Extra Credit

Sweat Swag board for July

By now everyone has probably seen the Sweaty Swag board at the gym.  Originally intended to give props for personal records it has also been really useful for helping hold people accountable for extra credit work.  While James had the idea years ago of a “Extra Sweat-It” board, where the coaches would write up accessory work for people to do, the Sweaty Swag board seems to do that, and more!  While not everyone may be interested in doing extra work, those that are can use the board to keep track of, and publicly hold themselves accountable for whatever extra credit work they decide on for a given month.  For example, for a while I’ve said to myself, “I need to work on handstand pushups..” , but all that really meant was that I would try and make it to the gym whenever HSPU would come up in the workout, or when working out by myself, I would try and program them…. if it fit.  The reality of that was me really not doing much, if any, extra HSPU work.  Instead, I used the Sweaty Swag board to tally up my accumulated extra HSPU’s I would do outside of the regular workout.  This was always done either before or after a workout, simply because right now I don’t have the time or desire to make it into the gym for multiple workouts in a day.  The result however was way beyond what I expected, 500 extra handstand pushups during the month of July!  I also realized that while they were programmed more than once in July, I actually only made it to one workout during July that had handstand pushups in it, and I believe that was only 48 total during that workout.  My point is that had I not done the extra credit work after my workouts, I would have only done 48 HSPUs during the month of July!  With as many different exercises as there are in CrossFit, if you really want to see some improvements in a particular area, you definitely need to work on it outside of just when it shows up in the workouts.