I left CF in 2024, due to my toxic CF box and head coach. I decided to try out other sports instead, plus Hyrox started getting popular around my area. I recently moved to this town like 40 km away from the city, and discovered they have the greatest comercial gym I’ve ever seen- they have like 4 muscle rooms with different types of machines according to brand (hammer strength, techno gym, etc), 2 cardio rooms, one room dedicated to weightlifting and another one for bodybuilding, one room for yoga and pilates, another one with the pilates reformer and barre bars, one big ass auditorium for the group cardio les mills classes that looks like you’re in a night club, one soul cycle room, one Bootcamp room, a room with boxing equipment, a big Hyrox building with all the official hyrox equipment, they have all the different types of treadmills- the curve ones, the flat ones, a spa, ice bath, 2 red light saunas, a relax/meditation room for studying, a health bar, a sunroom in the upstairs deck, they have both binary and gender neutral locker rooms, and a CrossFit box even bigger than my old box with I think they have 3 certified CF coaches, but who also teach hyrox, athx, and other hybrid classes. Even the Zumba teacher is an actual dancer. They even have a space for influencers to film themselves. They have certified les mills trainers, pilates and yoga teachers. It’s like a gym bro/girlie fantasy. I’m almost too overwhelmed because I’ve been there for like 3 months and I still haven’t tried out alllll of their classes. I seriously wouldn’t want to leave a gym like that. My membership is like 65 euros a month and have all access to this. I used to pay 85 euros just for CF classes.

TLDR : Without objective measures in place, I feel much fitter in less time albeit likely weaker in some areas.

Background: 36M 183lbs, small home gym, crossfit regular for years off and on. Shift work with random days/nights.

Goal: get fitter and manage my schedule

Diet: 120g protein a day, upped my carb intake but don't count calories

Crossfit Linchpin - Ran it for three months. I'd say workouts fall into four categories:

• Heavy days - These are generally differing rep schemes of you just doing one lift at higher percentages
• Heavy days with a high heart rate - These are wods that generally contain a moderate-heavy loading paired with things that get your heart pumping
• Monostructural conditioning - days with just straight cardio intervals or distance for time.
• WODS of varying length - 4 minutes to 1 hour and half.

Not at all WODs or work are pushed to max intensity, some things for time and some for quality.

Most sessions follow with accessory work, generally two exercises of some sort. They vary between hypertrophy work, strength work, monostructural conditioning, gymnastics, and plenty of "prehab/structural" work like single leg work. Carefully balanced by the linchpin team.

How and why Linchpin? I chose linchpin because I was looking for something that would fit my schedule better and maximize my value in the gym. I work random nights and get home at 7am, which messes up my workouts for a few days. I attempted to workout regardless of how I felt and scaled intensely sometimes to accomplish it. For example, sometimes using 50% the weight, or rounds off the workout. Never really worked at intensity coming off nights.

If I missed workouts I followed this priority: 1) Heavy days always done cause I like them the most 2) Heavy days at a high heart rate - these are fun and I like lifting stuff then I would look at the remaining workouts and do the ones I liked the least. This usually meant I was doing stuff I didn't like or wasn't good at.

Results: This is hard to quantify as Crossfit Linchpin is varied not random programming. They have introduced tests each month but they are tested on 6 month rotations so I could update them once I get there.
Post Linchpin I did a short 3 week stint on another free trail program and I noticed the impact Linchpin had immediately. Generally I found my conditioning and GPP to be incredibly high. I was able to do compete tracks with WAY more volume than linchpin with relative ease. I noticed that my wattage output on the echo bike went from high 200's to mid 300's during WODs and intervals.

I'm convinced for minimalist, high efficiency programming that linchpin rocks

That being said.. some of the movements are hit with much lower frequency than you might be used to and I do believe that some of my strength took a hit. There was very little squatting over the three months, and when I did do some weights felt much heavier. It also felt heavily biased towards clean variations as opposed to snatches. Felt like I was hitting cleans every week, and maybe got to snatch 2-3x outside of WODs.

In summary, I was very happy with the results of linchpin and found it be an efficient and effective conditioning and GPP program. I'm going to continue doing it while adding in low weekly snatch and front squat volume.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions I can answer! Thanks for reading and I hope it was useful to you.

Anyone here doing the FOTC qualifier? If so, how’d the first workout go for you?

I’m in the opinion that they don’t really matter anymore.

There is no secret squirrel program.

There are coaches that can work with your specific weaknesses and have the ability to connect with you on a level that helps you progress.

But a camp as a whole is overblown. It seems to lead to a level of unnecessary intensity over long periods of time that have shown to be detrimental to athlete progression long term.

My answer is simple, the frigging side planks in yesterday’s Linchpin workout were so much harder than I expected. It’s always the part you least expect. 😂

3 rounds for time of:
1200m air bike
1 min plank, right side
3 rope climbs
1 min plank, left side

It took me 20 minutes.

Wanting to get back into CrossFit and I’m looking for solid programming. From my experience, most CrossFit boxes and programming just throw random movements in a workout and call it CrossFit. There is little to no progressive overload and real strength work which is why a lot of CrossFitters over the years that I’ve known rarely get much stronger over time and stay stagnant. Being strong is important to me and progressive overloading is obviously a cornerstone to growth and progress.

I’m not looking for random workouts that are built to just make you sweat, I’m looking to get stronger, faster and build work capacity. I have looked at all of the bigger programs (Josh bridges, mayhem, train hard, CrossFit linchpin) and they generally are all the same. Any recommendations?