Ben Smith, His Crew & Good Vibes
Watch This Vid With Ben Smith:
Yeah, this is old and from before the 2012 Games, but I have to say this is an awesome vid with Ben Smith. For a while, I’ve already known he was a pretty cool guy. Then when I came across this video a few days ago, damn…I got nothing but good vibes from watching it.
The kid’s really down-to-earth and seems really normal on the outside. When it comes to CrossFit though, he’s a beast. I remember watching his videos from the 2011 Opens. This one really stood out to me as it was a WOD I struggled with, getting only 9 reps LOL. I had to do squat clean and jerks for this and man did I suck at getting shit overhead at the time. It’d be interesting to see what I can do now.
This was Open Section WOD 3 in 2011:
5 minute AMRAP
165# squat clean thrusters (squat clean and jerks, as I did, were acceptable as well)
That music haha…reminds me of my box’s Pandora playlist at the time…
…because of these videos he made then, I always thought Ben just worked out by himself in his garage by that damn refrigerator. Then when I came across that 18 minute video mentioned at the top of this post, I was pretty stoked to see he had his own bro-tastic workout group.
Seriously, nothing beats working out with a great group of people, especially those that both push you and carry on some good vibes.
When I saw the YouTube comment above, I thought, “Damn, I’m lucky.”
Okay, lots of people out there might prefer working out by themselves in a garage (I used to be like this). That’s cool. However, there are a bunch of people like that YouTube commenter who feel like something’s lacking when they’re just tackling WOD’s on their own.
If you happen to be in that kind of predicament, definitely do something about it. Alright, certain circumstances might prevent you from doing so, but if you have the opportunity to workout at a legit CrossFit box or partner up with another CrossFitter you know, do it.
As I said, I used to be one of those guys who preferred working out alone. In high school, I would hit up Planet Fitness, pizza and bagels galore, by myself. I wanted to go at my own time and do my own “programming” (I definitely have a Word doc with some of my routines on my old desktop…it was definitely shit and full of Nautilus nonsense). Then in college, I would go to the campus gym with roommates. Luckily, most of the guys I went with either gave up and started doing cardio only or they preferred doing their own shit which was rather inefficient (at least not as bad as my high school routines lol).
It was pretty much myself or some partner sessions with my friend who eventually became a CrossFit coach.
Not gonna lie.
Transitioning into the class setting was kinda weird for me at first. I just wanted to workout on my own, dammit! But it was just a better idea of signing up for a class – for logistics and monetary reasons. And you know what? I’m not sure if I could ever workout on my own again…unless I were to do some specialized programming down the road.
Aside from getting a glimpse of Ben Smith’s pre-real world day (didn’t he just open his own box recently?), this vid reminded me how important the class setting has been to my progress.
I’m sure the class dynamic has helped many of you out there as well.
So what do you all prefer? Hitting up a WOD alone? With a partner or two? Or a full-out class? Post in the comments below.
Kip it real, my friends.
