Judge, Coach, Compete: CrossFit Michiana

March 26, 2013

Brittney Saline

“You work harder when you have someone counting your reps. It’s different mentally, physically and emotionally.”


 

Four weeks before the Open, the trainers at CrossFit Michiana started to prepare their members for competition.

Anyone who was going to sign up met twice weekly for mini-competitions. The trainers ran them through past Open and Regional workouts with judges.

“I wanted our athletes to feel what it’s like to compete,” Carole Stevens, the owner of CrossFit Michiana, says. “It’s different when you have a judge judging your reps. You have to do it correctly and sometimes, in a (regular) workout, that doesn’t always happen.”

It gave their members a chance to practice doing a workout under pressure before the Leaderboard went live.

“You work harder when you have someone counting your reps,” 43-year-old Stevens says. “It’s different mentally, physically and emotionally.”

But Stevens didn’t just pit green competitors against one another and run out the clock. In the “I Am CrossFit Open Challenge,” as she dubbed it, athletes played competitor, coach and judge. They’re encouraged to recognize bad reps and make corrective cues, giving them a panoramic view of CrossFit competition.

“I’m reinforcing form,” she says. “They’re learning form by doing it, teaching it and seeing it.”

Every Tuesday night, athletes would pick a score sheet up from the heat desk and figure out if they coached, judged or performed first. Even if your CrossFit experience was shaky, you were in, and Stevens’ watchful eye surveyed the floor as everyday CrossFitters became judge and trainer all at once.

She showed them what each role looked like in action, teaching them what a no-rep box jump or burpee looked like. After the workout was over, athletes traded places and Stevens reset the clock.

Denise Ott is a 47-year-old CrossFitter of eight months with no prior athletic background. For her, practicing being a judge prepared her for 13.1 in ways she couldn’t have predicted.

As they scrutinized each other’s snatch form just one week prior to the revealing of the burpee-snatch couplet, Ott began to see the other side of the CrossFit equation. Now, she wasn’t just doing what was on the board, she was calling out numbers and no-reps.

“Being a judge was a good training point for me,” she says. “Watching someone else and no-repping them … it was like, ‘Oh yeah, your arms have to be locked out.’”

For Stevens, the best part of the challenge is the impact it’s having on everyday training, as athletes hold each other more accountable to movement standards. She says that’s what the Open is about anyway: takeaways you can use long after the season ends.

“We’ll be in a workout and we’ll hear someone say, ‘No rep!’ across the room,” she says. “I’ve seen a lot of changes.”

Changes that Stevens, and CrossFit Michiana’s 28 registered competitors, can build on for much more than five workouts.