On Freedom Fridays at getFIT615, students arrive and look at the unassuming chalkboard at the front of our workout space. The only thing written on there is the “weekly pattern” of repetitions, time intervals, or stations that we had used for that week — today, however, the individual movements are there for us to freely choose.
As I ask the group in front of me about what movements we would like to select for the next 30 to 45 minutes, some shift their weight from left to right and clutch their brightly-colored water bottle to perhaps infuse them with strength and guidance, while others casually chat away with their gym buddies and pet our little black gym dog, Emma. I can tell they’re pretty sleepy, and are simply happy to have showed up at 7am. I congratulate them for doing so. “If you don’t have any preferences, I’ll pick for you!” And they know I mean I’ll pick something they may not like…something like burpees.
Burpees never did anything to them, I say, and burpees are more scared of you than you are of them. I direct them all to do a little jump — “That’s the first part of a burpee, and you crushed it!” — and then place their hands on the floor, then either jump or step back with both feet into a plank position, giving the pushup at the bottom as an optional move, and finally return to the starting position. Though I smile and say that they successfully can, in fact, do a burpee, I still see shifting eyes. Yeah, that’s only one, and we’ll be doing more than one, I can almost hear them scoff.
It always brings me back to the time that my CrossFit workout was called “7 Minutes in Heaven,” where all I had to do was do as many burpees as I could in that time. After being in the CrossFit world for a few months, I knew 7 minutes was going to be an excruciatingly long time to be doing burpees, even if I chose the pace at which I completed them. I set out a plan to do ten at a time, walk a small circle and do ten more, repeating the process. The longer I did them, the simpler the burpee became. Jump, hit the deck, squat, jump. By 7 minutes, I was a few burpees shy of 100. After that, I realized that burpees cannot kill me, even if they leave me heaving on the floor. Because as the buzzer rang, I could feel blood pumping through my body, air in my lungs, eyes wide open, leaving an imprint of a sweat angel on the black mat below me — and I knew that I was quite alive (and reasonably well, too).
Once I began teaching at getFIT615, I also learned the power of the power pose — hands on hips, eyes up and chest open, feet firmly planted under your hips — as well as realizing how powerful my internal monologue can be to keep going, one at a time. During one exercise, we were partnered up to do burpees tabata-style. 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest. As one partner worked, the other cheered her on, and we couldn’t help but laugh and feel like superstars for something that we felt used to be punishment. Now, if I feel my inner voice telling me that I can’t do it, I imagine how it would feel if someone else was telling me that, or vice versa. I would never tell my friend she is getting tired, out of shape, and worthless. Why should I tell myself that?
So while many of my CHAARG girls start getting flashbacks of doing burpees as punishment from anything like cursing to not putting equipment away, I feel like every jump is a jump of triumph, a moving poem of our ability to pop back up after hitting rock bottom. They can be done anywhere, without equipment, at any time, by almost anyone.