A workout brief that gives you tips and strategies for coaching the workout, like what the stimulus of the day should be, 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 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 (Beyond RXD, 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.

Competitor

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 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.

Rxd – (Recommended)
For best results, this should be the top level for most of your athletes.
The 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.

Fitness
This level is for new athletes who have just come from a prep-course or are de-conditioned. We help coaches instruct athletes at this level by removing a lot of the complex, highly skill-based movements that might overwhelm members.

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.

The Beyond Rxd 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 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 Beyond Rxd 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).

If you have strength and metcon programmed into every session, your members will never perform as well as they could.

First, let’s talk about recovery. A grueling metcon is going put your people on the floor… gasping for air… as they lay in a puddle of sweat. For GPP, this is fine, but for building strength, it’s not so great. Why? Because athletes are human, and humans need time to recover from intense work.

It’s our job to program intermittent sessions that accomplish two things at once: 1). Allow for recovery, 2). Provide the chance to work on a skill that can transfer over to lifts and, with some practice, make you stronger too. And then we sprinkle those sessions between really hard metcons and strength-only days.

In short: there needs to a be a sensical balance between the heavy metcon days, the strength-focused sessions and the skill-based workouts. You don’t need to pile all of those needs into one training session, especially not every training session.

But, you say, “what if Billie Jean comes on Mon, Wed, Fri and the strength days are Tues, Thurs that week. By your methodology, she’ll miss all the strength days.” This is why our programming flows in what might appear as unorganized cycles. We do not dedicate one or two calendar days as strength; this week, it could be a Tuesday, Friday and next week it could be a Monday, Thursday. It’s our own special recipe of organized chaos. If you’re really concerned about this potential issue, you could start a dedicated strength program, or have open gym several times a week so that people could work on their lifts. It all depends on the needs of your community.

Yes. We design benchmark workout and fitness testing sessions, then bring them back 3 – 6 months later so that your clients can measure their progress.

Our dose recommendation is usually 3 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 common place to have members attending 3-on, 1-off (etc.). But if they would like to follow that schedule, that would be just fine.

Our program is not tailored to your specific gym, because that requires an insane amount of energy and time to write. 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.

Another thing to keep in mind is that any group selling you “customized” programming 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) with their other clients.

The only way to give your clients completely customized programming is to write it yourself. If you have the extra time and energy, go for it! We want you to do what’s best for your business.

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.

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.

Yes! If you’re a member of Beyond the Whiteboard and Warmup & Workout, you don’t have to enter the workouts into BTWB because that is done for you. This is a huge time-saver and makes things very easy on your end. Also, linking the two accounts 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.

If you sign up after the first of the month, you first payment will be pro-rated. 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.

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.