The HAM Plan

To all of our affiliates, athletes and coaches, we can't thank you enough for your support and trust along this journey. You are the reason we do what we do, and you push us to be better every day. Thank you!

We are excited to announce that CrossFit, LLC has acquired HAM Plan!

Austin, James, Spencer, and Travis will continue with CrossFit, LLC to support the CrossFit Affiliate Programming (CAP). CAP will provide advanced continuing education for coaches and a world-class training experience for members. 

We're looking forward to this next chapter as we continue to work with the CrossFit community to provide unparalleled coaching and programming resources for affiliates!

Please check out https://www.crossfit.com/programming for more information and to join the waitlist!

💥 Challenge Workout Update!

❄️ January - ☀️July Swipe Right!

Halfway through 2021, it’s time to recap all our Challenge Workouts.

🫐 July / Huckleberry - total your reps and distance and then subtract that total from 1000. The resulting number is how many burpees you must complete to finish.

🌈 June / ROYGBIV - June’s naming theme focused on colors. So we created a big beefy chipper that follows this theme.

🌱 April / Beanstalk - A true challenge for sure. How long can you climb?

⚗️ March / Metrodora - In March, we celebrated Women’s History month by naming our workouts after famous women inventors and teachers. “Metrodora” is a daunting workout inspired by the classic CrossFit benchmark “Linda.”

🪶 February / Hummingbird - You must complete all reps and rounds unbroken to finish this one as RX.

Scale as needed and enjoy!

🎉 Tell us your scores, your favorites, and your most significant challenges!

Workout Intent & Stimulus

Show up, stay safe, stay consistent, and have fun. Maintain those four elements, and you will likely maintain a lifetime of fitness.

But for athletes who want more fitness faster and the coaches who want to deliver it, we want to hammer down on the intended stimulus.

⏰ Identify the intended time domain of the workout. Workout timeframes exist in a range; for example, a moderately timed workout could last from 10-15 minutes. What you want to look at is, on average, how long does it take you to complete workouts of a specific range.

🐆 If you finish most workouts intended to last 10-15 minutes around the low 10:00 mark, then you might benefit from slight increases to the workout difficulty. This is especially true if you do not regularly perform the workouts as prescribed.

🐌 On the other hand, if you always finish workouts intended for the 10-15 minute range in 15:00 or more, you need to start moving faster. If you train like this often, you only teach your body a single speed or intensity. Over time, training like this will hamper results. Scale workouts so you can finish the workout in closer to 10 minutes and then slowly increase the difficulty from there.

🧠 Keep in mind that effort should impact your pace. Increasing effort should allow you to increase the pace, therefore reducing overall workout time. If a significant change of effort doesn’t significantly change how fast or slow you are finishing workouts, then paying more attention to the intended time domain will help you.

Cueing and Correcting: Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment of improvement or effort is a crucial teaching tool that can be just as useful as correcting.

What can acknowledgment do? What pitfalls appear when we misuse acknowledgment while coaching?

🎯 Make your acknowledgments specific. What improved and by how much?

🥪 Use half of the constructive criticism sandwich. “That was better, but try to jump a little higher.”

🕵️‍♂️ Pay attention to your athlete’s effort. “I liked how hard you pushed on that last set of pull-ups, great work.”

🎉 Avoid gratuitous acknowledgment or using acknowledgment terms like filler words. Saying “good” to every rep doesn’t help.

🏆 Use specific acknowledgment when assessing your best movers and athletes to reinforce sound movement patterns.

🗺 Specifically, acknowledge more than movement. Acknowledge how well an athlete paced, how they handled a set, or what you thought of their effort.

👥 Balance individual acknowledgment with “global” acknowledgment. Global acknowledgment addresses a group of athletes as a whole. Continue working on keeping global acknowledgment specific and direct. “I like what I saw on everyone’s squat depth, but I want to practice a few more reps before moving on.

The concept of triage starts with prioritizing the most dangerous or worst expression of a fault. All faults require attention, but some faults take priority above others.

Understanding this hierarchy will make you more effective.

Here are a couple of tools and strategies that can help you utilize triage to its fullest.

🧠 Memorize the common faults and fixes for the nine foundational movements. The less you need to remember, the more you can focus on assessing and correcting the athletes in front of you.

🥇 Understand that not all points of performance are created equal. You should focus on some points of performance before others.

🗂 Stop trying to do too much. If you try to fix anything and everything, you will end up fixing nothing effectively. Instead, start by choosing 1-2 main points of performance to focus on and make those two points better across all the athletes in the room.

🦺 Unless an athlete is unsafe, don’t get stuck trying to make a single thing perfect. Instead, spend 2-3 reps per athlete and then move on. Then continue to revisit this athlete in 2-3 rep intervals throughout the class.

👥 Triage the group, not just the individual. At some point, you need to address and improve all athletes in a class. So start by allocating more attention and interactions to your newer athletes during the specific warm-up and first half of the workout. Then, during the second half of the workout catch up on your more veteran members.

Partner Workouts

We’ve added more partner workouts and partner workout options to our Affiliate programming. Partner workouts can add an exciting twist to regular group classes, but we want to keep a few things in mind.

We need to balance the individual needs of each athlete while understanding that some athletes don’t want to let a partner dictate their daily fitness routine.

📣 Communicate the intent of your programming clearly and constantly keep your athletes updated on upcoming unique workouts.

📏Use partner workouts sparingly and try to give your athletes as much lead time as possible, so they know when the partner workout is coming.

💪Occasionally provide a partner option for an individual workout. Again, AMRAPs work while in these cases because the partner option won’t overrun your class timeline.

📆 Saturday’s and Sunday’s work well for partner workouts due to reduced class schedules and athlete’s work schedules.

🧮 Consider workouts that easily partition into equal reps for partners. For example, sets of 5’s, 10’s, and 15’s allow athletes to maintain intensity without creating too much downtime for the resting partner.

👥 Use the specific warm-up to test out a “prove-it” round to ensure that partners have similar fitness capacities.

⏱ If you have a mismatched pair, have them alternate work in time-bound intervals instead of reps. This way, both athletes work relative to their ability without causing disproportionate rest intervals.

🎟 Don’t ostracize athletes who don’t want to participate in partner workouts. Have a plan for individual workout options

May Challenge Workout “Mando”

We had a lot of fun with the strength focus and Star Wars naming themes from May. Now you have our May challenge workout, “Mando.” If part 1 seems familiar, that is because it is a slight twist

🏋️ Consider using a barbell weight and muscle-up option that allows you to finish each movement in 3 sets or less throughout the entire workout. Similarly, adjust the DB loading if you can’t hold on to it for multiple reps.

⚖️ If you need to scale the muscle-ups, default to a pull-up variation over a muscle-up transition or assisted muscle-up.

💪 If you feel strong and the weights are moving well, use a muscle sn**ch and a muscle clean to speed up the weightlifting movements.

⏱ Let us know if you can finish both workouts under 10:00.

Why and How to Use Levels

We use levels to provide quick scaling options for all levels of athletes. Our levels are a RX, Level 2, and Level 1 options.

👍 The RX and level scaling options should not limit athletes or coaches. Levels should make everything we do easier.

👟 Choose an RX or level scaling option that allows you or your athletes to achieve the desired workout stimulus. Remember that the stimulus is how long the workout lasts, how heavy it should feel relative to an athlete’s ability, how complex it is, and the volume of the workout.

🪤 Don’t get stuck picking the same option; instead, pick and choose pieces from each option to best achieve the workout stimulus given your ability.

🎯 Start using the level scaling options to target weaknesses. You might take two or three movements from a beginner option and then one movement from the intermediate or RX options to challenge yourself with a new movement you are targeting.

Don’t simply ignore simple workouts.

“Amaranth” is meant to guide athletes to focus on positional and isometric strength while giving them the chance to determine their overall intensity.

✅ Well-rounded fitness requires that we add variance to our intensity as well as other workout elements. As valuable and potent as intensity, we can’t chase maximum intensity every day and expect maximum fitness results.

🎯 Stress movement quality and position during the carries. Athletes take the most away from “Amaranth” by performing larger sets on the carries and strictly holding the positional guidelines.

🗺 “Amaranth” also allows athletes to modulate their intensity based on how they feel. Educate your athletes on increasing or decreasing the intensity of this workout. Keep the carries smooth and consistent, but increase the rowing pace if desired.

🎓 Educating athletes on how to successfully navigate workouts like “Amaranth” helps them get the most out of the other workouts programmed during the week.

Touch Everyone Twice

..at least twice. Interact, check-in, cue, acknowledge, cheer on, and coach each athlete in your class at least twice. Also, understand that this is a low benchmark, but it is a decent starting point.

📓 What works well about two check-ins is that it allows you to watch a few reps, give a single cue or acknowledgment, and then watch a second rep to assess if it got better, stayed the same, or got worse.

👍 On athletes who are moving well, two check-ins allow you to look for consistency or provide them coaching tips that reach beyond movement quality. You could share an efficiency tip, a pacing tip, or even some pointed motivation.

🎯 Aiming to check in with each athlete twice in a class helps you map out the class and create a triage plan on a larger scale. Instead of darting around the class randomly like an excited puppy, follow a consistent path around the round. This ensures you don’t gravitate to your favorite athletes or find yourself stuck only on the new athletes.

🔎 Lastly, checking in two times lets everyone know you are tuned in. Seeing and correcting aside, this is a simple way to start building a template for group management. This check-in process also creates a tangible framework that builds presence & attitude.

Set up to Setup

How often do you see someone in a terrible setup position and think, “Well, I am sure as soon as they start moving, everything will get better”? Hopefully, you never think this way; we sure don’t. Start with building better setups.

Coaches, if you struggle with seeing, cueing, and correcting athletes, start with setup positions.

🍇 Low Hanging Fruit: Setup positions are static positions, which means we can assess them when the athlete isn’t moving. Once you know what to look for, fixed positions are much easier to evaluate in group classes.

🎰 Common Themes: Set yourself up to set up athletes in the proper setup positions. Commit the setup points of performance to memory. A small amount of studying builds your confidence and seeing efficiency. Functional movements exhibit common setup principles.

🚑 Triage Setups: Holding athletes in a single setup position for :30 while you rush through the room is inefficient and painstaking. Spread your setup assessment across multiple full movement reps. Check 1-3 athletes, and then have them perform a repetition. This keeps athletes moving, and it provides you with plenty of reps to review everyone’s setup.

🏆 Small Wins: Effective setup positions improve safety and effectiveness for all movements. They are also easier to continually improve compared to dynamic points of performance. Focus on setup positions to build your coaching confidence and athlete comfidence. Enthusiastically acknowledge when an athlete achieves a correct setup position.


📸 .photography