https://www.buzzsprout.com/2398845/15768479-ep6-scaling-vs-cheating
One of the common misconceptions about what we do at CrossFit Torque is that everything is this “high intensity” type of movement and workout where we don’t scale and don’t modify, and everyone just comes in and has to suffer through. And I couldn’t be further from the truth here at CrossFit Torque. For example, we were coaching a newer member to Torque, but not new to CrossFit. This was probably this person’s fourth or fifth CrossFit gym in the last six to ten years, because of traveling purposes, they’ve been to California and overseas and whatnot. And one of the biggest learning curves for this person is understanding that when we have our workouts, we present what we’re looking for, and we’re always going to have people scale or modify.
Very rarely do we have anyone do an RX workout, which means exactly what’s written on the board, whether that’s volume or weight or load on the bar or object. So in this case, we want people to scale and modify to hit the intended stimulus for the workout. And this person, there was a workout where it was 120 wall balls and 60 deadlifts over the course of this chipper. And this person wanted to modify the volume of the wall balls. And I absolutely 100% was on board.
And the moment I agreed to it, they said, well, “isn’t that cheating?” And I said, oh, goodness, we don’t like that – cheating is not a word that we use here. Cheating, to me is saying, okay, so, and so I want you to do 20 reps and they say, okay, and the workouts happening.
And they might only do eight, but they still tell me they do 20. So they’ve cheated themselves in that instance, right. They had not have done the full volume that they’ve had intended to. And cheating would be because they, they just didn’t want to do the workout or the work anymore. If they had to modify the volume down mid workout for a safety concern or mental concern, then, yes, we modify down, it’s not cheating, but cheating yourself would be not doing your intended work and saying that you did so.
So in this case, they asked if they were cheating. I said, absolutely not. We want to modify, we want to scale down the volume to allow this person to finish the volume and the workout in the intended stimulus. In this case, we wanted all this work to be done in twelve minutes. And so if this person didn’t modify the volume, they most certainly could get it all done, but it would take way longer than twelve minutes.
And that’s not the point. Okay. And so it’s just having this person understand that the word cheat. And cheating doesn’t really belong in our setting. We are always going to scale and modify.
And so when I see people on the street and they ask me what I do, and I say, I run a successful CrossFit gym. They say “Oh, I can’t do CrossFit”. I respond with yes, everyone can do it. Everyone can do it to the best ability. And we’re always going to scale and modify to where you are, not only in your overall fitness, but your day to day fitness.
Your sleep could be different, your nutrition could be different from day to day. And so we want to meet you as the member to where you are in this given day and provide to you the best workout. So scale, modify, let’s do it. Let’s have great workouts.
