Using Beyond the Whiteboard
Beyond the Whiteboard
One of the benefits to training at CrossFit Adelaide is that we provide you with a free membership to Beyond The WhiteBoard (BTWB) workout tracking app. A lot of you are all over it and use the app religiously – a few of you might have been a bit hesitant to dive on in and give it a go (or werent even aware that you had an account on it!)
So we’ve put together a bit of information on how the app works, the benefits of using it and ways to you can use it even more effectively.
Lets start with 5 Good Reasons to Use BTWB –
Tracking Progress
This is the big one – by logging your results you can track your improvements, also knowing what you did previously on say a lifting workout means you know what weight to start at or what you need to do improve on last time. If you dont know your numbers you can spend a lot of the time guessing and hoping.
Knowing the workout
This can be a blessing and a curse – if you have the app installed you can see what the workout is before you come into the gym and be mentally pumped up and ready to rock (also if it has rope climbs in it – you will remember to bring your socks. If you are someone that likes to cherry pick workouts – dont have Push notifications setup and dont open the app till after you are at the gym!
Community
One of the awesome things about BTWB and having a CrossFit Adelaide community on there is that you can connect with people that might not get to physically see each day. When people post their results (and set them to Public) you can give them virtual kudos through emojis and leaving comments on there. So if you are poking around the app and you see someone killed the workout or set a PR in a session you dont actually go to – feel free to give them a little thumbs up
Motivation
Its does all sorts of things to keep you motivated and on track – it lets you know how many training days you have completed for the week, the month, the year and lets you know when you are doing well! You can see how much you are crushing it right there on the app but it will also let you know when you are maybe drifting off a bit and remind you to get back on track
Fitness Analysis
One of the super cool things BTWB does is provide an overall analysis of your fitness in a bunch of different areas (under Imbalances) – if you enter all the data in there it will let you know if you are particularly deficient in an area (ie are you better at rowing short distances or long distances?) Using this information can help you target your weaknesses and build up your overall fitness.
How to Use It
First things first is getting the app – its available for both Apple and Android, if you are an Android user you are clearly a sharp individual and probably already have the app installed and very familiar with using it. When you sign up for a membership with CrossFit Adelaide we automatically create a BTWB account for you (and generally you will get an email about it) – if you didnt get this email, have lost it etc just let one of the coaches know and we can help set you up with an account.
The app is fairly intuitive and there are actually quite a lot of videos within the app explaining what everything is but in terms of a real quick start guide what you need to know –
If you click on Todays WODs – it will take you to the CrossFit Adelaide workout for that particular day, if there are a couple of different parts with scores to enter there will be multiple entries. Once here you can see the workout and then there is a LOG button that will let you enter your results – most of it is fairly self explanitory but a couple of things to note are
“How Did You Perform This Workout?” – if you changed any of the movements or used lighter weights than are written for the workout, then you need to click “Modified” and then you can enter your modifications in the Notes section, if you dont click either Prescribed or Modified it will automatically select Modified.
“Which Squats can see this result?” – this is your privacy settings, if you have it as Public, anyone can see the results you have entered, Squads -CrossFit Adelaide this means anyone that is a member of the gym can see it and “Only Me” – has it set to private and the results are just for your reference.
If you dont know where to find something, how to do anything or any questions in general about using the app just grab one of the coaches before, during, after a session and ask for a hand digging around in there. If it is a workout with a lot of information to enter, ie something with 10 rounds each for time, it can be handy to enter them into the app as you can along during the session.
What is that?
Even for more experienced users there can be things in BTWB that you might not know what they are, now even though there are videos, articles in the app explaining all of them – we’ll put a short guide to the common confusing ones here and that might prompt you to look into it a bit more.
Fitness level – this is the one that people always wonder about, you get assigned a cool animal and a number ranking compared to how you rank to the rest of the community both overall and on particular workouts. A score of 75 means you performed better than 75% of the community on that particular workout.
Modalities – this is basically the big 3 areas of CrossFit, Weightlifting | Gymnastics | Monostructural (which is things like rowing, running, assault bike). This category breaks down how much training you have done in each area so you can see if you only ever do weightlifting, or you just run all the time or you are fairly balanced.
Lifestyle – not many people play around with this area but it can be really useful if you are looking more at your overall health picture (rather than just the gym side of things) – it lets you track sleep, basically diet, stretching etc and give you an idea of whether you are looking after yourself.
Imbalances – this lets you see if you are a fairly balanced individual ie your Back Squat and Deadlift are correct relative to each other or if you have an appropriate ratio of strict to kipping pullups. This information can be super super useful for improving your overall performance and targeting what you do in your workouts and training – but it brings me to my next and one of the most important parts of this article –
How to use it effectively?
BTWB can give you lots of useful information but it is only a computer program made up of various formulas and calculations so the information it can give you is only going to be as good and complete as the data you put in.
If you want a full picture of your fitness you need to put in results for everything (even the boring stuff) otherwise you will get skewed results come out in areas like “Imbalances” or “Modalities” – even if you run 10km everyday, if you dont put the results in – BTWB will think you never do any monostructural work and will tell you that you need to work on it.
On accuracy of data – not that the rankings / fitness levels are the be all and end all but how you enter YOUR results will affect the overall data pool, so accurate with your weights / times and if you MODIFY a workout make sure you enter it MODIFIED, it will help someone that did it RX sleep at night not wondering how someone beat them by 5min on a workout (but actually did it 20kg lighter than them)
Lastly dont lose your mind with rankings etc in there, they are a fun way to keep motivated and roughly see how you are tracking against the broader community but at the end of the day it is about you and improving relative to yourself.
So if you havent already – get it downloaded, have a look around, enter some results and give someone else a thumbs up on theirs while you are at it – it’ll be a much better use of your time on your phone rather than trawling Instagram mindlessly