Redefining Health & Fitness

We are continually trying to develop our knowledge around training, nutrition, and recovery.

As the community adapts to training we have to refine our programming to ensure you're getting the most out of the hours you spend with us each week, and as we refine our knowledge we also come to redefine our message and ethos.

ShiroKuma Health & Fitness started as a name that allowed us to take the elements of the CrossFit Methodology that served us and our community while creating an identity of our own, removed from the heavier, faster, shirts off, high intensity suffering that characterises the traditional CrossFit gym.

It wasn't until later that we refined our programming in line with our identity to the Health & Fitness streams our members are familiar with on the whiteboard.

Health in the training environment directly refers to the condition of our joints, our capacity for balance applied through single leg work and plyometrics (Explosive movements, jumping and landing), and endurance and stamina developed gradually with our physical and psychological tolerances. You can live a long, strong, happy life only doing Health programming, and the longevity conferred by the development of these capacities into old age cannot be overstated.

Fitness refers to the physical qualities described above, only dialed up to a greater degree. Balance and strength are applied to more complex skills like handstand push-ups and snatches, loading prescriptions are generally heavier, with more interference taking muscular endurance closer to the limit. These workouts are something to work towards, but they're not necessary for Health.

Fitness is the upper end of a continuum in the CrossFit methodology, with the addition of sickness beneath wellness at the lower end of the scale. Fitness creates a greater margin of Health, the more you develop your capacities in strength and stamina the more of a buffer you have from sickness.

Over the past year we have come to further refine our definitions and application of Health and Fitness, ending up with the proposition that Health is the result of what we do outside of the gym with our Nutrition, Sleep, and Non-Exercise Activity (Namely walking and stretching/flexibility training), while Fitness is conferred by our development of Strength, Stamina, and Skill in our training sessions.

In simple terms the more solid the foundation of our Health habits the better our Fitness outcomes. We can think of these behaviours as amplifiers, with a training session giving us one point, and each of our Health parameters for the next 48hrs acting as a multiplier.

If we eat adequate amounts of nutritious food, sleep 8+ hrs per night and get 8000+ steps per day that point earned through our training session is amplified to a three, the most favourable possible adaptations from training will occur. More strength, more stamina, more skill acquisition.

If we mainly order takeaways, sleep less than six hours a night, with our only activity taking us from our bed to the home office then back and forth to the kitchen a few times we end up with a zero, and would arguably have been better off spending the extra hour in bed or preparing a nutritious meal.

What's notable about this framework is that it isn't a balancing act, we can't offset bad choices with good ones. In this way poor Health habits aren't something that can be undone by training, the amplification only works in one direction; a Health platform of zero results in a fitness development of zero regardless of how hard you train.

We can take this further and redefine the typical training day/rest day dichotomy to Health days and Fitness days. On Health days you take the hour you're not spending at the gym and apply it to food prep, stretching, walking, and other activities that prepare you for the rigours of your next Fitness day.

Of course there are occasions when we go out to eat, get a bad night's sleep, or spend a day indoors; the reasons come in many forms, from work or family stress to having a healthy social life and recharging our batteries. Just ask yourself whether, once all the votes are counted, you've confirmed your identity as someone who prioritises Health & Fitness (For more on this refer to our email on Consistency two Sundays ago). It's easy to let what ought to be a temporary period of acceptable stress become our default state without us realising.

Over the coming weeks we will cover each of these components or Health & Fitness in more detail with the intention of giving you clarity and focus in your training and daily routine, taking us through to 2024 with intention and momentum.

Big love.

James & Katherine