CrossFit St. Pete

So I'm not sure the site I'll share will fit into the traditional mold of a learning and education resource but I think if you look outside the traditional boundaries of education and training, you'll find this site to be a solid example of ARCS in real-life, intentionally or otherwise.

The site is hosted by a CrossFit gym in St. Petersburg, FL. It's designed to supplement the training conducted at the gym and to be a place where members can connect with trainers, coaches and other gym members to ask questions, compare results and give advice. The site goes further to provide training and nutrition tips, a meal planning tool, work out descriptions and a fitness blog hosted by the head trainer.

ATTENTION: Right out of the gates the site grabs your attention with a loud, scrolling title banner advertising the gym with pictures of the members during workouts. If you happened to be a member it's not unlikely that upon landing on the site you'd find yourself plastered at the top of the page (kind of motivational). Further, the site pairs each daily workout post with a picture, fitness focused that but not in the traditional sense. Usually, the pictures have no obvious connection to the daily post and often incite you to wonder what the author is going for with the picture. The workouts are also named, often after a military, police or fire fighter that gave their life in the line of duty. For most, well for me anyway, this leaves you to wonder and probably research who the person is behind the workout. Learning the bio, the contributions and the sacrifice tends to be a significant motivator to get involved with the workout.

RELEVANCE: The You wouldn't be logged in if you weren't focused on fitness or aspiring to develop it, so the site has a decent head start in the relevance department. Taking nothing for granted though, the site authors do a nice job of promoting the relevance of their content every Saturday with the weekly post by the head trainer. In each of the posts the author tackles a different aspect of fitness, nutrition, physiology, etc by convincing us we've got it all wrong. The posts then go on to show us the right way, usually with an anthropology and kinesiology lesson and pictures with links to the literature (not what you'd expect at a workout blog) to back it up. For those of us on the extreme high side of perceived relevance, the posts erase anxiety by giving us the coaching we need to improve. For those on the low side the combination of pictures, literature, examples and discussion do a great job of erasing indifference.

CONFIDENCE: The CrossFit blog handles the confidence issue with a parallel "work out of the day" blog by gym members. Participants share work out results, tips, feelings, goals and failures. The sense of community created by this level of sharing can be motivating and inspire personal accountability.

SATISFACTION: The "work out of the day" forum is a major part of the satisfaction piece of ARCS as well. In this case, comparing results can be a huge motivator both when your performance exceeds someone else's and even more so when it falls short.

Take a look if you get a shot.

http://www.stpetecrossfit.com/