It’s no secret that we’re big on performance. Not so much in the sense that we target ourselves to competitive athletes or are a gym of world-class performers; but in the sense that we see performance as the ultimate metric and the target on which you can set your sights and never be short on opportunity for improvement. We choose to focus on fitness, not abs or some other metric. Why? Because it works.

What’s most interesting is the reactions that some people have to performance-minded training. The general public seems to view performance as something at odds with, or at the very least largely unrelated to other common health and fitness pursuits. Performance is viewed as something meant for the athletes that you watch on TV, not everyday people.
Me? Pursue performance? No, I just want to be healthier and lose some fat.
But this comes back to the reason that we ultimately set our sights on performance: it is the pinnacle. Our fitness isn’t separate from our health; in a very real way, it is our health.

Recently, the American Heart Association (AHA), the primary guiding body in cardiovascular disease prevention and health, has recognized and recommended VO2max as a primary metric for cardiovascular health and disease risk in clinical settings. The AHA released a statement (HERE) recommending that doctors begin testing VO2max, a marker of cardiorespiratory fitness, in their patients. VO2max has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than commonly used risk factors such as hypertension, smoking, type II diabetes, and high cholesterol. This is a huge step in public health. Fitness is beginning to work its way into your doctor’s office.

We’ve been calling on the world to start training for performance for quite some time now. The strength and conditioning community at large has long maintained that, far and away, performance training yields the best results for health and fitness, and maybe we’ve reached the time that the medical community and the general public will start catching on, too.

- PS

7/12/17

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  5 rounds

  
  




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  3 min AMRAP

  
  




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  10 push-ups

  
  


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  150’ SB carry (AHAP)

  
  


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  AMRAP SB over shoulder

  
  




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  Rest 2 mins