coach-led and changes every day (along with the workout). Its purpose is not only to prime your body for intense work, it’s also where you practice movements, refine skills, and build those neurological pathways that are so important to overall fitness.

A workout prep section for detailed walkthroughs of the movements in the workout so that your clients can review each moving piece of the lifts/movements and determine scales or substitutions. Depending on the day, it could also include skill or technique work for the associated movements, or loading schemes to prepare for a heavy day. The aim of workout prep is to get a client prepped and doing the exact movements and weights they will find in the workout that day so they’re ready for 3-2-1-Go!

A workout with 3 levels of difficulty (Competitor, Rxd and Fitness) so that every athlete in a class, no matter how long they’ve been doing CrossFit or how fit they are, can get a quality workout that meets their needs and abilities.

Every section described above also includes time breakdowns that tell you roughly how long each piece should take so that your coaches stay on-schedule.

Some session plans also include warm downs or mobility suggestions. Occasionally, there’s an optional finisher or buyout.

Fitness
This level is for de-conditioned athletes or newer athletes who have just come from a prep-course. We help coaches instruct athletes at this level by removing a lot of the complex, highly skill-based movements that might overwhelm members. The goal would be to eventually move athletes from this level into RX.

Of course, injured athletes are also a good fit for this level. You may still have to scale a few movements, depending on their injury, but being smart and focusing on proper mechanics will get them back to their desired level much faster.

Rxd – (Recommended)
For best results, this should be the top level for most of your athletes. This middle-tier is designed for the everyday athlete who wants to increase their fitness performance and do more than just “workout.” Like the Competitor category, their goal is to master their weaknesses and improve their numbers, whenever they’re in the gym. In other words, they don’t want to settle for just getting fit but they don’t want a sponsorship either.

For athletes who want to compete recreationally in the sport of CrossFit, this level will help you improve in all domains of the sport.

Competitor
The Competitor scale is sport specific to the sport of CrossFit. This top tier is designed for athletes who want to compete in the sport of CrossFit at a Regional level. Their focus, every time they come into the gym, is on improving their numbers by mastering their weaknesses and refining their strengths. They take training sessions very seriously. This track is not for 99% of the people who will walk through your door.

This level is a good base to support any additional training program you are giving these athletes (like our Competitor Program), especially if they’re getting additional education on nutrition and recovery.

* There is a going to be a lot of grey area in between these levels. The coaches job each day will be to assess where people fit and do their best to give the members the intended stimulus. That very often will mean mix and matched scaling choices. Don’t force people to do exactly what is suggested. Be smart, get creative, and give each member what they need to improve.

The Competitor scale (the highest of the 3 scales we offer with each session plan) is a great base for competitors. But they will need to spend extra time on personal weaknesses and add a touch more volume to the overall program if they’re serious about competing.

We also offer a separate Competitor Program which is designed to be used in combination with this program for athletes who are performing 90% of their workouts at the Rxd or Competitor levels. Here’s how it works: Your athlete will attend the day’s regular class and also perform the workout from the Competitor Program. Sometimes the athlete will perform the competitor workout before regular class and sometimes they will perform it afterwards (and sometimes they will have stuff to do before and after the workout).

The Competitor Program can prepare athletes for competitions without splintering your community. A common problem is that a facility will have 5 athletes who want to compete in Regionals. Each of those athletes is following a separate online program and none of them are training in your classes. This makes it really difficult for coaches to keep up with what these athletes are doing, so it’s nearly impossible to know how their outside programming fits with the facility’s programming. This can hurt your whole community because if there are several individuals off to the side doing their own thing, a me-vs.-you or us-vs.-them vibe can happen, which can change the feeling of the facility.

By using the Competitor Program, you can meet the needs of your top-level athletes, keep track of what everyone is doing (as you have more control) and you use the program to offer more value to your community.

Many gyms run periodized strength programs or cycles. “We’re going to do an 8-week squat cycle, and when it’s all over we’re going to retest your 1RM.” This is linear programming.

WUWO is a non-linear program, meaning there are no true cycles. And here’s a few reasons why: Linear strength programs run at affiliates tend lift on specific days. For instance, a gym will program squats on Tues/Thurs. But what if a person can only come in on Mon, Wed, Fri? Well, they’ll miss the cycle entirely, or they’ll have to rework their regular workouts to get their squats in. Linear programming is designed to hit a specific lifting volume through the course of the program. They are scientifically designed to be as exact as possible to elicit a specific adaptation. What happens if you miss a day? Well the program become significantly less effective. Linear programs are great for competitors because you know exactly when they are training, everything they are doing and how the progress is going. But linear programs are marginally effective, at best, in an affiliate setting.

With a GPP program that doesn’t assign strength days to specific days of the week, you are hitting a bit of everything every month, allowing for slow gains over time rather than focusing on one thing at a time. Cycles of periodized programming are more for people who need to meet specific requirements for an event, like a competition. The problem with using cycles at affiliates is that you don’t know what days of the week your members are going to come in, or when new members are going to start.

A non-linear program is built with the understanding that some people have a specific set of days they can attend (because of work, kids, etc.) and others come in randomly. With so much variation, the possibilities are infinite. So our program’s aim is to cover all the lifts throughout the month, on different days of the week, so that no matter which days of the week you attend, you get a great stimulus. We also focus on skills that transfer to lifting, so even when we’re not lifting, we’re building strength, mobility, and flexibility in ways that help you see gains in strength.

Our program is not tailored to your facility because we believe a well-planned GPP program doesn’t have to be written specifically for one gym. A good GPP program will help every human improve, no matter their fitness level, injuries, goals or location on the planet. Every single person will improve from a varied program.

If you want a customized program, perhaps you could use our plans as a template (and massive time saver) that would allow you to change things up and tailor the program to your community, rather than treating us as an all-out replacement. This would still save you hours of time otherwise spent programming, but you could tweak the plans to fit your specific needs.

We believe that the customizations shouldn’t come at the programming level. The same GPP programming could be used across hundreds or thousands of facilities with great effect. The magic comes from the coaching. That’s where you personalize and custom tailor the experience.

Another thing to keep in mind is that any group selling you “customized” programming often isn’t telling you the whole truth. You are still receiving the same programming as dozens, or hundreds, of other gyms. They are merely funneling you into certain buckets (strength-heavy, gymnastics-heavy, endurance-heavy, GPP focused) with their other clients. And the problem with this is that facilities will often request that the program be a little biased toward the type of training their athletes like, or want, and need the least. The simple fact of training is that we all prefer to do the type of training we need the least. So if your athletes are requesting more lifting, that’s most likely what they’re already good at. Which means they don’t need to lift even more than they already do. They need to run. They need burpees. They need to practice gymnastics skills.

The only way to give your clients completely customized programming is to write it yourself. If you have the extra time and energy, get after it!

Our dose recommendation is usually 3-4 sessions per week for the new client, and 4-5 for the intermediate or advanced. Remember, rest/recovery days are crucial. The program is designed so that no matter how many classes your clients attend, they will always get a different/appropriate stimulus. For example, if someone attends Mon/Wed/Fri, they won’t always have a 20-min metcon on Monday and strength on Friday. After over 8 years of working with athletes who have varying schedules, we have found this to work really well. We have not seen it commonplace to have members attending 3-on, 1-off, etc. But if they would like to follow that schedule, that would be just fine.

Yes, we program classic CrossFit benchmarks throughout the year. We also theme a whole month around testing in our ‘Fitness Testing Month.’ For this, we’ve created custom benchmarks and a series of fitness tests that we program over the course of a month. Then we repeat the ‘Fitness Testing workouts’ four to six months later.

Yes! We have a growing video library of technique and movement demonstrations. You can browse all the videos from your member dashboard (after you sign up) or you can view specific videos directly from a session plan. For instance, if today’s session plan included “Bird Peckers,” that text would be linked and all you would need to do is click the link for a video box to come on the screen and demonstrate that movement. This makes it super fast and easy for you to see what a “Bird Pecker” is and how we would coach it.

Standard CrossFit gear is all you need. We rarely program Air Assault bikes, or other fancy toys, because most gyms don’t have them. On the occasion we program something you don’t have, use a sub with similar stimulus.

Here are a few sub recommendations:

Rope Climbs –> Inverted Rows; feet on a box and use one Ring to pull from or Towel Pullups.

Kettle Bells –> Dumbbells

Dumbbells –> Kettlebells

Rowing Machine, Air Assault, Ski Erg, and Running can all be used in place of each other.

Wall Ball –> Dumbbell, Barbell or Bumper Plate Thruster

Rings –> Pullup Bar work and Box Dips

Jump Rope or Plyo Box –> Plate Jumps or Standing Tuck Jumps

GHD Back or Hip Extensions –> Weighted Good Mornings or Stiff Legged Deadlifts

GHD Situp –> You can lie crosswise across a bench, with your feet hooked. Feet hooked inside one side of a giant tire or sub in weighted situps with no abmat.

You can give access to your coaches with our ‘Team Access’ feature, which will give them their own member dashboard where they can search through the calendar of session plans, watch videos, and access some other resources. (But they will not have access to your billing info or other admin settings.)

Yes! If you’re a member of Beyond the Whiteboard or SugarWOD, you don’t have to enter the workouts into those apps because we do that for you. This is a huge time-saver and makes things very easy on your end. Also, linking your BTWB/SugarWOD account with WUWO is a simple process that will take you less than five minutes.

For you wonderful Wodify, Zen Planner, etc., folks out there — we would love to integrate with those systems, but it’s not possible for us to do so right now. Their APIs don’t allow for a custom integration. But as soon as that changes, if it ever does, we’ll make an integration happen.

Yes, you can join a closed Facebook group of WUWO affiliates and gyms immediately after you sign up. Members ask questions, share tips and post helpful resources. And Pat and Taz film videos, host Q&As and share a lot of info in the group.

Session plans are released on the first of every month. You get all of the current month’s plans plus a preview of the first few days of next month.

If you sign up after the first of the month, you first payment will be prorated. Let’s say you sign up on the 15th, you will be charged for the 15th – 31st, and you will have access to only those days’ plans (15th – 31st). Then after your first month, you will pay the normal membership price on the 1st of each month.

If you want to wait until the first of the upcoming month, you can go ahead and purchase the program. In the checkout process, there’s an option to pre-purchase so that your membership will begin and your payment will be processed on the 1st of the upcoming month. This is a great option if you need a little time before you launch our program at your facility but you want to go ahead and get everything in order.

You can easily bundle the Gym Program with the two specialty club programs we currently offer: the Olympic Lifting Program and the Competitor Program.

Our Oly Program is for people who want to get better at the sport of Olympic Lifting, whereas our Competitor Program is for people who want to get better at the sport of CrossFit. In other words, the Oly Program looks to make people better lifters, and our Competitor Program looks to make people better competitors.

Another big difference between the two programs is that the Oly Program can be done as a stand alone program, but the Competitor Program cannot (it is only available as an add-on to our Gym Program). But keep in mind that even though the Oly Program can be a stand alone program, it is written to be combined with the Gym Program.

The Oly Program includes “Additional Work” for people who don’t follow our Gym Program so they still get the desired results. This program is 60-90 minutes of training volume 2-3 days a week.

With our Competitor Program, you must complete the Gym Program workout at the Rxd or Competitor levels and do the extra Competitor Program work to see the desired results. This program is 30-60 minutes of training volume 5 days a week.