Trying to please all of our clients with perfect programming in a non-1-on-1 situation (group class) is a near impossible task. There will ALWAYS be things that folks want more or less of – this is inevitable.
At CrossFit One Life, we believe in prioritizing the needs of the many over the needs of the few where our programming is based on satisfying the goals of the majority of our clients.
It’s important to be conscious of what our clients’ goals are – improving how we look in a bathing suit and how we feel day in and day out and not trying to make the Olympics!
However, if we aren’t giving our clients the tools to hit these goals and our programming revolves around the comments from a few clients, then we’ll likely miss the mark on both of these areas. We always take feedback, but don’t let that feedback compromise our mission statement – our mission is to help people improve their overall quality of life and health through strategic exercise and nutrition coaching.
Something I hear occasionally from our clients is that they miss things like “muscle-ups” and “snatches” and the classic hero workouts. That’s not to say we don’t program them, we do and we just so happen to be doing them all this week, but far less than most other gyms. We program using risk vs. reward analysis and what gets us “the most bang for our buck.” Everyone benefits from Strict Pullup work while very few benefit from Muscle-Ups.
The logic is simple: we see our clients for roughly 2% of the total time in a given 168 hour week (roughly 3-4 hours/week). If we spend that time prioritizing higher-skill work we’ll miss the bigger picture.
Higher-skill work and hero workouts have their place and shouldn’t be completely disregarded, but it just comes down to simple math; seeing that our time delivering fitness to our clients is so limited it makes it tough to actually devote chunks of time to these areas without compromising progress and results.
There is always a tradeoff with programming and we can’t “have it all.”
