Who are you?

Yesterday I told you a little bit about myself. Who I am where I'm from and why I do what I do. But what about you. You who are searching for the elusive goal of fitness, or being fit. It's something that I'm sure most of you have tried to achieve before and failed and so perhaps are a little skeptical of any claim I might make guaranteeing you that you will be the most fit you have been ever. Yes really ever ( with a few exceptions). I don't care if you used to used to run marathons, squat 700 lbs or pull trains with a rope in your teeth. How can I make such bold claims? It's simple really all those things I just mentioned are only part of what fitness is. So now you ask what is fitness? Ah now there is a good question. It also just happens to be my first point with regard to the post title. You are most likely someone who has been searching for fitness with out knowing what exactly that is? Go ahead define fitness for me. Think about what it means to you. Is it the physique of a body builder, or perhaps a model for a magazine? The endurance of an Ultra Marathon runner. Perhaps the strength of a strong man competitor. Who out of all those people is most fit? Today we seem to think that endurance athletes are the most fit human being on the entire planet. The fact is however that the top endurance athletes may not be able to complete one push-up or mange to jump up on to a 10 inch box. So are they really most fit people in the world ? Of course on the other end of the spectrum is he weight lifter who can bench press a house but cant run more than a mile at a time, if that, and then not very fast. So I ask you again what is fitness and who is fittest. I mentioned earlier that there are a few exceptions to who my claim of increasing fitness no matter what applies too. There are two types of people then that may already have the elite level of fitness this program delivers decathletes, and those whose every day lives require the variety of skills to remain fully fit, such as some law enforcement and military personel, those whose lives depend on a broad and inclusive fitness.
So now you understand that you may not have ever had a clear Idea of what fitness is and whatever idea you did have is been relegated ,at best, to only a small part of the total definition of fitness. So here is my definition of fitness ( which I am taking strait from crossfit) "Work Capacity Across Broad Time and Modal Domains". Great now what does that mean well the short answer is that, I am trying to get you to be able to perform as many different tasks in as many different ways or as many different time frames as possible. We will unpack this more as we go and explain it in much more detail as well. Another way you can think about it is an analogy I am also taking from crossfit which is the "Hopper method of fitness". Imagine a hopper (a big black box we can mix stuff around in) inside the hopper is every conceivable task you would be asked to do in every day life, as well as some you could never see coming, as well as exercises that mimic those tasks, these could be things like dead lift your body weight 15 times or run a 5k. And we mix all these things up in the hopper and we start to draw them out one at a time, each one that I pull out you and a group of other people have to complete in a set amount of time, or as fast as possible. Crossfit and I would argue that the person who performed statistically best across all those events would be the fittest person there. That means that a marathon athlete and a power lifter, a football linebacker would all have a hard time beating the decathlete or advanced crossfiter in this competition because those people have a specialized fitness while the decathlete and crossfiter have a broad and inclusive fitness which better prepares them for the demands of our theoretical hopper and, I might add, life in general.

My, and crossfit's, Definition of fitness as only been briefly addressed here, and we have much deeper to dig, untill we reach ideas like general physical preparedness, the ten fitness domains, and other ideas that define what real fitness is. In the mean time here is the WOD of the day.

WOD :
as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes ( shoot for five)
400M run
30 Squat jumps
15 push ups
15 sit ups

remember to scale back the work outs if you are just starting out, its better to be safe and scale everything back than to injure yourself. So here is are a couple examples of  scaled versions of this work out.

400 M Run
20 squat jumps
10 push ups
5 sit ups

200M Run
15 Squats
10 push ups
5 sit ups

Remember it doesent have to be fun, to be fun :)