Super fun workout Saturday – we broke up into teams and got competitive. The teams ran through a 4-part course three times, with 3 minutes in between for the teams to re-strategize. It was fascinating to watch how fast people were able to figure out what worked and what didn’t, how willing everyone was to make changes, and how smart the tweaks were to get the team as a whole moving more efficiently.  Very unlike how things tend to happen in the non-Queerfit world.

Especially on the final run, the intensity was turned way up, with everyone pushing harder because they wanted to win. Competition runs the spectrum – it can be everything from just silly to downright soul crushing – because we load it up with all sorts of value judgements. The winner is the best, and the losers are, well, losers. What Saturday’s workout did, though, was remind us that it can also be utterly joyful to compete.

So…we’re at The Wall (660 Irwin) today, and we’ll talk afterward about whether we want to sign up for this Tactical Strength competition, happening here in Atlanta on Dec. 14, or put one together of our own. See you today at 6:15!

From last Saturday: Read more…

If yes, come to queerfit.

As social animals, we humans are hardwired to seek out social connections. Earlier this week, an Atlantic magazine post laid out the neuroscience behind our need for human relationships, and then asked an economist to put a dollar value on those relationships. Here’s the breakdown:

If you have a friend that you see on most days, it’s like earning $100,000 more each year. Simply seeing your neighbors on a regular basis gets you $60,000 a year more. On the other hand, when you break a critical social tie—here, in the case of getting divorced—it’s like suffering a $90,000 per year decrease in your income.

Queerfit is not the friend you see most days, so we’re not worth $100k to you. But we can be the neighbors you see on a regular basis. That’s apparently, scientifically (or economist-ically, at least) worth $60,000. You just have to come regularly to get that $60k benefit.    

Then after you’ve collected that $60k for showing up, something else happens that’s awesomely good for your social brain. You get to run and jump, lift heavy things, and climb around…as part of a social group.  

We first started running our workouts as partner and team workouts because we had a lot more people than we have equipment. We couldn’t (and still can’t), for example, put out 20 barbells and load them up in a way that lets everyone do their own deadlift workout at the same time.  

The 20 barbells in a room is the Crossfit model. There’s nothing wrong with it – doing an individual workout in a roomful of other people doing the same workout is certainly more interesting than grinding away by yourself on the Snap Fitness elliptical. But, it turns out, partner and team workouts are Read more…