Here we go! It’s week 1 of the CrossFit Open and we have a chipper style workout that’s a throwback to 2014!

CrossFit Open 23.1 RX (aka 14.4)
AMRAP 14 Minutes:
60 Calorie Row
50 Toes-to-Bars
40 Wall Balls @ 20/14 lbs to 10/9 ft
30 Cleans @ 135/95 lbs
20 Muscle-ups

CrossFit Open 23.1 Scaled
AMRAP 14 Minutes:
60 Calorie Row
50 Hanging Knee Raises
40 Wall Balls @ 14/10 lbs to 10/9 ft
30 Cleans @ 95/65 lbs
20 Pull-ups

Full details about all divisions and movement standards are online. Please take time to look them over before coming to the gym! (Links: RX/Scaled/Masters and Foundations)

Logistics:

Sign up for class as you normally would. When you come, you will sign up for a heat and there will be a self-directed warm-up for you to follow. Expect to work out during one of the heats and judge/cheer a friend during another. If you know you need extra time, come a bit early to get yourself warm and cheer people on. You can use 1643 for warmups, leaving our main class space for the athletes working out and judges.

Can’t make it Saturday? Post to Slack and we’ll help find a time for you to do it with a judge before the Monday 5PM score submission deadline.

Strategy: Pacing & Smart Sets

Let’s be honest, for just about everyone, this is a chipper – where you work your way through as much of the workout as possible before the time cap. Follow the guidance below, and when you get close to the end of the 14 minutes, go go go!

• Row: Don't dog the row but don't go all out either – you don’t want to tire yourself out too early. Pick a quick but manageable pace and stick with it. Keeping your heart rate in check and breathing under control are the goals early on in this workout.

• Toes-to-bar: Break them up early, do small sets, and know yourself! These go away quickly, so while the first 20ish reps may feel easy, don't let that fool you.  Leave 2 or 3 reps in the bank during your early sets and it will pay dividends in reps 35-50.  Remember to keep that rest short and be disciplined about getting back on the bar. For those good at toes-to-bar, one set of 10 and then sets of 5 with short breaks will keep you moving. For others, fast singles can be a good strategy if you're smart about it and keep chipping away.

• Wall Balls: Four to five controlled sets is a good goal – this is with a breath or two in-between and then right back on it. The breaks will give your shoulders a rest from tension and help you manage your breathing. For those doing muscle-ups, this will also help prevent shoulder fatigue.

• Cleans: The cleans are singles/small sets from the beginning. (And by singles we mean: clean, drop (with hands following bar), set, go again.)  No wasting time between reps, unless this is a heavy weight for you (if so, take the time you need to feel set and tight so you don't waste any missed reps).

• Muscle-ups: Have you been practicing them? If not, be smart about attempting these. If you have these, do a first set where you know you won’t miss any, then settle into singles or small sets. Steady, confident singles with no misses, and intelligent rest, is better than missing and wasting energy, time, and mental focus.   

Scaling

We will have scaling options for everyone! If you’re entered online, there is an official scaled version. (See above). Remember though, that any reps at RX beat all scores at scaled! So, if toes-to-bar are your limiting factor, do the row and give yourself time to get as many toes-to-bar as possible. Who knows, you may surprise yourself! If you hit the wall on them, but want to keep doing the workout, tell your judge you’re done with the RX version and switch to any scaled version of toes-to-bar and keep going.

Have fun, cheer on your friends, and come back this week! Let’s do this!

It’s only February and yet there is LOT happening. To make sure you don’t miss a thing we’ll keep you in the loop with a quick rundown

1. FCCF Scholarship Applications Close Wednesday 15th February:

   In order to increase access to FCCF for those who are not able to afford a full membership, we’re excited to share that we have launched our new scholarship program. If you or anyone you know might be interested please apply here.

2. The CrossFit games begins on Thursday 16th:

   It’s that time of year…Open time and the games are starting. The first workout will be announced this Thursday. What do you think it will be? We hope they go easy on us at least for the first one, let us ease into things. We have a couple of posts on how we’ll be running the workouts and our own Jen Clarke blogged about why you should join (scroll down for more details). ALL levels are welcome so do consider signing up and participating. We promise it’s a lot of fun!!

3. Spring Fling Party:

   We are still confirming the date (please vote in our Slack channel if you haven’t already) but we’ll be hosting our first party of the year after the CrossFit open rounds are finished. Its a great time to come and socialise and get to know one another outside of the gym and outside of our athleisure wear!! Kids and dogs all welcome 😎 More details to come so stay tuned!

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WODs

It’s that time of year again and the CrossFit Games kicks off on Thursday 16 February 2023 and they will be announcing the first workout. There’ll be a total of 3 workouts over 3 weeks announced every Thursday with scores due by Monday at 5pm and here’s how it will work…

We’ll be running Open Heats on Saturday mornings instead of our usual partner WODs. Sign up in MindBody for 8:00, 9:15 or 10:30am each week. We’ll go over the workout, provide scaling options, get you warmed up and then we’ll start the official heats!! We’ll have judges to count your reps and sign off on your participation. If you can’t come on Saturdays don’t stress you can still do the workouts and submit your scores.

If you haven’t participated in a CrossFit Open before it is A LOT OF FUN and ALL LEVELS are WELCOMED! The energy in the gym is amazing, athletes often get their “first” of movements and of course there’s cheering and encouragement from the whole community! If you just want to come and help out by counting and cheering, please come on down.

We’ll also be running a little friendly competition. After each workout you’ll get to submit a token of participation. By the end of the third week if you did all 3 workouts you’ll have 3 X the chances to win an amazing prize and of course bragging rights too!

Register to participate on the CrossFit website and don’t forget to select Fog City CrossFit as your local affiliate.

SEE YOU ON SATURDAY 18TH!!

On February 16th, the official CrossFit 2023 season kicks off with the Open, a worldwide annual event that’s the first stage of qualification to the CrossFit Games. Much more importantly, the Open is a chance for you to set a goal, benchmark your current fitness level, and participate in a fun event with the FCCF community!

Fog City “exists to investigate the limits and capabilities of people, both individually and collectively, to improve their own lives and the lives of those around them.” Health, fitness, performance, and community are the backbone of this labor of love. The CrossFit methodology is a key part of how we try to do this every day.

There is a ton of thought behind the CrossFit methodology that informs our daily WODs, and there’s a wealth of info on CrossFit.com that can compliment your time in the gym. One key tool in improving your fitness is the ability to track and measure your performance over time. This is why we write scores on the white board, and why we encourage you to track your workouts. It helps you to identify your relative strengths and weaknesses, and can show you empirically where you are getting better (especially when it comes to lifts, or benchmark workouts like Fran). For some, competing with others is a big motivator. But for most of us at FCCF, competing with ourselves is where we get the most motivation to stretch and grow!

The Open takes place over 3 weeks every year around this time. Workouts are announced at noon PST on Thursday, and participants have until the following Monday to submit their score online for the given workout. Fog City provides everything you need, including judges, and then you just have to log your score online before the deadline. We will hold multiple sessions each Saturday during the Open, complete with blasting music, people cheering you on, and other folks pushing themselves in the workout. It’s a whole other level of energy, and pushes many of us to do our absolute best!

Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world participate, and you’ll be ranked overall and within your age group. The workouts are pretty representative of your general level of fitness according to CrossFit’s methodology, so I’ve found that the ranking provides a good sense of my degree of improvement year over year. This will only be my 3rd official Open, and I wish I had data going back to previous years. My first year gave me a baseline, my second year I set (and surpassed) a goal to improve within my age group, and I have a goal for this year as well. In a perfect world, signing up for the Open is a catalyst in the months leading up to it for you to stay committed to your fitness - at this point, perhaps it’s a catalyst to really focus over the next two weeks! But even after the Open, you can take what you learned about yourself as motivation to improve throughout the year.

Note there are scaling options just like in class every day - every single FCCF member will be able to do a version of these workouts. And we will cheer you on whether you’re killing it Rx-style, or are doing a scaled version. This is about you doing your best at your current level of fitness! And also, doing it responsibly - push yourself, don’t kill yourself. As always, we want you coming back the next day.

There is a $20 registration fee that goes to CrossFit HQ to support the content they create, the platform and judging (competitive level athletes submit videos for review). Admittedly, as a CrossFit superfan and consumer of a lot of content from CrossFit, I’m biased, but I personally get much more than $20 of value from CrossFit throughout the year and I’m glad to support their efforts. It’s that much more meaningful to me this year because I think with their new CEO, as well as CrossFit OGs, the company is headed in a really positive direction after some quite tumultuous years. 

If you are at all curious, just sign up, show up, and have fun! And please also feel free to come during other sessions to judge or cheer! Register here.

Jen Clarke

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We are running our first internal weightlifting meet for our members this Sunday 5th February!

It’s going to be a lot of fun and there are many ways in which you can participate:

1. If you’d like to lift… YAY!  We’ll have platforms set up and be doing 3 lifts for each the Snatch and Clean & Jerk, just like a real meet.

2. If you want to come and workout and lift but don’t want to be part of the “mock meet”... that’s great!  We’ll have a programmed session you can follow at your own pace and you can vibe off the excitement. 

3. If you don’t want to lift at all… perfect!  We need volunteers to help us run the event and you can get a glimpse into how a meet is run.

4. If you just want to come and check it out… awesome!  I’m sure our athletes would love to have our community cheering them on.

If you haven’t had a chance to lift in the recently opened space on a platform you’re gonna love how it feels AND sounds!

Let us know you’re interested in participating in ANY way and sign up for Barbell Class (2/5) on MindBody (open only to our FCCF Members at this time).  We’ll be kicking off 10am, getting warmed up and then getting into lifting heavy shit over our heads.

Bring your singlet, bring yourself and we’ll bring the coffee and donuts!!

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Sunday 22nd January marks the New Lunar New Year and brings forth the year of the rabbit.  The most popular Chinese story tells that the legendary Jade Emperor who is considered the Ruler of Heaven decided on his birthday to have a race.  He called for all animals on earth to participate and 12 showed up.  The order in which they finished would help determine the passage of time.  The animals finished in this order: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, or pig.  SO the rabbit is the fourth sign of the Zodiac.

Each animal is attributed with individual traits.  For people born in the year of the rabbit they are:  kind-hearted, friendly, intelligent, cautious, skillful, gentle & quick.  If we think of our rabbit friends I’m sure we see these characteristics in them.  

So what does the year hold for us? It holds longevity, positivity, auspiciousness, wittiness, cautiousness, cleverness, deftness and self-protection.  When we think about these and the way we push ourselves at the gym to be stronger, faster, improve our technique or master a new movement they all apply to the journey we are on.

In the spirit of wittiness and kicking off this new lunar year don’t be hare brained and grab it by the ears before it disappears!!

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On Monday, January 16, 2023, we'll be celebrating a Fog City Community Fitness tradition: a MLK, Jr. Day Tribute WOD \ Community Giveback and we’ll launch the FCCF Scholarship!

1) Community Giveback: 

The best way we think we can give back to the broader community is $$$, so we have gathered member input on local groups that serve communities of color in SF that we can lift up and contribute to:

• https://www.sfblackinfanthealth.org/ 

• https://mediajustice.org/ 

• https://www.cityofdreams.org/ 

On MLK, Jr. Day, we’ve made classes FREE in hopes to see more of your friendly faces and to maximize our impact within the community: We ask that if you join us in doing the MLK, Jr. Day Tribute WOD at FCCF or at home, then you consider making a financial donation to the above organizations (any amount helps!). When donating, please list Fog City Community Fitness in the comments section, in addition to your name. Please check with your employer to see if they offer donation matching.

At FCCF, we believe Black Lives Matter and we are excited to continue this tradition! If you have other orgs you’d like us to consider, please let us know.

2) MLK, Jr. Day Tribute WOD:

This WOD is a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. who was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest.

Dr. King still inspires today including at FCCF where we strive to make a difference in the everyday lives of our community. “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

3) FCCF Scholarship Application now Open:

In order to increase access to FCCF for those who are not able to afford a full membership, we’re excited to share that we are launching a scholarship program. We’ll be accepting applications now through Feb 15th, so if you or anyone you know might be interested please apply here.

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WODs of the Week:

As we celebrate the end of the year and rolling in 2023 we all know how easy it is to make a long list of new year's resolutions, but how many do you really keep?  And does that set us up for success or failure?

We’ve all been there, gungho and making promises to ourselves and often our loved ones about how we are going to become better versions of ourselves because it’s now the beginning of a new year. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for success does it?  How much really alters in our lives just because it’s now January of one year compared to December of the previous?

Changing is hard and can be very overwhelming.  If you plan to eat more vegetables every day, get more sleep, spend more time with the kids, drink less alcohol etc etc, that is a lot to take on.  If you don’t get to do all the things on your list everyday does that make you a bad person?  NO it makes you human!  

If we fail to eat more vegetables everyday often our mentality is to just give up, but what we should be doing is not concentrating on what we didn’t do but know that tomorrow we will try again.  It’s consistency that wins every time and gets us the results we’re looking for.  It’s not giving up or saying “stuff it”, it’s accepting that today we didn’t achieve what we set out to do but tomorrow we still can.

Part of consistency is being real with yourself and knowing your limits and what you can actually take on.  With our Healthy Habits challenge we want to encourage and model good behaviour and so we have asked our members to choose up to 3 habits they would like to reinforce for 2023.  

It takes 21 days to make a habit become part of your routine.  So instead of writing that long list just choose up to 3 things you know you can do everyday and be consistent.  There are also tools to help you with consistency.  Have a gym buddy hold you accountable or share a habit and do it with someone else. 

The key here is not to be overwhelmed but to create something lasting and once you have created a healthy habit it’s easier to move onto something else in much the same way.

We’re excited to see all the stickers be placed on your sheet at the gym!  If you haven’t done that yet there’s still time.

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2023!

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WODs for the week:

Welcome 2023 and Happy New Year!

It’s that time of year again when we start our January “Healthy Habits” Challenge. For this annual tradition, we commit to a healthy habit to kick off the new year and we document our successes on paper forms at the gym to keep each other accountable.

It's up to you which healthy habit(s) you choose. Some ideas include:

• Less/no sugar

• Less/no booze

• Drink more water

• Sleep more

• Less screen time/digital detox

• Nutrition overhaul

• Or you can make up your own!

Grab a sheet at the gym, write in your challenge(s), put a sticker on each day you meet your goal, and see how many stickers you can get over the course of the month. Winners get... a healthy new habit. And lots of stickers. Good luck and have fun with this!

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WODs for the Week:

We’ll be running a slightly reduced schedule this week: no 6:30PM classes and no noon, except on Friday. Make sure to check MindBody for the most up-to-date schedule. Also, try to sign up early, as we may cancel classes that don’t have any sign-ups.

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WOD of the Week:

🕎 Happy Hanukkah!

Who knew bear crawls can be so grueling? Thanks to Zach & Sarah’s 8 Crazy Nights workout this past Saturday, kicking off Hanukkah! If you joined in for the fun this weekend, you got to experience the burner workout. Wishing everyone in our community a Happy Hanukkah! Wishing your family peace and light this holiday season!

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🏋🏼‍♀️ Coach Kate Competing:

Congratulations to Coach Kate who competed this weekend in Belmont at the Evolution Performance event. Checkout our post on Instagram!

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1 Rep Back Squat Max

Monday will wrap up our Back Squat Series. If you’ve been coming in consistently, you’ve been anticipating this day to test out how you’ve progressed. We’re looking forward to seeing many of you hit the PR gong tomorrow.

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Holiday WOD & Schedule

Come in this Saturday for our traditional 12 Days of Christmas WOD! It’s going to be a fun one to kick-off the holiday season. Also, we’ll run a holiday schedule the week of 12/26 so stay tuned for that!

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WOD for the Week:

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Oh what fun it was to celebrate this beautiful community this past Saturday over drinks, desserts, and tacos. Thank you for coming out to celebrate Fog City’s accomplishments over the past year. We have so much to be grateful for, but we are most grateful for all of you who make this community so great.

We want to thank our board members who have served in their roles this year. Each year, we vote for members to join our board to help us fill key functions that keep the gym running smoothly. By Friday this week, we will send out details to vote on electing a new board for 2023. Keep a look out for an email about it!

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WOD for the Week: