Bound Newsletter 9.6.2025
The Lifestyle Hack: Smart Training, Simple Nutrition, and Balance
We live in a world where everyone is searching for a shortcut—the perfect hack to live healthier, perform better, and feel stronger. The truth is, there isn’t one single magic formula. Instead, the real “lifestyle hack” comes from combining a few core principles: smart training, simple nutrition, balance outside the gym, and clear goal setting. When these pieces work together, they create long-term results that actually stick.
Smart Training: Train With Purpose
Smart training doesn’t mean doing more—it means doing better. The best programs are built around:
Progressive overload: consistently challenging yourself with slightly more weight, reps, or intensity over time.
Variety with intention: balancing strength, conditioning, skill work, and recovery.
Longevity first: training in a way that makes you stronger today and keeps you capable 10 years from now.
The smartest athletes know that quality beats quantity. A one-hour focused session beats three hours of random workouts.
Simple Nutrition: Fuel Your Body, Don’t Complicate It
Nutrition can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Stick to a simple formula:
High protein: supports muscle growth, recovery, and satiety.
Moderate carbohydrates: enough to fuel workouts and daily activity without overloading.
Lower fat: focusing on nutrient-dense sources rather than excessive oils or processed foods.
Decreased calories when needed: if fat loss is a goal, adjusting portion size—not eliminating entire food groups—is the key.
Think less about trends and more about consistency. Whole foods, lean meats, fruits, veggies, and smart carb choices will carry you further than any quick-fix diet.
Balance Outside the Gym: Train Hard, Live Fully
Your health is more than what happens in the weight room. How you sleep, manage stress, and spend time with family and friends matters just as much. A true lifestyle hack includes:
Quality rest: 7–9 hours of sleep is the most underrated recovery tool.
Stress management: workouts help, but so does unplugging, walking outside, or simply saying no.
Connection: relationships and community provide motivation and accountability far beyond a training plan.
When life outside the gym is balanced, progress inside the gym comes easier.
Goal Setting: In and Out of the Gym
Without goals, training and nutrition lack direction. The key is setting targets in both areas of life:
In the gym: PR a lift, complete a 5K, or master a skill like pull-ups or muscle-ups.
Outside the gym: read more books, spend quality time with family, or grow professionally.
Goals should be specific, measurable, realistic, and time-bound. Big goals give you vision, while small goals create momentum.
The Lifestyle Hack in Action
The hack isn’t about chasing perfection—it’s about building sustainable habits that stack together. When you:
Train with purpose,
Eat with simplicity,
Live in balance,
And set meaningful goals…
You don’t just create a fitness routine—you create a lifestyle that carries over to every area of life.
👉 Your challenge: Pick one area above to improve this week. Maybe it’s adding 20g more protein per day, turning your phone off 30 minutes before bed, or setting a new 3-month gym goal. Stack one habit at a time, and watch how quickly they add up to your best version of yourself.
Welcome New Members
Annie Morlock
My name is Annie Morlock, I am 23 years old, and currently work at Allatoona HS as a Parapro and volleyball coach. I got married about a year and a half ago, and my husband and have been living in Florida until this past Summer when we moved back to Acworth! I am originally born and raised in Acworth, and have a younger sister Claire who has also been a member here and introduced me to CrossFit Bound!
Bragging Board:
Jeb Bufftington 345 clean at 49.63 years of age!!
Dylan 295 clean
Kyle Rice 285 clean
Jonathan Payton 275 clean
Sydney Hightower 165 clean (5lb post busted back - and huge improvement with knee tracking over toes)
BAM 155 clean
Natalie Gordon 145lb clean
April Zacharis 130lb clean
Attendance for August 2025
Total Attendance - 1681
Class Averages:
5:15 pm - 12
12 pm - 11
9 am - 10
6:30 pm - 10
4 pm - 9.7
5:30 am - 9.2
6:30 am - 5
Committed Club Members:
Casey Linch - 20
Amber Buettner - 20
Matthew Kimm - 20
Natalie Gordon - 20
Miguel Chavez - 20
FeFe Lawler - 20
Elaine Dunbar - 20
Miles Pettit - 19
Jenni Pettit - 18
natalia Scott - 18
Katie Allen - 18
Mary Lubbers - 18
Jeffrey McDonald - 17
Travis Tucker - 17
Sergio Rivera - 17
Meghan Willis - 17
Hannah Spratlin - 16
Jake Peteerse - 16
Alyssa Winkler - 16
Jen Wells - 30
Jeb Buffington - 30
Mary Turner - 28
Brittany Karneol - 27
Michael Jamorski - 26
Brian Lawler - 25
Ryan Boone - 25
Kyle Rice - 23
Matt Schuster - 23
Melanie Venable - 23
Ruben Rivera - 23
Santez Kindred - 23
BAM - 22
Nicolas White - 22
Elysia Dunlap - 21
Christopher Kibbe - 21
Sheri Kindred - 21
Julie Chambers - 21
Alex Falcon - 21
Upcoming Anniversaries & Brithdays
Birthdays
Reed Dockers Sep 8
Sam Porter Sep 10
Trevor Maloney Sep 11
Jason Moore Sep 13
Cody Cobb Sep 13
Greg Brooks Sep 17
Javier Hernandez Sep 20
Eriko Moore Sep 22
Grant Griffin Sep 28
Sarah Little Sep 28
Trevor Lampe Sep 29
kara Everill Sep 30
Anniversary
1-year
Tiffany Rivera Sep 17
Joshua Bristow Sep 30
Dalton Brumfield Sep 30
2-year
Levi Samples Sep 27
Natalie Gordon Sep 28
Santez Kindred Sep 30
Nicole White Sep 12
3-Year
Savannah Haygood Sep 12
Upcoming Schedule & Events
Melanie Venable has put together a ‘team’ for the upcoming Savage Race. The team is called ‘FRIENDS BOUND’
Need a training plan to get ready Bound Endurance is implementing a 5K program for this summer. 2 Days a week of running.
Amicolola Falls Marathon - December 6, 2025
Full and Half Marathon route in the famous Amicalola Falls State Park which boasts miles of trails, catering to various fitness levels and preferences. The park's trails meander through lush forests, alongside bubbling creeks, and offer stunning views of the 729-foot Amicalola Falls—the tallest cascading waterfall in Georgia .
Jess and some others are already signed up
The Conquer ‘The Toughest Backyard Ultra’
$150 to sign up, and at the start of the race runners will be given a $100 bill to carry the entire race. The remaining $50 goes to the park fees, volunteers and insurance. If the runner desires to stop or times out of the race, they will place the $100 bill into a glass case for the overall winner to claim at the end. Two years into the planning to discover the toughest location to pull off a backyard ultra and we found it at the famous AT approach trail in the Amicalola Falls State Park. The loop starts at the top of the falls with the rugged East Ridge trail leading down to the bottom parking area to pick up the lower Mountain Laurel trail and then up the AT Approach trails with 605 steps back to the top of the falls.
Simple: Each runner will have 1 hour to complete the 4.1-mile loop (1,065ft of elevation) every hour until only one person remains.
Helen Holiday Half & 10K Race - December 13, 2025
discount code ‘Helen10’. *thank you Jen Wells!
CrossFit Journal Article of the Week: CrossFit Means Failure
by: Stephane Rochet
No matter how hard you work, CrossFit will humble you. Forever. Regardless of your ability.
Newcomers to CrossFit often ask breathlessly after their initial exposure to intensity (and a good dose of mechanics and consistency FIRST), “When does this get easier?”
The short answer: “Never.”
Sure, your technique will improve, you’ll get stronger and fitter, and your scores will improve. But that just means you’re building an organism that can handle more work and greater intensity. The physiological and psychological effects, however, remain basically the same.
Ask someone who has done Fran once and someone who has done this CrossFit classic a dozen times (and whittled their time down to below 3 minutes) and observe their reactions. The same memory of the pain, struggle, cough, and day-long recovery flashes across their faces. It never gets easy or stops hurting.
2024 CrossFit Games Open Workout 24.1 at CrossFit Narellan
And actually, as an added “bonus,” the better and fitter you get, the more often your best on that day will fall short of your best time. You’ll fail to record a numerical improvement in your fitness. If we just go by the scoreboard, you will have lost. Fortunately, that’s not all we go by.
The fact is, regardless of what the stopwatch or rep counter says, every day, win or lose, fail or succeed, is a massive victory.
Like it or not, you’re going to fail over and over doing CrossFit. Forever. It’ll take months of struggle and failure to master the next step in the muscle-up, handstand push-up, or pistol progression. Moreover, you may never actually succeed in performing these movements.
You’ll fail over and over at adding that next 5 lb to your squat, deadlift, press, snatch, or clean and jerk. There are some workouts you’ll never master enough to beat a sensible time cap. It’s infuriating. And motivating.
You’ll fail much more than you succeed. And for every success you celebrate with your coach, family, and friends, there will be a new obstacle waiting to dish out heartache.
“Is this supposed to be a pep talk, coach?”
Absolutely. Stay with me while I tell you why constantly varied and continuous failure is one of the best parts of the CrossFit program.
With the right mindset, we can frame failure as a good thing, as a beautiful lesson and great motivation. And let’s be honest, if you were drawn to CrossFit, sitting back and skating through life isn’t your MO. If you’re still doing CrossFit days, weeks, months, and maybe even decades after your first workout, failure is about as comfortable as a nice hot shower.
So, instead of dragging us down and making us feel like quitting, failure can be a tool to make sure we’re excited to show up to the gym and practice our butts off to overcome any obstacle. Just as it does in life.
Failure, no matter where it happens, drives us to formulate a plan to attack our weaknesses so we can get where we want to go. Failure stimulates the massive ACTION we need to take to get there.
Stretching ourselves this way, pushing into the uncomfortable, consistently and continually, is the only way to get better, and is the required path to achieve our own greatness.
When we say Forging Elite Fitness, CrossFit’s original tagline, this is what we’re talking about. Contrast this cycle of failure propagating amazing results to the general mediocrity that is so pervasive in globo gyms where patrons toil for years on the same program, with no coaching and no real motivation. Move a little, text a little, chat a little. These gym-goers never leave their comfort zones, never feel the anguish of missing the mark over and over, and never get much better. There’s no forging going on here.
Failure breathes life into a dream
I grew up a huge sports fan. I love the lessons sports can teach if we approach them with the right mindset. As a huge Florida Gators fan, “The Promise” speech by Tim Tebow resonates with me. After a stunning loss where the highly ranked Gators football team lost to a much less-talented squad, their star QB, Tim Tebow, faced all the questions from reporters asking why Florida had lost. With tears in his eyes, Tebow ended the press conference with this promise to the Florida fans and all his critics:
“I’m sorry. I’m extremely sorry. You know, we were hoping for an undefeated season. That was my goal. But I promise you one thing, a lot of good will come out of this. You will never see any player in the entire country play as hard as I will play the rest of the season, and you will never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season. You will never see a team play harder than we will the rest of the season. God bless.”
Goosebumps.
Tebow kept his word, and this loss — and the motivation that stemmed from it — vaulted Florida to a national championship. That’s how failure can spur great action and accomplishment.
Now, let me wrap this up so you can feel good about all the failures you’re going to experience.
Staying with the sports theme, John Wooden, the greatest college basketball coach of all time, defined success “as peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
Success is not lifting more than someone else at the gym, getting a PR every time we test a benchmark, effortlessly learning new skills, always doing the workout Rx’d, or never having a meal that doesn’t match our plan. Success is showing up and giving your best for that day and doing this over and over and over.
Every lesson you learn by trying and not succeeding is a success. Every missed rep or missed weight is progress, and progress is the key to happiness and, ultimately, success.
In CrossFit, we are always works in progress, and we have a lot to be happy about so we try and try again. The only chance failure has of stopping us is if we quit. So fail forward and fail often, my friends. I’ll see you on the leaderboard.
