Programming at Boulder CrossFit

Most CrossFit gyms follow the same training methodology of constantly varied, functional movements performed at high intensity. For the most part, Boulder CrossFit is no different. Whether you’ve been doing CrossFit for 10 years or 10 days, almost everyone has the same questions on how our gym programs on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.

On a macro level, our gym’s goal is to build fit, happy, and healthy members who can move well and pain-free for the rest of their lives inside and out of the gym. With that in mind, our gym’s programming generally reflects that.

Each quarter of the year we re-test 5 classic CrossFit benchmark workouts also known as “girl WODS”. We do this to test your general work capacity. If you don’t test/re-test your fitness, it’s very hard to track any progress you make.

On a weekly basis, we like to follow the same format and in terms of the specifics of our programming, we follow Comptrain for the most part. We change/modify tons of it to fit around our membership base but generally, the inspiration comes from these professionals. Weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we have a strength portion of the class. Mainly the functional lifts like the back squat, press, and deadlift but we also throw in Olympic lifts like the snatches and cleans. We, of course, follow each lift with a fun metabolic conditioning workout aka WOD (workout of the day). These normally last 15 minutes or less but can vary in their times from 5 mins-20 mins. Tuesdays we normally do higher volume WODS that last at least 15-30 mins in length. On Thursdays, we do “active recovery” days which basically means you come in and work on a skill (double unders, muscle ups, handstand walks, toes to bar, etc) and then we sweat for about 10-20 mins. These days are meant for you to move but NOT at high intensity or against the clock. And we end each week on Saturdays with a fun partner community workout. We let each coach make up their own WOD on Saturdays so it really varies on what we do but they will always be partner-oriented.

Most CrossFit gyms do NOT follow our format and most do NOT share their programming until the night before each class. Boulder CrossFit has just recently decided (in 2023) to share ALL workouts for the following week on Sunday nights at 8pm. Here’s our rationale behind it.

In an ideal world, we would love to have ALL of our members attend our classes 4-6 days a week. But we understand tons of our membership base do others forms of fitness outside of CrossFit. And that’s awesome! People have yoga, rock climbing, and cycling gym memberships and you want to know what to expect/plan their weekly training for. We totally get it. We wouldn’t want to train our legs 3 days in a row either! We also believe that this can prevent over-training/over-use of a certain body part if you knew what to expect for each workout the week before.

If you have any other comments, concerns, or questions regarding our programming, please reach out to Zach directly.

-Zach T.