Special mentions goes to Chris 'The Oak' Grant and Jamie Martin for stepping in and covering the mornings for me. To my Brother Dave for, as always helping out when I need him and to Darren for being as dependable as ever.
I tried my hardest to leave the gym alone and trust these guys to deal with the day to day running of the gym and I think accomplished that goal. This week off has given me the chance to spend some quality family time with Kala, Ellie and Theo who I have neglected a fair bit in pursuing my dream of running my own business/gym. I had a cracking time with them and started to reflect on what I have achieved, what I want to achieve and at what cost am I prepared to go to to get there.
12 weeks ago I took the decision to run two programmes. One to be purely CrossFit and one to be a bit more strength and conditioning based to work towards competitions. The aim being to encourage my members who want to keep fit and follow the CrossFit ethos of constantly varied, functional movements, performed at high intensity the tools to keep motivated and keep training. And also to provide a program that will push those who wish to compete. I didn't think it was possible to do cater for both in one program. My heart was in the right place with the aim of making everyone happy. As I have learnt over the past 3.5 years this is very difficult.
I have received a lot of feedback over the past few months that I would like to address. Firstly it has been said that there is a feeling of separatism. That the atmosphere in the gym is not what it used to be. People feeling that they are not included.
What I propose is to run one program. Something that everyone can follow. The gym program will cover a strength/Skill phase to begin each weekday. The gold program will be able to follow their structured personalised program during this phase. The Wods will be geared towards Divided We Fall in October and will be challenging, but easily scaleable as per the CrossFit way.
The weightlifting club on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday will be included in the gold program as per usual. Ideally we would lift then WOD but that is personal preference and time dependant.
We have always enjoyed competitions. Many of us have achieved personal bests as a result of the pressure of competition. We will be entering the Divided We Fall games for the 4th year in October and I would like to encourage as many of you to take part as possible. Last year we saw people achieve their first pull up, string together 20 double unders and PB their shoulder press all in competition. It is a great weekend and a perfect chance for us to get out on the Swansea night life :). We will be holding a trial over 6 weeks to decide our teams. We will start on the 14th September and have a BBQ afterwards.
We/I have been guilty of letting our social events pretty much disappear off the calendar. I would like to ask for some volunteers to start a committee to take over the role of Gym Event Planner. I would like an event every month where we can get together as a community and have some fun.
With all that I have said above I am really keen for you (the members of AFS) to have your say. If there are suggestions out there as to how to improve the gym, the program, operations or you just want to do a Birthday Wod please drop me an email or collar me in the gym. I am always open to constructive ideas/criticism no matter how close to the home it is. I want to make AFS as good as it possibly can be.
Get After It TAFS
Gareth
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