Final Fitness Level Challenge WeekWe are starting our FINAL week of the September Fitness Level UP Challenge!
This week we have workouts for these Fitness Levels: Bodyweight, Light, Olympic Lifts, Endurance and Heavy. If you haven't yet unlocked a Fitness Level, NO WORRIES! I am hosting a FITNESS LEVEL PARTY this Saturday at 9am. You will have the opportunity to attempt any workout from any Fitness Level you want. We can even help structure your training session so you can complete several workouts together. Be sure to join me this Saturday so you can unlock your final Fitness Levels! We still have prizes this week when you unlock a Fitness Level Category. Remember, if you have more than 1 locked category you can earn a prize for each one you unlock. Your Coach will let you know the FL category of every WOD to help you know if it's one you need to do as prescribed. You can also earn a weekly prize for the MOST EMOJIS given on BTWB. I have the ability to track our BTWB engagement and Charlene is our winner with 131 emojis given last week!
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What's for Dinner?WOOHOOO! It's #foodiefriday! It's finally fall and with last week's lovely warm temperature my garden is finally GOING OFF! It's time to harvest NOW, before the cold rains move in and overwater all our ripening veggies Ratatouille is one of my favorite ways to enjoy the late summer harvest. Ratatouille takes advantage of your tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, onions and garlic. This Ratatouille recipe courtesy of The Splendid Table takes a long time, it's the perfect recipe for a mild fall weekend. Click on the video to learn how to make weapons-grade Ratatouille. Enjoy! Since this version of Ratatouille takes so long, why not pair it with its eponymous movie? We are in our third week of our September Beyond the Whiteboard Fitness Level UP Challenge. Are you enjoying the workouts we have programmed for you? We are doing workouts from all 8 Fitness Level categories. As we've progressed through the month you may find your Fitness Level moving up or down. It's important to remember that you are not one workout. Beyond the Whiteboard has a blog post that addresses this very issue. Fitness Level: You Are Not One Workouta Beyond the Whiteboard blog
"A lot of words describe Julie Foucher. Among them are smart (she’s going to be a doctor), fit (she’s one of the fittest in the world), determined, consistent, and hard working (be sure to read How Julie Foucher Became Julie Foucher to understand why). After what transpired at the Central Regional in 2017, we can also include inspirational. Julie tore her right achilles tendon, and, rather than end her weekend feeling sorry for herself, she finished the remaining three events in impressive fashion…in a boot. In addition to being incredibly motivating and empowering, Julie also deals with an important issue every CrossFitter, at one point or another, has to deal with. That is, feeling unfit as a result of a singular workout performance. “My 15.2 score was 8 reps less than last year’s score in 14.2. Does this mean I’m not fitter than I was last year? Absolutely not. 15.2 is one workout of many, and overall my metrics tell me I’ve the fittest I’ve ever been” The Fitness Level Connection It’s easy to understand that Julie is more fit than she was in previous years because of her constant competing. But what if you don’t compete on a regular basis? What if you never participate in a comprehensive, weekend long competition that tests all aspects of your fitness? How could anyone ever know? Fitness isn’t about your performance on one workout at your box on a random Tuesday. Fitness is about your performances on several different workouts across a broad range of time domains and movement combinations (ie. the Open). Fitness Level is a number derived from 8 different, specific categories. The levels from each are averaged together to determine an athlete’s overall Fitness Level. The most well rounded individuals (users with high ratings for each of the categories) will have the highest overall Fitness Levels. It isn’t at all how well you perform on, for example, Fran (a workout that belongs to our Short category), but rather how you perform on a host of workouts from the Short category that determines your level for that category. While a low score on Fran, say 50, will pull your category score down, 80s and 90s on other workouts from the same category will help to pull it back up. The same is true for the other 7 categories that make up Fitness Level. The same idea applies to an athlete’s overall Fitness Level. A poor rating in one category will pull a category rating down, but it only counts as 1/8 of an overall Fitness Level score. Most of us have either personally experienced, or know someone who’s experienced, the phenomenon of becoming more fit by giving up certain strengths in order to improve upon weaknesses. Perhaps the best example of this is the incredibly strong athlete losing size, and, as a result, strength numbers, but simultaneously improving MetCon capacity. The ratings for this hypothetical athlete’s Power Lifting and Olympic Lifting categories may drop, but the increases in the other 6 categories may be enough to ultimately improve his/her overall Fitness Level. The chart below shows an athlete lacking in the Power Lifts and Speed categories, but because the ratings for the other 6 categories are fairly high, this athlete still has a very respectable Fitness Level of 72. This athlete is not a 28, though he/she might feel like it sometimes when suffering through some of the short distance running and rowing Speed workouts. In the end, your Fitness Level history, and how it’s trending, is all you need to know about your fitness. Additional Factors To Consider Let’s not forget about the other factors that go into each and every individual performance. For example, did Julie get enough sleep the night before 15.2? Was the environment as motivating as it was the prior year? While repeating workouts does wonders for tracking progress, it is often difficult to duplicate the exact environment, mindset, and motivation each time. That’s especially the case if your last performance was one for the ages. In Julie’s case, from what we can tell, her hands ripped early on during 15.2. At that point, 15.2 went from a predictable repeat workout, to an entirely different experience altogether. Below are a list of additional factors that come into play when repeating a workout. Each can play a part in causing an athlete, who is more fit, to not PR. However, the design of our Fitness Level feature will help to negate these when/if they happen. Mindset The stuff going on between the ears is the most powerful tool of all. Are you confident in your abilities? Do you trust that you’re more fit than last time? Or was your performance so awesome last time that you don’t know if you can duplicate that form? Personal records are often determined before the clock even starts. Atmosphere Where are you performing the workout? Is it as motivating as the last time? Are you competing against others that push you? Are you by yourself? Athletes often perform up, or down, with their environment. Never underestimate the power of a buzzing atmosphere. Training Biases Have you been focusing on a certain aspect of your fitness to the detriment of others? Sometimes that’s by design. If a repeat workout happens to present itself during a stretch of biased training, a poor performance won’t tell you much about your fitness. Remember, you’re sacrificing now so that somewhere down the line you are more fit than ever. Sleep/Water/Food We often take these items for granted. Maybe you didn’t drink enough water the day before the workout. Or, perhaps, your eating wasn’t as on-point as it could have been in the couple of days leading up to your workout. Even something as simple as getting one less hour of sleep than last time can be enough to keep you from achieving the same perfect storm of internal factors as last time. The Unknowable Sometimes setting a PR has to do with everything going just right. As mentioned previously, Julie’s hands ripped early on in 15.2. There was no way for her to know that would happen, especially if it didn’t during 14.2. Another example could be getting “no repped” unexpectedly on an Open workout. How do you handle the workout now that your focus and plan have been tampered with? Do you crack under the pressure, or do you overcome the unforeseen obstacles? Sometimes the unknowable is a bit too much to overcome. For Julie, performing that many C2B pull-ups on ripped hands was always going to be a challenge. To her credit, she still only missed her PR by 8 reps! Fighting Human Nature It’s easy to get frustrated with a singular workout. It’s human nature. We want it all now. If every repeat performance isn’t a personal record, sometimes it feels like it’s the end of the world. You’ll likely encounter many of these “bumps” in the road on your fitness journey. The key is maintaining a long-term perspective. Fitness Level can be that perspective for you." Today, for Whoop Wednesday, I'm sharing a podcast with Whoop VP of Performance Kristen Holmes and Director of Analytics Emily Capodilupo who are joined by nutritionist Kassandra Hobart to take a deep dive into the science of calorie tracking. Kristen, Emily and Kassandra explore exactly what calories are and how your body uses them, as well as the difficulties that arise with trying to count them–both coming in and going out. They also discuss a recent update to the WHOOP app to improve the way we track your caloric burn, as well as some general tips for how to be smarter and healthier with the calories you’re putting in your body. 4:01 – What Exactly are Calories? “Calories are unit of energy,” Kassandra says. “They’re our fuel.” 4:26 – Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). “Your BMR is your very basic energy need for living. Anything like breathing, digestion, etc. You need a certain level of calories to function. … Your BMR is really the best baseline so that we can calculate things on top of it.” 5:39 – Factors that Affect BMR. “Your height, your weight, your age, where you’re living, you’re environment, your epigenetics,” and more. 6:07 – How Does WHOOP Calculate BMR? “We currently calculate BMR as a function of age, your reported gender, your height and your weight,” Emily says. We’re excited to improve on this with PNOE integration and using cardio-metabolic analysis. 7:56 – 3 Ways We Burn Calories. BMR, the thermic effect of food (“It’s a lot of work to eat!”) and active burn, “the calories that you expend to do anything above the bare minimum.” 9:04 – Recent Update to Improve Calorie Tracking. “Most of the literature out there has actually only been developed by data collected on much higher heart rates,” Emily explains. We updated our algorithm to better reflect caloric burn when you’re less active. “We have this really big data set that we can look at and find these discrepancies that the studies miss.” 11:09 – Food Label Inaccuracies. “The error bar on the other side of the equation is way higher,” Emily points out, “the FDA requires that all food labels are within 20% of the actual amount of calories that they claim, and they don’t even enforce or police this requirement at all.” Plus, human error plays a big part. For example, two chefs at a restaurant may make the same salad very differently. “The more ingredients you have, the more likely that it’s going to be more imprecise with the calories, even if it is whole-food based,” Kassandra adds. “It also matters how it was cooked.” 14:50 – Does Weighing Food Work? “Counting calories is fraught with issues,” Kristen concludes. “Weighing does get you maybe a tiny bit closer to understanding what’s in your food, but as far as calories are concerned, you’d have to weigh each individual ingredient, and you’re still taking an average,” Kassandra says. “Also, what you’re eating is going to be different than what you absorb.” 16:09 – Overcoming Challenges of Calorie Counting. “I think that we need to get away from this quantity approach, and more look at quality,” Kassandra states. “One thing that is good about weighing and measuring food is that it gives you a better understanding of how nutrient-dense your food is.” 17:28 – Nutrient Dense Foods. “Even at a cellular level, it’s more important to have nutrient-dense food than it is to worry about being in a calorie deficit or surplus,” Kassandra says. “Let’s worry less about being precise on your calories in and calories out, and being more in-tune with your body.” 18:16 – Eating Slowly Matters a Lot. “Getting into this parasympathetic state is really important,” Kristen explains. “That’s one thing I love about WHOOP,” Kassandra adds, “you guys really do a good job of explaining and understanding how important that parasympathetic system is. … If we want to absorb more of our food, than we need to be calm when we’re eating it.” 19:27 – Rest & Digest. “You need to be chewing each bit like 10-15 times. … You’re going to feel better because you’re a little bit more balanced as far as what happens during digestion and absorption, especially of carbohydrates.” 21:14 – Microbiome. “When we’re eating more whole foods and eating them slowly, those good gut bugs are able to grow and help us absorb more nutrients.” 22:19 – Liquid Sugars. “When we drink liquids it’s a very different process than when we’re actually eating sugars,” Kristen says. Recent studies, A and B. 22:56 – Where Should Your Calories Come From? “A good rule of thumb is 30% of your calories from protein, 30% from fat, and 40% from carbs,” Kassandra suggests. “That’s before we look at any of the other factors or your goals, but that’s a good baseline to start.” 25:06 – Daily Goals. “Glycogen storages take up to 36 hours to replenish,” Kassandra points out. “If I have an athlete who’s running on Thursday, I want them to be increasing carbs and even some protein on Wednesday, even Tuesday.” 26:25 – Performance vs. Longevity. “What is your goal, and how important is it? … If it’s a lot of volume short term, I’m even less worried about the quality because I just need you to be so fueled and calorically ready for that particular event.” But, you have to understand the consequences of what might happen long term, Kassandra says. Emily gives the example of how runners’ “goo” makes sense in the moment, but not under regular circumstances. Conversely, it also doesn’t make sense to eat a salad while you’re running. 29:12 – Food Timing. “I’m going to eat foods that enable me to optimize whatever that behavior is that I’m doing,” Kristen says. 30:33 – Keto and Cognitive Health? “Right now we only know the short term of it,” Kassandra notes. “We don’t know the long-term effect of someone doing such a high-fat diet in the endurance world.” 32:18 – Sleep and Nutrition/Calories. “We have our athletes start a ‘power-down’ routine” before they go to sleep. “We don’t want have a lot of fat before bed,” that’s going to be hard to digest. Kassandra recommends cool food as opposed to hot food prior to bed as well. “If we don’t sleep enough, our body will start to look for that energy in other forms. In particular, it’ll crave junk food.” 34:53 – Leptin and Ghrelin (Hunger Hormones). “If you’re not sleeping well, if you’re not getting recovered at night that next day most likely your metabolism is going to be a lot lower too,” Kassandra explains. “You’re now going to crave things that you normally wouldn’t need or wouldn’t want. … Your REM and your deep sleep are so important for this.” 36:23 – If You Wake Up Hungry at Night? “That lets me know that we have to increase your calories, and carbs in particular. … A lot of times if you’re waking up in the middle of the night it’s because your muscles are trying to recover and they just can’t.” 38:55 – Big Takeaways. “The way that we’re counting calories at WHOOP is internally consistent … the trends are very reliable,” Emily says. “On both sides of the equation calorie counting much noisier than people appreciate.” Kassandra adds “Quality is just so important. Calories are a unit of fuel, we do need them. At the end of the day, we all need macronutrients.” And from Kristen, “Really try to get in that parasympathetic state when you are eating.” If you are interested in joining the dozen TSCF members on our on a Whoop journey, use my link to get your first month free. If you're already a Whoop user, join our True Spirit Whoop Group with the team code: COMM-AD6416.
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