Mirror mirror on the wall
You may care about your appearance, but we don’t. We care about performance. We care about your quality of life. That’s why we don’t spend time lifting in front of mirrors or posing to see our muscles bulge.
Aesthetics are not an indicator of fitness.
We concern ourselves with increasing our work capacity, not our biceps. Let’s celebrate your ability to do whatever you want instead of how many abs you can see.
This is why we provide a workout tracking app for our members called BTWB. It allows them to record all their workouts and see the improvement in their performance and work capacity.
Let's use the workout "Grace" as an example. Grace is written as complete 30 Clean & Jerks at 135 lb for men and 95 lb for women, as fast as possible. If I perform the workout with the same weight and do it more quickly, I've demonstrated an increase in fitness. My capacity for completing the work improved.
This is what we get excited about, but we don't always do the workout as written. We all scale the workouts to an appropriate level. This ability to compare work capacity becomes more interesting when comparing "scaled" and "as-written" results for a workout.
Below are two of my previously recorded "Grace" efforts from BTWB.
Completed the workout as written (or Rx)
30 Clean and Jerks at 135 lb
4:45 = 124.7 foot-pounds/second
Completed the workout scaled
30 Clean and Jerks at 95 lb
3:35 = 128.2 foot-pounds/second
The result for Rx workout shows an increased ability to do more work. I couldn't have completed the workout with that weight and speed when I completed the scaled version. 135 lb would have been too heavy for me. This shows increased work capacity and therefore increased fitness.
But interestingly, my power output for the scaled workout is higher than my output for the Rx workout. Scaling a workout doesn't mean you're doing less work. You could potentially be working harder than those doing the workout, as written. What matters most is that we're seeing improvement in your work capacity.
We chase work capacity because we know that’s what increases fitness. We also know that if your goal is increased work capacity, the rest of your aesthetic goals will come in time.
