To participate in the Paleo Body Challenge, the rules in a nutshell are:

• Put $10 into a pool
• Eat a paleo-style diet and read our handouts
• Keep a food diary of everything you eat, and email it in once a week to the Yahoo! Group (if you don’t send in your food diary, you’re eliminated)
• Allow us to take before and after photos so that we can determine the winner of the money in the pool: the person who changes the appearance of their body the most. The photos will be kept private, stored in one place and viewed on paper by the trainers.

The challenge lasts six weeks. The winner gets the money in the pool and a free month at their membership level. To win the pool contributed by our clients, you have to be a current client or have been at some time since Sept. 1, 2011.

Food diaries, emails with questions, ideas and recipes, and PDF resources are all to be sent to the Yahoo! Group, which you can join here.

The challenge will begin on Sunday, January 29, after you’ve had a week to clean out your kitchen and go shopping. First food diary is due February 5. The challenge ends on Saturday, March 10 with the final food diary due on the 11th.

“Before” photos will be taken in the gym starting during the potluck and over the following week. (Yes, this means you can get an early start!) All “After” photos will be taken in the gym by the end of the day on Monday, March 12–no exceptions. (Can’t make the potluck? You can still participate in the challenge by getting your picture taken and contributing to the pool.)

People love CrossFit for lots of reasons. Besides being a healthy outlet for the competitive drive, plenty of people like it purely for the changes they see in their own bodies; for the new strength that turbo-charges their other sports; or for the joy and courage in exploring what the body can do.

You can take the six CrossFit Start-up classes at 8:30 AM on Saturdays and/or at 6:30 PM on Thursdays. (Thursday classes begin on Jan. 26.) Mix and match as needed and start any time. Purchase the series ($114) by clicking here, and then click here or use our Sign Up for a Class button on the home page to schedule your classes.

The holiday party planning committee (that’s Fran, Ernie, and Sabrina) and the rest of the party animals are looking forward to socializing with you all! This event is posted on our Facebook page so you can RSVP. (I think in Facebookese that means click “Join.”)

Procedure:
Each person will declare their planned first weight that they will back squat–maybe it’s your established calculated 1-rep max you’ve been basing your lifts on lately. Everyone will lift in order of how heavy the declared lifts are, lighter lifters going first, heavier lifters going later. Each person will lift once, then declare what you will lift for round 2 when it’s your turn again. If you missed your first lift, you have two options: you can lift the same, or you can boldly plan to go heavier anyway. If you made your first lift, definitely plan to go heavier. Once again in round 2 everyone lifts in order of how heavy. Repeat one more time for round 3, each person’s third turn to have one attempt to lift the weight you planned.

We will do exactly the same steps for the shoulder press and then for the deadlift. People will have to be warming up for their next lifts while others are lifting, and we will keep things moving.

Some of the lifting standards:
Standards for the lifts will be upheld. You are all familiar with these. For example, the back squat has to go below parallel; the press has to be fully extended overhead without the feet moving and without the knees bending; and the deadlift has to be completely finished so that you are standing all the way up. No lift can stop moving or change directions during the lift. There are other details we will discuss.

You are all stronger than you realize. I hope we will have a full group of 16 people testing their strength at 9:30 on Saturday, December 3. The 10:30 AM class is cancelled because the CF Total will take more than an hour. The 7:30 AM class will be normal CrossFit as usual, and the 8:30 AM intro class is on.

Don’t buy anything until the date in October when your next autopay would have hit; get all your value out of your Sept. payment first. Email Fran if you don’t know “your date” or with any questions at all.

About the prepaid 3-month plans

The online store defaults to Series and Memberships, and your first menu looks like this. Choose “CrossFit Classes.”

Your next menu will show the prepaid 3-month plans. Click on one to add it to the shopping cart. Examples:

Advantage to prepaid 3-month plans:

There’s no autorenewal, so you can buy a new package (or a bigger or smaller one) as soon as you need to. This can be better than having an autopayment go through and then realizing you had intended to buy a different plan for the upcoming three months.

The clock starts ticking on these classes not at the sale date, but on the date you use the first one. You have the most flexibility on this plan, in my opinion.

Don’t want to prepay?

In that case, when you first get into the Online Store, click Contracts (direct link into Contracts area):

Your next menu shows lots of options!

Here’s what you need to know about the autopay plans

Each option that says “prepaid, autorenewing” will automatically bill you every three months. This is the same subscription model we’ve always had; it’s just that it now bills every three months instead of every month. Why? This saves on transaction fees.

Each option that says “pmt plan: autorenew” will automatically bill you every month. And it will continue until you want it to stop. Each set of three months is a separate contract. Each individual month is an autopay; each third month is an autorenewal that starts the autopays over again. That’s transparent to you. (It is the same as in the past when you hit one year. Your contract autorenewed after 12 months transparently.) This contract renews every three months instead. Why three months? We’ve learned that a three-month commitment lets new clients start seeing significant results; and we’ve seen that people stay with us for so long that three-month periods aren’t too long (especially since you can terminate the contract if you need to).

Putting these payment plans on hold doesn’t happen the way it did in the past, because rather than a monthly subscription, they’re payments on a financing plan. What you can do is terminate a contract and start a new one when you’re ready. If you need to terminate, let us know as early as possible, and we will work with you to make sure you know what to do to avoid losing classes or paying drop-ins.

Each option that says “payment plan” and does not contain the word “autorenew” will automatically bill you for three monthly payments, and then stop. The advantage to this: Maybe you used up the classes sooner than you thought, and you don’t want to autorenew because you need to buy another package or a larger one.

All of the plans that involve autopayments start the clock ticking on the life of the classes on the sale date, just like our old monthly subscription model did.