This past weekend I took what is called the Crossfit Level 1 course. The course gives you the basic knowledge to teach crossfit and is the first of several courses you take to become a Crossfit coach. The course was in Orlando Florida at Crossfit Performance and consisted of two days of lectures, small group sessions, workouts and finally an exam.
Everyone who I know who has taken the course assured me that most of the class would be new people to Crossfit. However as everyone walked in I noticed they didn’t look like beginners at Crossfit… and when they did the introductions most of the class had been doing Crossfit for 3 years. I was immediately a bit intimidated and really worried I was getting in over my head. However, when I told Tarasa she assured me I knew the movements and would be fine (which I was).
The first breakout into our small groups- I was surrounded by 9 guys, so I really wanted to move perfect to not have any attention called to me. I felt fairly confident as we were working on squats and I am pretty good at them. I survived without getting corrected!
Day one moved on and after lunch was our first workout- I was mentally prepared to do Fran… to everyone’s surprise it wasn’t Fran, but worse. It was 3 rounds of Thrusters with 65 lb. (95 lb. for guys) and burpees. I think I would have really preferred the pull ups, but as one of the leaders said “You can hide with the pull ups. There is no hiding in this workout!” I did scale the workout to 55 lb. as 65lb. is just a bit much for me. The next goal was just not to be last… and I wasn’t. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being tired and having 50 people standing around telling me to do another burpee! I was no where near competitive as the other girls were finishing in 3 minutes without scaling and I was 7:09.
After the workout they pulled out a cooler for everyone to have a beer and celebrate finishing day one. We headed out for some dinner and a trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods- where I got some cool new shoes!
Day two started at 9 am and we did our daily workout in the morning after our breakout session on deadlifts, sumo high pull deadlifts and medicine ball cleans. Now other than deadlifts- I really don’t ever do the other exercises, so I thought it could be an interesting morning. To my surprise I actually did fairly well with them (and didn’t get called into the centre of the group).
For day two’s workout is was an 8 minute AMARP of 10 push ups, 12 medicine ball cleans and 15 sit ups. It wasn’t too bad, but the goal was to really coach your partner and I happened to get one that just would not shut up and kept telling me repeatedly to open my hips on the cleans… It was a long 8 minutes.
More lectures and breakout sessions and we finished with our exam around 4. It was 50 questions and we will get our results in the next 5-7 business days… so we will see if I passed!
Overall it was a great experience for me as it took me way outside my comfort zone and pushed me to do something I didn’t think I could. People ask if I am want to coach now… I have to say the course doesn’t really qualify you to coach in my opinion. It is a good course and does teach you the main movements, nutrition and the basic Crossfit theory- but you would still need to shadow an experience trainer for quite sometime before you should be coaching (or at least in my opinion).
Next course— Crossfit Defense later this year!
The Johnsons 