When I began coaching at CrossFit NYC in the Flatiron district of Manhattan two years ago, we had around 500 members. This made us one of the biggest CrossFit boxes in the world. Since members only ever appeared in groups of 10 to 300 in classes, it still felt cozy. Today, with membership verging on 1300, on any given night there will be upwards of 110+ people milling about between those WODing and those waiting to do the same. With great coaches (I have to say that, they’re some of my best friends) and state of the art facilities (glass doors on the showers- what what!) we are able to handle the huge amount of members, and that’s the reason we’re still growing today. I used to think the hardest job in the place must be keeping it clean, and while that may hold true, the second hardest job may be writing the WODs that are posted everyday on our blog. You forget someone has to come up with those things, until you’re tired of seeing your goats pop up or favorite Girl hasn’t made an appearance in months- then you want to know who to bitch at. For the past four months, I’ve been your man. These are the lessons I learned along the way, one missed rep at a time.

Three years ago I was introduced to CrossFit by a friend who I completed the Marine’s Officer Selection Program. The last workout we completed in my Elements course at CrossFit NYC was Fight Gone Bad, a circuit of 5 exercises done in one-minute intervals. I was bested by less than ten reps, taking home second place, and the competitor within me was awakened. Since, I have come to appreciate the sport on many levels as an athlete and coach. In my own training, I am obsessed with tweaking my programming to reach new athletic levels- a process that becomes much more difficult as you progress as an athlete. As a nerd, CrossFit is so intriguing because it blends disciplines that unveil common athletic trends. As an example, many believe CrossFit has brought back from the dead the sport of Olympic weightlifting because so many newly minted CrossFitters have learned that they can become exceptional in their sport by focusing primarily on Olympic weightlifting. This transition from CrossFit to Olympic weightlifting exemplifies one of the reasons I love CrossFit as a coach; it’s a gateway drug for many of my students. They walk into CrossFit because someone told them it’s a great way to kick their own ass, and six months later they’ve done two adventure races, have a certification in kettlebells, and are scheduling their vacations around accesses to boxes. They are addicted to the community. This addiction can start at any age; CrossFit has proved that it is a lifetime sport. Athletes of all ages, levels and backgrounds can dig into the world of CrossFit and almost never stop digging as the endeavor to become the fittest versions of themselves possible.

This quest for ultimate fitness can’t happen without a WOD being written on the whiteboard, and that’s where I come in. When CrossFit NYC started in Central Park, they did main site WODs. This continued as they grew into and out of spaces around the city. The past couple of years, one of the owners wrote the programming- borrowing from main site and adding his own spices to flavor. When he handed over the mantle last December, I was confident in my ability to succeed, but couldn’t truly understand the ups and downs until I was in the trenches (try and tell a non-CrossFitter what Fran feels like before, during, and after; and why you chose to do it in the first place - it’s similar to that.)

I set out to create a strength and conditioning program with aspects of CrossFit. How does this differ from a traditional CrossFit program? It’s difficult to describe without 1000 words and a beer, but basically we (the CrossFit community) have learned that CrossFit (constantly varied, high intensity, functional movements) as a general physical preparedness program and CrossFit as the Sport of Fitness are two different things entirely. To compete at incredibly high levels in the Sport of Fitness, you need to be technically sound in Olympic lifting, gymnastics, and have a large base of conditioning. To be healthy and fit for everyday life, you just need to be able to wrestle around with your kids or move your friends’ furniture without gasping for air, and remain uninjured. Somewhere in between the Sport of Fitness and general physical preparedness lies my programming. Are you confused yet? Don’t worry. I was even more confused at some points along the way.

The basic structure of my programming is an 8-day cycle. This is to ensure the Monday-Wednesday-Friday crowd and the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday crowd are still getting a balanced fitness curriculum. The athletes are exposed to the same handful of strength movements regularly, and conditioning work is balanced amongst energy systems (sprint, sprint intervals, aerobic, etc.) and types of movement (delineated by quad, hip, push and pull.) Sounds simple, right? Anything but. Here are a few of the lessons I learned along the way.

1. Writing general programming for 1300 is a pain in the ass.

If you make one person happy, ten people hate you. This is the same ordeal group programmers struggle with in boxes all over the world. The ones who succeed realize it’s never going to be perfect and where the programming lags the coaching steps into high gear to make it work for each individual athlete.

2. I had to cater to the extremes.

In a perfect world, all of our athletes come to the box 3-4 times per week and get ten hours of sleep a night. Instead, you are simultaneously programming for the person who comes in 6 times a week to get their money’s worth and the poor soul who can only make it in once a week because work is crazy. With this in mind, and approximately 800 other things, I constantly referred to the big picture and tried desperately to write workouts that stood alone as ass kickers and supported the larger goal at hand- becoming elite.

3. People don’t like prescribed rest.

This was one of the most surprising lessons learned. I thought I had a good handle on what would be popular and what would be less so. While I had success with many hare-brained ideas including using mobility work in supersets and inventive partner workouts, I received an incredible amount of backlash for asking folks not to work. I eventually learned how to trick them into doing so with unbroken sets and heavy touch and go reps, forcing myself to be creative which is tough for a guy who just likes picking up heavy things and putting them down.

4. Technique must be mastered without fatigue before it is mastered with fatigue.

That’s pretty much a fancy way of saying an idiom CrossFit has been preaching for a long time: learn the movement, then do it consistently, then add intensity. This “ideal structure” is difficult when you have 20+ new athletes transitioning into regular classes every week. So once again, coaching must take the lead. When the RXed weight is 185 pounds for a power clean, many (a large majority) of athletes need to drop it down to focus on form. To complicate things even further, a noob won’t have any idea what weight to put on the bar; so a coach must use his experience and discerning eye to decide what weight is going to prepare that athlete for success and strengthen their foundation.

5. What people want to be doing and should be doing are two different things.

This is something I have to remind myself of daily as an athlete. If I had my way, I’d spend 30 minutes on the Airodyne, do a shit ton of muscle ups then wrap up with some ice cream eating for time. But I realize that in order to become better, there are a lot of productive thing I should be doing instead. In my first iteration of the programming, I included a lot of what I believed our athletes “should be doing.” Members have many ways to tell you how they really feel- be it publicly in one of my classes or anonymously on the blog, and eventually I learned it is important to strike a balance, because if folks aren’t having fun, what is the point really?

I’d like to wrap up by speaking to one strata of the everyday CrossFitter who deserves some loving, the person who has been doing it now for 18 months. What happens at 18 months, you ask? It’s around this time that with regular training you stop being a beginner. This means that the honeymoon period is a thing of the past PRs are fewer and further in between and conditioning workouts have a way of getting you down in the dumps. As a programmer, I’ve noticed it’s also the point where you can, if you let yourself, get whiny as hell. Instead of blaming it on the WODs, I encourage you with this--we’ve all been there. Decide today to work harder than ever. Don’t let yourself get lazy because things aren’t coming easily anymore. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and learn from your mistakes. Become more independent, even in your classes, and take your destiny in your own hands. And make sure you are training smarter, not simply more. Pay attention to tenets of strength and conditioning like progressive overload and never stop learning.

I’m passing on the responsibility of programming soon with this last piece of advice: have fun. Much like you can tell when a chef hates their job, you can tell when a programmer has lost the flair for their art. And I share the same with you: through the tears, the sweat and the blood, please remember that working out should be fun.