May Newsletter
Summer Break is here and the CrossFit Regionals and Memorial Day Murph are just a few weeks away! May is one of the most exciting months of the year, let’s get to it!
MEMBER FEATURE: TYLER CAREY
When I asked our staff who to write about this month, several coaches requested this man. He’s got a wicked sense of humor and makes every class more exciting to be a part of. Let’s get to know Tyler!
How did you arrive at CrossFit Fringe? What’s your fitness background?
I joined CrossFit Fringe in late 2017 because I was bored of doing the same “traditional, gym bro” workouts. Also, on Fringe’s webpage, I noticed they had so many coaches. I thought it would be good to workout at a place with so many knowledgeable people. Especially since CrossFit has some higher skill movements.
I started working out in a traditional gym when I was 14 years old and lifted ever since then. I played youth sports growing up. I never really played in high school due to sport and lifting injuries. From ages 15-16 I had four shoulder surgeries, two broken legs, and a torn ACL (my only lifting injury). Needless to say, I have spent many hours in physical therapy. Throughout college, I continued to workout but never very intensely. I started functional fitness training in 2016, stopped for about 6 months, and joined CrossFit Fringe later in 2017.
What is your favorite workout?
My favorite workout is DT or Heavy DT. Anything with a barbell or is an “all out” workout are great too! I also enjoy rowing and getting on the assault bike!
What are your favorite and least favorite CrossFit movements?
Any kind of clean: power, full, hang… there is just like hitting a good rep. The lift feels so smooth and effortless.
I really do not dislike a movement. There are a lot that are challenging or I cannot do, but that is all part of the fun! If I had to pick, it would be any run over 400 meters.
What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last 6 months (or in recent memory)?
It would probably have to be pre-workout. I know a lot of people do not like to take it before a CrossFit workout but it helps me get in the zone and in the mood to workout. Without I would skip workouts and not push myself.
What is an unusual habit or absurd thing that you love?
If anything it would be that my favorite movies are Pixar or Dreamworks animated movies. My favorite movie of all time is Cars. Finding Dory, Fox and the Hound, and Cars are all close runner-ups.
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made?
As cliche as it sounds, it would have to be me. Working out more and trying to eat healthier makes me energized, positive, and just better!
In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life (other than CrossFit of course)?
You just have to make things a habit. Just making yourself do something for a couple days will help it snowball. Whether it’s waking up early, earthing health, going to the gym, keeping a positive attitude at work.
Wait, final final question – any single piece of advice you’d give to the novice CrossFitter who is just starting at CrossFit Fringe?
You can’t worry about what other people are doing in the gym just show up, workout, and have fun. This is not the CrossFit Games, it is a community of people who want to workout together and see everyone improve!
Coach Taylor and Lauren are engaged!
Congratulations to Coach Taylor and Lauren on their engagement at the end of April!
Ava Kitzi’s Qualifier Update
We are still so excited and blessed to have watched one of our very own compete in her very first CrossFit Games Online Qualifier! The 2018 Online Qualifier took place on April 19-23, 2018. During that time Ava placed 82nd overall, an amazing feat when you consider the amazing talent and amount of young CrossFitters who entered into the Open and made it to the Qualifier. We’ve watched Ava grow into an amazing athlete and demonstrate dedication, commitment, and a level of maturity far beyond her years. She was writing an update/reflection on her experience, and so I asked if I could also share it with you. Graciously, she agreed!
“The 22 days between the Open and the Online Qualifier were the most intense training days of my life. Every day, I put in 1.5-2.5 hours of work in the gym. Most of the time, it was alone in my garage gym. Although it may seem lonely, I was having so much fun training for something so big. I also cleaned up my nutrition, transitioning into having vegetables and protein for almost every meal, drinking more water and no carbonation, and sleeping more.
When it came time for the qualifier, I was comfortable with the fact that I had done everything I could do, and that I was prepared as I possibly could have been. I knew that everything I have done from spring break to now made be a better athlete and that whatever happens in the qualifier is the best I could do. Now, come Thursday night, the workout announcements rattled me, because everything was so heavy. Nevertheless, I completed the 4 workouts and 1 redo in 4 days and learned a lot about myself in the process.
Over the next few days, I watched myself fall down the leaderboard, and ended up 82nd in the world, just one spot behind my Open finish of 81st. I am definitely not satisfied with where I placed among the rest of the girls, but I am also very happy with the progress I made and the movements and weights I was able to complete. Five months ago, I couldn’t snatch that weight once. Now my max snatch is 20 pounds heavier. I could never have done as many handstand pushups or chest to bars just weeks before. I now know what I need to work on for next year, and how much work it will take to continue moving up the leaderboard. I definitely have goals for next year, and a plan to carry them out, and I am excited to get back to training and improving what needs to be improved.
The Crossfit community, both Fringies and worldwide, have become so important to me lately. All the strong girls I’ve been able to meet through social media have forever changed my worldview, and I am so incredibly happy to be able to talk to them. And of course, the Crossfit Fringe crew and members who have been with me from the very start, who have made working out the best part of my day and have inspired me in so many ways. Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout this journey!”
Be sure to follow Ava’s continued training on her Instagram account!
Brooke Wells heads to her 4th
straight Regional appearance
Finishing SIXTH IN THE WORLD in the Open, her highest finishing standing to date, Brooke rolled through the Open like a breeze. Central Regional tickets are on sale NOW, so get yours and show your support for Brooke in her final year with us at Fringe!
As we have every year, we’re also going to have shirts to support and commemorate the trip! Presale of these shirts goes live on May 7th and runs just one week! Grab yours here:
https://fringe.pushpress.com/open/preorder/preorder_276a51af52aace
InBody Scans are LIVE!
We previewed back in March that we were adding an InBody 270to our facility to give you, our athletes, a complete picture of where you are in your health and wellness journey. The InBody 270 is a piece of state-of-the-art scientific equipment that is able to offer validated, reliable measurements in regards to an individual’s lean muscle mass as well as body fat amounts. Thankfully, we have a had a handful of help getting accustomed to using the InBody from our pilot group and we are now ready to further expand the use of the machine to our whole gym population.
You can now schedule an appointment with us to not only get your scan, but to have an in-depth conversation as to what the metrics mean. Results with no explanation don’t really offer any insight as to what’s going on within your body, which is why we really wanted to take the time to understand how best to serve you all with the added offering of scans. We recommend a scan no more often than every 4-6 weeks; anymore regularly than that would hold little value.
Tell Your Friends — We Just Rolled Out Our New Elements Program!
We’ve heard your feedback and are excited to roll out the next iteration of our Elements Program! Our new Group Elements format is a 2-week, 6 session course you take at the start of your first month’s membership (meaning you are buying a full month of Unlimited CrossFit when you buy Elements). Each session is 1 hour of work designed like a normal CrossFit class that includes warm-up, skills, workout and discussion. Classes meet Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in either the morning or evening depending on the program schedule.
Our goal is to run two small group (2-4 participants) Elements each month, giving us more time with individual athletes both during Elements and transitioning into classes, and offers our athletes a more concise and attentive plan of action that has them in regular classes sooner. It also means less wait time when they decide to join CrossFit Fringe!
We also have a new way to check out Fringe with our No-Sweat Intro. Your friends and family can self-reserve a spot with a coach for a time that best fits their schedule and discuss their goals and experience with a coach who can help tailor their experience with Fringe even further. Below is a little infographic I put together that describes it.
Check out our current schedule of Group Elements Session dates and tell your friends!
Have you told your friends and family about Vitality yet?
Have you told your friends and family about Vitality yet?Our Vitality athletes cruised through their first CrossFit Open and are now training for Memorial Day Murph in a few weeks! As always, if you know someone who would be a great fit for the class, we’re always looking for more friends to join us at 10:15 am Monday through Thursday!
Remember this a program focused on our aging athletes, so the pace and skills learned are more applicable to the needs of our parents!
It’s never too late to start your fitness journey — and the benefits now are just as important as they were when you were younger. Check out this article from CrossFit HQ about some of the great things we’re seeing our older generations accomplish!
Interested in Fringe Vitality? Email Coach Sam at [email protected]!
Does your healthcare provider reimburse for gym memberships?
Is your healthcare provider on the list on the website below? You could be earning a portion of your membership back each month just by attending 12 or more classes per month at Fringe. There are many care providers on the list already and if you don’t see yours, don’t hesitate to reach out to your Human Resources person to petition for its addition. You only have to do a little work to get started, and then just keep attending classes as you always do!
Healthy Contributions: https://healthycontributions.com/Info/employee
Facility Updates
All of our prize orders from the RX Pistols winning of the 2018 Fringe Intramural Open have arrived! We will now be programming in new workouts featuring sandbags for a whole new stimulus. The weights of these 3 bags range from 40#-80# and our Rx standards will be 80# for the guys and 60# for the ladies. Just because those sound lighter than a barbell, don’t be fooled, it’s going to be tough!
On top of that, we also got in new ab mats. We have 10 brand new mats for each location and as a special bonus, most of them come complete with an added rash guard, so there’s a bit of extra padding on these mats to prevent the dreaded friction burn/ “butt rash” that some get while doing high rep, fast ab mat sit-ups.
Upcoming Events and Competitions
- May 25-27: CrossFit Games Central Regionals (Nashville, TN)
- May 28: Memorial Day “Murph”
- June 16: The Gator Games 3
- July 21: AR-X (CrossFit Little Rock)
- August 1-5: The 2018 CrossFit Games (Madison, WI)
- September 28-30: Heart of America Team Competition
From the Question/Comment Box?
Q: What is the difference between grams of food and grams of macros?
A: First, before tackling this question – you need a little background on where calories come from and what macronutrients are. Luckily for YOU, we already covered that all the way back in July of last year!
To give us a quick and dirty rundown again though, we have 3 major macronutrients, and they are Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrates. Each macronutrient has a different amount of calories per weighed gram. One gram of protein and one gram of carbohydrate are the same, and they each contain four calories. One gram of fat, however, contains nine calories.
One of the most readily available and least expensive sources of protein we all know and love is chicken. So let’s use that as our example of how gram weight and grams of a macronutrient, in this case, protein specifically, are different. For simplicity, I’m going to use myself as an example to help us all understand the differences.
From MyFitnessPal, you can all see that my daily goal is to take in approximately 214 grams of PROTEIN; that’s a big chunk of muscle building goodness in a day!
To get to 214 grams of PROTEIN, I need to eat a lot of rich sources, like chicken. But like we’ve already mentioned weighed grams of food DO NOT equal grams of protein. To further illustrate that, here’s a picture of what 200 grams of cooked chicken looks like on the scale:
If we go back to our MyFitnessPal tracker and we type in 200 grams of chicken breast tenderloin, this is what we get:
MyFitnessPal is telling us that a weighed 200 grams of chicken breast tenderloins contain 194 calories, almost all of which is protein. It also illustrates that 200 grams of this food only equates to about 44 grams of protein against our daily total. In this scenario, if I were only eating chicken all day, and it was my only source of protein, I would have to eat almost five times the amount seen in the picture above! That’s a ton of food, isn’t it?!
The moral of the story, and to really drive the point home, is that the macros in your food choices do not equal their scale weight! It is an easy mistake to make for beginners, but always remember there are huge differences in the weight of foods versus their macronutrient numbers.
If you need a chat about your diet or situation or need affirmations you’re on the right track, you can always schedule a no-cost consult. We’ll talk about you and your goals. You get a free 15-min nutrition counseling appointment as part of your Fringe membership.Have an amazing month of love, lifts, and GAINS! As always, if you need anything, you can reach out to us on social media, or email [email protected].