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Coach Kate sent our coaches’ group a really good article on movement standards in CrossFit and why they are so important.  You thought you were done with that after the Open, huh??  But read on, and you’ll see that full-range-of-motion movements are not just an invention of CrossFit competition, but important to maintain full functionality in your life, especially as we get older.  Being able to move your joints through full extension and full flexion allows you to have full confidence that you can move however and whenever you want to without risk of injury – especially if it’s a movement you didn’t plan for like a fall or a jump off of a tall object.  If you don’t have a below parallel squat in the gym, how is that landing going to work for you?

I also thought about the topic of full-range movement in terms of having personal standards of excellence and always striving to uphold them.  Excellence in fitness is not defined by having the fastest time in a workout if it comes at the expense of your personal standard of movement.  Strive for excellence in each repetition so that you are not left wondering after the fact whether you could have done more.  Don’t cut corners just to go faster – slow yourself down so that you can move with virtuosity, keeping your body safe and your standards high.  Be the example for others to emulate in your quality of movement.

Make this striving for excellence a habit in all parts of your life.  Strive to be a loyal friend that can be depended on when others in your life need you.  Strive to be a great dad that models excellent personal standards for your kids.  Know what your most effective habits are – like reading, journaling, and exploring the great outdoors – and strive to be consistent on a daily basis.  Every day is a new chance to wake up, review your personal ethos and decide that you will meet that standard, and if you note in your evening wrap-up that you fell away from your path, then internalize that lesson and strive to not make the same mistake twice.

If you’re reading this and think that I’m writing directly to you, as I hear from some of you sometimes, maybe I am!  But maybe I’m also writing this to myself as a reminder to stay vigilant on my own personal standards and make every day a great adventure in moving toward mastery.

“Be excellent to each other.”
 – Bill and Ted

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve introduced the RPE scale when prescribing weights for our strength sessions. RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion). It’s a flexible way of assigning weight to a workout without a strict percentage of your 1RM.

RPE is a way to measure training intensity by how you feel.

Developed by Swedish researcher Gunnar Borg in the 1960s, the RPE scale measures how hard you feel your body is working during physical activity. It’s a “subjective” measure, meaning it is personal to you on that specific day, taking into account muscle fatigue and overall strain.

The Simplified 1-10 RPE Scale:

• 1: Very light effort (e.g., walking, easy warmup)
• 2-3: Light effort (can hold a full conversation)
• 4-6: Moderate effort (breathing harder, can still talk)
• 7-8: Vigorous effort (borderline uncomfortable, brief sentences)
• 9: Very hard effort (heavy breathing, very hard to talk)
• 10: Maximal effort (impossible to maintain, “all-out” effort)

RPE allows you to practice autoregulation, which is the fancy term for modifying your workout intensity based on your current physical and mental state. You aren’t a robot. Factors like poor sleep, high stress, improper nutrition, or even different temperatures in the gym can make a standard workout feel much harder. RPE allows you to scale back on bad days to avoid overtraining and push harder on good days. By relying on RPE, you learn to read your body’s signals rather than just relying on an assigned weight.

You could use RPE as a guide for running, swimming, biking, anything you’re into that allows for a modulation in pace or intensity. In weightlifting, it is often paired with RIR (Reps in Reserve), which measures how many more repetitions you could have done before failing.

If our workout calls for 3 sets of 5 repetitions at an RPE of 8, choose a weight that feels heavy, but you could have done 2 more reps if you had to (RIR 2).

The RPE scale is a great tool to personalize your strength session. It empowers you to train smarter, avoid injury, and measure progress based on how you feel.

Train hard, train safe!

Ryan

Well, we’re two workouts into the Open, how is everyone feeling?  I know that just like every year in the past, I have felt a little more beat up after these workouts than in our standard CrossFit classes – probably due to the increased intensity of trying to compete and squeeze out every rep possible, and the high volume of high-skill reps in general.

Recovery is thus a little higher on my priority list during the Open and I thought I would share a few thoughts – and discounts available to us as CFKI members!

First of all, the standard recovery protocols apply.  Hydration, refueling, and rest!  Drink lots of water, and use electrolytes to help your body absorb the water and not just pee it out.  Electrolytes can help with cramping during long sessions as well.  As a general rule, try to drink half of your bodyweight in ounces of water every day.  If you only drink water when you notice that you’re really parched, then you are dehydrated.  Eat or drink a snack with protein and carbs within an hour after your workout to refuel and rebuild your damaged muscles.  Dehydration and undereating will lead to declining performance, lower motivation to workout next time, and potentially an injury.

Get 8 hours of sleep!  I know that is sometimes not practical based on your busy schedules, but give it your best shot.  Growth hormones release when you’re in REM sleep, which is the third cycle – gotta get there by giving your body and brain as much time in that bed as possible.  Avoid sugar and alcohol before bedtime because they will inhibit your sleep patterns and prevent that important growth and recovery from taking place.

Closely related to refueling is supplementing your nutrition with any important building blocks that you are not eating, or eating enough of.  For me that includes creatine for muscular recovery, collagen for bone and joint support, and fish oil (Omega-3 fatty acids) for heart and brain health.

We have a sweet deal with Thorne supplements to get 20% off of your online purchases, you just have to use our affiliate code:  https://www.thorne.com/u/PR709542

If I haven’t sent you an invitation email with that discount I will also do that right after I send this one!

Finally, taking some extra steps outside of our post-WOD durability sessions can be a gamechanger.  If you have any nagging injuries or pain that you need to accelerate out of, consider physical therapy sessions that can include range-of-motion work on stiff joints, targeted massage work, dry needling, and cupping, along with any other good stuff that a solid PT doctor can come up with!

My family and I have made PT a part of our recovery plan, as have many of our members and coaches.  If you don’t have a good relationship with a PT clinic yet, consider these two that have been great partners of CFKI over the years:

Shore Elite PT (https://www.shoreelitept.com/) – located in Stevensville in the same building as The Edge, these ladies are awesome and offer a 10% discount to CFKI members!

Dr. Christy Asonglefac at Cultivate Movement (christy@cultivatemovementandwellness.com) – located in Annapolis at 12 Labours Fitness, she is a CrossFitter and weightlifter so she knows our language and your needs!

With that, it’s time for my daily stretching routine so I’ll sign off.  Recover well, and I’ll see you for 26.3!

Ryan

I was cooking dinner last night (no-bean chili, check it out) and Denee snuck up behind me and asserted, “I’ve figured out my 7 non-negotiables.”  As usual, I didn’t really know what we were talking about so I led with a vague “that’s awesome!”  and then followed up with “what?”  She explained that a non-negotiable is a commitment that you make when planning out your day, month, or year, and you’re not going to waiver from it.  It’s the first thing you put on the schedule, and the last thing that would ever get moved.

One of Denee’s non-negotiables when looking at the entire 2026 calendar, for example, is for us not to be away from home for more than two weekends in a row.  2025 felt so busy, and there were a few months where it felt like we had a trip to visit friends or family every weekend.  So this travel-limiting non-negotiable is now in place to protect our weekends, our wallets, and our sanity!

Another example that I really latched onto is that her and I will go on a date every month.  She’ll schedule it (she’s good at that, I’m not) and I’ll plan out what we’re going to do (we’re both equally good at this part but I have to do something, right?)

I really like this idea, and I’m now in the process of using the non-negotiable model to plan out my year.  I started by revisiting what my non-negotiable daily priorities are – things that I know are important to me because it’s easy to not do them but when I do let them go I feel out of balance.  So these are my “me time” daily grounding activities which then help me be more productive with all the other roles and tasks I need to take on.

1. My morning practice – first thing in the morning (after making coffee) – gratitude, box breathing, review of my passions/principles/purpose, visualization of today’s plan
2. Physical training – 5 days a week it will usually be in the gym, but on Wednesdays, Sundays, and travel days it most likely is outside
3. ROMWOD – alright now the app is called Pliability – a 20 minute stretching routine, call it yoga for CrossFitters.  My new commitment here is that this needs to happen directly after my workout or else it usually doesn’t happen, and then my tight hips become a tight back and then I can’t sleep.  Non-negotiable!
4. Mental training – currently doing a deeper dive into some concepts through Unbeatable Mind, an integrated training method that I’ve been a student and coach of for years
5. Evening practice – reading/breathing to calm down my mind, then a daily review of what went right, what went wrong, lessons learned, then a review of tomorrow’s schedule

January 2026 is almost over, but it’s not yet.  We have a few more days – and maybe some snow-related downtime? – to contemplate the question, what are my non-negotiables?  What can I commit to this year on a daily basis, and then looking more into the near future, on a weekly or monthly basis that will add significant value to my life?  What is one non-negotiable goal that I will achieve this year?

Let me know what you come up with!  I might want to steal it for myself too…

Ryan

We’ve now gotten through almost 8 weeks of my CrossFit program, which many in the world of strength training would consider one “cycle”. This generally looks like one iteration of testing a max effort, training for 6 weeks and then testing again. And this strength cycle model is awesome, and scientifically proven to achieve results in weightlifting, which we are striving for in our CrossFit program… but not exclusively. We want to get stronger, yes, but we also want to get faster, and leaner, and more durable. And so my program in the first 8 weeks has not been characterized by a predictable strength progression, but more following CrossFit’s model of variability in movements and workouts. I’ve heard your feedback, many of you like what we’re doing. Some of you want to know where we’re going, what we’re training for and how we’re going to get there.

Our next 8 weeks will marry the concepts of CrossFit’s unpredictable – if not randomized training – with a focused effort on a few specific lifts that will build strength and mobility, as well as some gymnastics movements that will prepare us well for the CrossFit Open that is coming up soon!

Look out for these strength-building movements to appear in your workouts over the next few weeks – Front Squats, Push Presses, Deadlifts.

Focus your skill training on these movements that will appear in the CrossFit Open and will feature prominently in our workouts until then – Pull-ups, Toes-to-Bar, Handstand Push-ups.

I can’t promise you that these strength and skill movements will occur in a neat progression, like high reps to start and building toward low reps. But we are starting this week with some one-rep tests, and will continue to train these key lifts and skills on a weekly basis.

If you want to know what we’re doing, where we’re going with this program, please know that we’re building strength and capacity in an organized way, maybe just not in the traditional sense that we’ve seen before. If you are consistent with your training, I think you’ll like where we end up.

Ryan

At CrossFit Kent Island, our four core values are Hard Work, Growth, Service, and Fun.  You guys are obviously Working Hard every day in the gym and on your nutrition and recovery, and that leads to Growth – we had 567 new personal records set in Wodify this year!  Next weekend we’ll have our Holiday Party – FUN core value engaged!  But it’s been a while since we’ve flexed our Service muscles, and I start to feel it when we haven’t reinforced that pillar of our community in a bit.

Soooo… in early January, fresh off of the holidays and when our fitness motivation is at an all time high, we are going to host a Row-a-thon.

Picture this – you and 2-3 of your closest friends are assigned a Concept2 rower for 6 hours.  How far can you row?  How much money can you raise for the charity of your team’s choice?  Your friends and family can pledge a dollar amount per meter rowed, or a flat donation to support your cause.

We’re thinking January 10th or 11th (Sat/Sun), which is coming up soon so we wanted to get the word out so that you can start organizing your team, getting shirts made (E Wolfe is on CustomInk.com already), and thinking about what charity – local or national – you would like to support.  We’re working on what the best online platform is to collect pledge donations – let me know if you know of the best one out there.

We’ll wait until after the holidays to start pestering our friends and family for donations – they have gifts to buy and parties to attend for now.  But come January 1st, it’s going to be a full-on pledgefest!

When you come to the gym in the next month for a rowing workout, let’s pay special attention to those efficiency cues that your coach is throwing out.  More efficiency = more power = more cash money toward your favorite charity.  This time rowing means something, and I can’t wait to see what we can do at the CFKI Row-a-thon!!

Ryan

Quick one this week, with some homework. I feel like our kids never get homework anymore, so maybe this is something they can do too.

Newsflash: We are a divided country and a divided world right now. On Kent Island and the Eastern Shore it can feel a bit one-sided sometimes, as I’m sure many regions of the country are. But there are others that want to be heard, that need to be recognized so that we have a balanced view on what is going on in our local community, and in the world. Watching your favorite news channel isn’t cutting it anymore, in terms of understanding what is really going on. And watching a news channel that is going to make you cringe is not a fun exercise at all. Your Instagram feed is showing you reels that they know you want to see, and we go on Facebook to find opinions we don’t like and to throw negative comments in, creating a fake fight that in turn creates so much more division.

So here’s a challenge for you today. Find someone to talk to. Find someone with a different take on something that usually gets your blood pumping.
Instead of gearing up to defend your side, just listen. Stay open, stay grounded, and see what happens.
You might be surprised at what you learn, and how much stronger you feel.

Let’s talk to each other, and listen to each other, please. I promise next week I’ll talk about VO2 max or burpees again, but for today I needed to get this off my chest. And I’m open to listen to your feedback.

Ryan

When you’re training in the gym, and maybe even more so when you’re running, you’re going to experience pain.  Pain is a feedback mechanism from our body back to our brain that something is wrong, and we should stop doing it.  But should we?

There are two types of pain that may occur during a tough training session.  One is acute pain from an injury.  We all know what that feels like, it’s out of the ordinary, it feels immediately different.  It feels like your body went from easy listening to heavy metal in a split second, and you have no choice but to listen to it.  The appropriate response here is to stop what you are doing, at least momentarily, assess the situation, and modify your movement pattern to avoid the injured area, or stop altogether.  I’ve been in situations where I thought the thing to do was to keep going – one example is a benchmark CrossFit workout called “Mary” that features pistol squats – and my left knee hasn’t been the same since.  So, maybe don’t do that.  Listen to your body and shift away from the injury, or wrap it up for the day and do what you need to to recover.

The second type of pain that can occur is not an injury but your brain can interpret it the same way.  It is fatigue, soreness, even boredom (going back to the running bit).

“I just don’t want to do this anymore,” and the negativity in my head is getting gradually louder.  I started at easy listening, spent some time at classic rock, and now my brain is overloaded with sad Alanis Morrissette played at full volume.  “I’m miserable, and I need to stop.  I should stop.  I’ve probably done enough.  Maybe I’ve done too much, maybe I’m going to get hurt if I keep going.”

This mental pain and anguish that you’re going through is important, and it’s part of the training.  It’s the lesson, and it’s the test.  If you stop, if you quit, then you are reinforcing that behavior for future training sessions, or even for future situations in your life where you will face challenges that seem too big.  When it gets really hard, you’ll quit again.  When the mental pain starts in, you’ll receive that signal just like you would from an injury, and decide the right thing to do when you are uncomfortable is to stop.  Don’t act.  Lay down.

Or, you could do the opposite.  You could feel the pain, the fatigue, the weakness, and decide to keep going.  Fall back on your training and refocus on your breath.  Breathe and move.  Instead of thinking about the whole workout and how hard it is, narrow your focus now on a micro-goal – I just need to finish this set, this mile.  Imagine yourself as strong and capable, and pour that energy into your training.  When you do finally finish this hard session, you will be elated with the accomplishment, that you didn’t quit and instead you persevered.  And you’ve taught yourself the positive lesson that when things get tough you’re not going to quit.  The next time a tough workout comes up, or you’re running farther than you ever have, or you have to have a hard conversation with your father, you’ll be strong.  You’ll know that of course it’s going to hurt, there’s going to be pain.  But it’s OK, you’re not injured, and this new experience is going to make you even stronger.

Work hard, stay strong.

Ryan

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

 – Shunryu Suzuki

 

Everyone loves a new cookbook.  We love the opportunity to try new recipes that our friends and family will enjoy, and we love creating new things.  Alright, maybe some people don’t love to cook as much as I do so let’s try this on:  Everyone loves to travel.  We get to see new cities, new beaches, experience a different culture.  No?  Some still not on board here?  Maybe not everyone loves to fly or not everyone loves the whole rigamarole of getting the whole family to that new place that is supposed to be so great.

But here’s where we can agree – everyone loves a new CrossFit member.  We love seeing new people come to the gym because we get to relive the experience of trying new things, getting almost instantly better at them and getting almost instant results from this new habit of fitness.  We love encouraging them to keep going on that hard workout that we know next week won’t be as painful.  And we love seeing their huge smiles when they feel successful for the first time in a while.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could adopt that same mentality of a beginner?

Experienced CrossFitters get into a groove of going to the same class 5 times a week, doing the same movements – “I guess I’ll scale to ring rows again because I can’t get a pull-up yet” – and eventually get stuck in a plateau.  It’s frustrating when the trendline on the deadlift graph isn’t skyrocketing up anymore.

So let’s adopt a Beginner’s Mind.  Let’s open our eyes to the possibility that we don’t know everything – and really we hardly know anything – and approach our next training session with a fresh perspective, like a newbie fresh out of On-Ramp.  Maybe there is a different way to scale pull-ups that will advance our skillset a bit more.  Maybe there is a cue to listen for on our deadlift setup that will create more efficiency… and power!

Let’s walk into the gym with open eyes and an expectation to learn something new.  And then let’s go home and try that new recipe you’ve been eyeing up – your family will love it!  Or at least they’ll appreciate the change-up from grilled chicken and broccoli.

Chef Ryan

So, I googled “How to start CrossFit” as a bit of a joke and a jumping off point to talk about how the internet is wrong and “don’t believe everything you read,” but I was really pleasantly surprised!  This is what my AI-powered response cooked up for how to get started on your CrossFit journey, and I don’t know if I would change a thing!

====================

To start CrossFit, join a local CrossFit gym, or “box,” and sign up for a beginner’s or “on-ramp” course to learn fundamental movements and techniques. Show up early for your first class, tell your coach you’re new, and communicate any injuries so they can scale the workout for your fitness level. Start with 2-3 sessions per week and gradually increase frequency as you adapt to the unique exercises.

1. Find a CrossFit Gym 

• Look for a good fit:  Visit different gyms to find one with a welcoming community, qualified coaches, and a focus on safety and proper form.
• Take advantage of trials:  Many gyms offer free or discounted trials, which is a great way to experience the gym’s culture and assess the coaching before committing.

2. Complete a Foundations Course 

• Learn the basics: Most CrossFit gyms offer a beginner’s course or an “on-ramp” program to teach foundational movements like squats, deadlifts, and push-ups.
• Focus on form: This is crucial for building a solid foundation and preventing injuries.

3. Attend Your First Classes

• Arrive early: Most gyms require you to arrive 10-15 minutes early to sign a waiver and get acquainted with the facility.
• Talk to your coach: Introduce yourself as a new member and inform them about any injuries or physical limitations so they can provide appropriate scaling options.
• Scale workouts: The coaches will help adapt workouts to your current fitness level.
• Listen to your body: Don’t push too hard in the beginning to avoid injury and burnout.

4. Build Gradually 

• Start slowly: Begin with 2-3 workouts per week and allow for rest days in between.
• Increase frequency: As your fitness improves, you can gradually increase the number of sessions you attend.

5. What to Bring 

• Comfortable, durable workout clothes and training shoes
• A water bottle and a towel

Boom, there it is!  Thanks ChatGPT or whatever engine produced this magic.  The path is laid out!  Now just get started with Step 1, and book a free trial session with us today!

Ryan