What's On My Mind - May 2025

What’s On My Mind

What’s On My Mind
A Gymnastics Competition Scoring Mentality

This Month’s Health Challenge
Body Composition in Health & Fitness

What’s On My Mind

A Gymnastics Competition Scoring Mentality - By Kyle Ligon

The first seven years I did CrossFit, I got hurt multiple times, the worst being a back injury sustained while working out alone in the gym. This injury was so severe that I had to crawl to a pole to pull myself off the ground. Now, ten years later, I haven’t had any injuries, my back feels great, and having recently completed MovementLink’s Movement Tests and Benchmark Week, as well as participating in the MS150, a two-day bike ride from Austin to College Station, TX, at 40 years old, I am the fittest and healthiest I have ever been.

To what do I attribute this dramatic turnaround? I shifted my focus from prioritizing whiteboard scores (which emphasize intensity in every workout) to balancing the intended stimuli of the workout, the intent of each exercise, choosing techniques most relevant to my goals, developing my technique, and pushing the intensity of workouts to the highest level my technique could handle. This shift in priorities allowed me the space to actually fix issues and improve as I built up higher and higher intensities.

Instead of trying to achieve the best possible score each day, I changed my mentality to aiming for the best score without compromising any of the elements I just listed. I stopped posting my whiteboard score in class, and in doing so, ironically, the scores I was capable of achieving improved steadily. After a few years of these ever-increasing results and remaining injury-free, we eliminated scores in the gym and developed the acronym F.I.I.T. to represent this mentality of training For Intent, Intensity, and Technique.

I’ve written about this many times, but I recently had an epiphany regarding the similarities between these priorities and scoring in gymnastics competitions. Because this mentality shift towards F.I.I.T. has had the single greatest impact on the success of my fitness journey, and because it is the foundation of the MovementLink workout program, I want to discuss it from this new perspective…let’s dive in.

It’s standard in most CrossFit gyms to record scores for every workout, turning each class into a mini-competition. The argument for this is that it motivates high intensities, which I believe it does, but at what cost?

During those first seven injury-ridden years, whiteboard scores were my primary focus. What gets measured gets prioritized, but what happens when what’s being measured is not representative of optimal effort? Workout scores only measure, and therefore motivate, the intensity of the workout. Intensity is important, but it is far from the only crucial factor. The other vital factors were not getting measured.

When you push at intensities beyond your technical capabilities, you not only face a higher risk of injury, but you also reach a point where your technique stops improving. Your technique isn't how your reps look when you are fresh; your technique is how your reps look when you are challenged at your limits. Your potential will always be limited by both your technique and your fitness. If you compare two people with identical fitness levels, the one with better technique will always be able to outperform the other.

Let’s review how technique is best developed:

First, we need to have full ranges of motion. MovementLink’s Mobility Tests can help you identify areas that may be hindering your technique. You can check out our Mobility Guides for ideas on how to improve any deficiencies.
Next, we need to understand what constitutes quality technique. MovementLink’s Posture Method can help you understand how to achieve quality positions, regardless of the exercise.
Once we know we can perform exercises reasonably well, it’s time to challenge our technique. This continuous process of challenging our technique is what drives adaptation and improvement. To challenge it:

First, add more speed (A Need for Speed). By applying higher forces, even with lighter weights, we can identify where technique begins to break down and can start consciously working to maintain and build it.
Next, once we can consistently move well at speed, we add weight or make the exercise more difficult (i.e., progressing from jumping pull-ups to pull-ups) and can further challenge it by performing movements while fatigued and out of breath.
Then, we repeat the process: first by adding more speed with the heavier weights or harder exercises, then by adding even heavier weights or harder exercises.

Technique develops by performing repetitions at the intensity thresholds where technique starts to break down. This is called threshold training and, fortunately, for our purposes, this method is not only the best for building technique, but by prioritizing working at the maximum intensity that your technique can handle, we can simultaneously emphasize pushing the intensity higher and higher. Threshold training doesn’t just create a safer buffer zone from injury; the intensity levels right where your technique is just barely beginning to show signs of breaking down are precisely where, if you actively work to maintain your technique, your technique will improve over the long term.

When we examine the best CrossFit competitors in history—Rich Froning, Mat Fraser, and Tia-Clair Toomey—not only do they not record scores every day in their training, but these G.O.A.T.s are all known for their ability to move efficiently under high fatigue and challenge because they are relentless in holding themselves to a high standard of technique in their training. Their quality technique equates to efficiency, allowing them to maximize their potential.

Now, onto the main idea of this article: if we consider how scoring works in gymnastics competitions, we can actually use this as an analogy for training F.I.I.T. to properly motivate our workouts.

In gymnastics, athletes are scored in two areas: 1) the difficulty of their routines and 2) their execution. While there are penalties and other scoring specifics that are not relevant to our parallel, I will focus on the duality of difficulty and execution as a potential framework for how we approach our workouts each day.

The difficulty component of the score could represent your intensity or the traditional whiteboard score in a CrossFit workout—reps, time, load. A better score likely indicates a more difficult workout for you.

The execution component of the score represents both the quality of your technique and how well you adhere to the intent of the exercises and the workout. If the intent of an exercise is to improve your jumping (like when we use kettlebell swings), the it’s a good idea to use a jumping pattern as opposed to other methods of kettlebell swings.

Your overall score is the sum of the difficulty and your execution. By posting traditional whiteboard scores, we were actually only representing the difficulty score and leaving out the execution score, leading people to place too much emphasis on it.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of how these components impact an overall score:

A low difficulty score would result in a low overall score. When old-school CrossFitters hear about not recording traditional whiteboard scores, they often worry about this scenario—technique looks great, but the person didn’t try very hard. We know you have to be challenged to improve. So, if we adopt this gymnastics scoring mindset, even if a score isn’t written on the whiteboard, to achieve a high overall score in our minds, we would have to achieve a high difficulty score. Therefore, we must push a pace and use exercises and weights that will make the workout very challenging for us (intensity).

Over time, our technique develops to a level that is effectively equivalent to our maximum intensity levels, so the difference between pushing at max intensity and the highest intensity your technique can handle becomes almost indistinguishable. However, you have to invest the effort in building your technique to earn this ability.

On the flip side, here’s what happens in most CrossFit gyms that record scores every class: prescribed (RX) competition weights and exercises are written on the board, and because people’s weights and scores will be posted publicly for everyone to see, they tend to go too heavy for their current fitness level. They would rather others see that they used the RX 135lbs with a slower time instead of the 115lbs they should be using. But, by going too heavy relative to their fitness level, they are actually altering the intended workout stimuli. Furthermore, because their score is going on the board, when trying to maintain good form interferes with going fast, instead of focusing on correcting their technique, they inevitably revert to just getting the workout done at any cost. With a gymnastic scoring mindset, they would receive a high difficulty score for bringing significant intensity to the workout, but a very low execution score for two reasons: 1) the weight was too heavy, so they missed the intent of the workout relative to their fitness level, and 2) their technique was sloppy. Thus, what would be considered a good traditional whiteboard score would receive a low overall score with our gymnastics scoring mindset due to the execution component.

If we make our ultimate goal to maximize your overall score with the gymnastics scoring mindset, then we need to optimize the balance between high difficulty and high execution scores, which is threshold training—the balance of pushing as hard as your technique can handle.

I have also heard the responsibility for poor technique when scores are involved ultimately blamed on the coaches. I have run a gym both ways. For the first ten years of CrossFit City Limits, we recorded scores and worked incredibly hard to motivate quality technique. I believe we did as good a job as we could with these conflicting motivations. However, I was never satisfied with it. It was clear to me that the allure of the whiteboard score was too powerful to overcome. When listening to your coach will result in a worse score that day, it’s an almost impossible request. The few who did overcome it essentially ignored trying to achieve the best whiteboard score, leaving us to wonder what was the point of recording scores anyway?

Nowadays, we do not record scores outside of our monthly partner competitions and biannual benchmark week. Not only is our client base’s technique significantly better than it was before, and we have almost no injuries, but the surprising result is that everyone is getting even fitter than before. Aside from having to convince the old-school CrossFitters who come in for a trial about the theory of not recording scores (hopefully this article will help), there have been no negative trade-offs, none…only upside.

While we found that it was nearly impossible to coach people to prioritize building technique sufficiently while simultaneously telling them to care about whiteboard scores every day, it is extremely easy to coach people towards pushing the intensity when they are already prioritizing quality technique.

Traditional whiteboard scores gamified workouts, which really resonated with people, but ultimately, because scores were not representative of what quality training looks like, it was to their detriment. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to track this gymnastics scoring style on a whiteboard, so F.I.I.T. is more of a mentality and gym culture that doesn’t use a scoreboard until the rare testing workouts.

An interesting outcome is that, over time, this approach produces the best whiteboard scores anyway. So, to maximize your results, approach each workout as if you are receiving a gymnastics score for your efforts. Optimize what would be your difficulty and execution scores. This means working out For Intent, Intensity, and Technique (F.I.I.T.).

To reiterate, choose the techniques that are most relevant to your goals and push as hard as your technique allows.

A Complete Guide to the MovementLink Method

This Month’s Health Challenge

Body Composition in Health & Fitness - By Kelly Dodds

Body composition—your ratio of lean mass (muscle, bone, organs, water) to fat mass—plays a role in health, performance, and aesthetics. While beauty ideals shift across generations and regions—ranging from "waif-thin" to curvy or athletic—our biology remains consistent: excessive body fat is linked to poor health outcomes and reduced physical performance.

Aesthetic trends often reflect socioeconomic factors. As one of my psychology professors once noted, the ideal body often mirrors what is scarce or hard for the average person to attain. In the past, during times of food scarcity and physical labor, body fat symbolized wealth and abundance. Today, in many industrialized societies where calorie-dense food is cheap and jobs are sedentary, leanness has become the more elusive and culturally prized body-type. In the U.S., approximately 73% of adults are considered overweight or obese (CDC, 2023). In this context, having a lean body type often signifies not just aesthetic appeal but a degree of discipline, health awareness, and economic status.

However, body fat is not as harmful as the media makes it out to be; in fact, too little body fat can be just as detrimental to health and fitness as excessive body fat. Some level of body fat is essential for health—especially for hormonal balance, proper metabolic function, and aging. Guidelines suggest healthy body fat ranges are:

Men: 10–25%
Women: 20–30%

That said, having an excessive amount of body fat for your body-type—particularly visceral fat stored around the organs—is associated with increased risk of developing chronic diseases, including metabolic disorder, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, NAFLD, sleep apnea, and all-cause mortality. This has led to body fat being stigmatized, despite its necessary biological roles.

Weight measurement and body mass index (BMI) are flawed but convenient tools. Even though changes in body weight and BMI are not direct measures of fat, they are widely used in research and clinical settings because they’re simple and correlate reasonably well with health risk in large population studies. Numerous studies confirm that a BMI over 30 (classified as obese) is associated with increased risk of disease and premature death. Although, BMI doesn’t account for muscle mass, body fat distribution, or fitness level, and should be interpreted in context. For instance, a very muscular person may have a high BMI which would not correlate with disease risk. But for the average person, maintaining a BMI in the 18–25 range is a reasonable target for long-term health. A more accurate way to measure body composition is with a Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA) machine. It’s the easiest and most affordable way to obtain a body composition analysis that measures bone density, lean mass, and fat mass– specifically identifying visceral fat (fat around internal organs) vs subcutaneous fat.

So what does it mean to be “unhealthy?” Being unhealthy means your body’s cells and systems are not functioning optimally. Aging and disease result from a gradual breakdown in the structure and function of cells. This can stem from DNA mutations, protein misfolding, hormonal imbalances, nutrient deficiencies, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. When damage to cellular structures (from oxidative stress, unbalanced/poor diet, lack of sleep, sedentary lifestyle, or environmental toxins) exceeds the body’s capacity to repair, then dysfunction accumulates. Over time, this imbalance leads to chronic disease and accelerates aging.

Excess adipose tissue (body fat) increases oxidative stress, inflammation, and insulin resistance—all of which impair the body’s ability to repair itself. It also taxes the immune system, increases the production of inflammatory markers, and dysregulates hormones. This chronic damage-to-repair imbalance from having excess body fat accelerates biological aging and contributes to disease onset.

Body composition also has a direct effect on fitness and performance across strength, endurance, speed, agility, and recovery:

Higher Lean Mass = Better Performance: Lean mass—especially skeletal muscle—is responsible for force production, balance, posture, and movement. More muscle mass typically leads to increased strength and power output, faster metabolic rate, hormone sensitivity, improved coordination and agility, better injury resilience.
Higher Fat Mass = Reduced Mobility and Endurance: excessive levels of body fat increases oxygen demand during exercise, impairs thermoregulation (heat dissipation), reduces movement efficiency, and increases the risk of joint strain and injury.
Unfavorable Lean Mass to Fat Mass Ratio leads to slower recovery from training, higher systemic inflammation, lower testosterone and growth hormone levels, and higher cortisol levels (stress hormone) which impairs the body’s adaptive capacity—its ability to respond to training and get fitter over time.

The goal for health and fitness is to focus on maintaining or building lean muscle while avoiding too much body fat. Science-backed strategies to achieve this include:

Eat a nutrient-dense, balanced diet: Prioritize eating a diet rich in lean protein, healthy fats (especially omega-3s), complex carbs (fiber), and antioxidants.
Use time-restricted eating (e.g., eating during a 12-hour window): Supports metabolic repair, mitochondrial health, and insulin sensitivity.
Exercise regularly: Both resistance training (for lean mass) and aerobic/HIIT activity (for mitochondrial and cardiovascular health).
Get 7–9 hours of sleep per night: Sleep is crucial for tissue repair, hormonal balance, appetite regulation, and recovery.
Safely get sun exposure: Natural sunlight for 20-30 mins daily to get vitamin D, while avoiding excessive UV exposure that can damage skin.
Practice stress management: Chronic stress increases fat storage and accelerates cellular aging.

Body composition is a useful indicator of both metabolic health and physical capability. While aesthetic preferences will continue to change, the science is clear: higher lean body mass while maintaining body fat levels between 10-25% for men and 20-30% for women improves quality of life, reduces disease risk, enhances fitness, and slows aging. Whether your goals are performance, health, or longevity– optimizing your body composition is one of the best investments you can make for your future.

This month’s challenge:

Know Your Body Composition– Get a DEXA Scan (if feasible): A DEXA scan is the most accurate and accessible way to measure your ratio of lean mass to fat mass, and see how it’s distributed throughout your body. BodySpec is located just one mile from CFCL and offers scans for around $50–60.
Commit to 2 Weeks of Healthier Choices: Prioritize lean protein and high-fiber foods at each meal, avoid processed foods, and exercise consistently.
Bonus points if you also: Get 8+ hours of sleep nightly, eat during an 8–12 hour window, spend 20 minutes in the sun daily, and implement other stress-reduction strategies.
Track/Notice Results: How do your clothes fit? Any changes in weight? Do your muscles feel or look more defined? Are you performing better? How do you feel?
Set Longer-Term Goals: Use this challenge as a starting point. If your DEXA scan shows body fat above the healthy range (10–25% for men, 20–30% for women), set SMART goals to increase lean muscle and reduce excess fat by continuing these healthy practices over time. Likewise, if you are currently at a healthy body fat level, you can use this information to set a goal to increase lean mass (muscle and bone), since the more lean mass you have, the healthier your long term outlook will be.