Bound Newsletter 9.27.2025
Embracing “Amor Fati” at CrossFit Bound
I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on the Latin phrase Amor Fati—literally, “love of fate.” At first, it might sound like passive acceptance: just letting life happen and hoping for the best. But the deeper I’ve thought about it, the more I see it as a call to action. Amor Fati isn’t about resignation—it’s about embracing exactly where you are, accepting the circumstances you face, and thriving because of them.
At CrossFit Bound, we see this in every workout, every lift, and every rep. Life throws challenges at all of us—injuries, setbacks, plateaus, unexpected obstacles—but how we respond defines us. When you choose to see these moments as opportunities to grow rather than obstacles to avoid, you embody Amor Fati. You train your mind alongside your body, staying disciplined even when it’s uncomfortable.
Self-reflection is a huge part of this. Loving your fate starts with being honest with yourself about your strengths, your weaknesses, and the work that lies ahead. It’s about showing up consistently, giving your best effort, and trusting the process—even when progress feels slow.
Every time a member pushes through a tough WOD, works on a skill that feels impossible, or finds strength in the middle of fatigue, I see Amor Fati in action. It’s not just about survival; it’s about thriving in spite of, and because of, life’s challenges.
So today, wherever you are in your journey—physically, mentally, or personally—remember: love your fate. Lean into the struggle. Stay disciplined. Reflect, grow, and thrive.
New Shirts are Available to Order on Wodify through the Ipad or through your phone!
The T shirts are Unixsex Triblend in Premium Heather and Vintage Navy
The Crop are the Womens Jersey Crop Tee in Athletic Heather or Vintage White
*You must pre-order before next Friday and you can pay now or have billed to your next membership payment through your phone or on the ipad point of sale up front.
1x shirt = $25
2x shirts = $40
*if you order 2x pay for your shirt online and email info@crossfitbound.com your style/size/color your want
Bragging Board
*had a bunch of athletes competing at Pensacola Beach Brawl this past weekend. Will have more athletes and recaps updated soon
Let’s Welcome New Members *bio be updated next week
-Erica Heaton
-Trevor Wagnor
New Bound Build Cycle Starts This Week:
We’re kicking off a brand-new 4-week training cycle - The Iron Complex Cycle - designed to build explosive power, raw strength, and muscle endurance — all in just 3 sessions per week.
This cycle blends three training styles into one powerful program:
Olympic Lifting Complexes — develop speed, precision, and coordination through barbell complexes paired with explosive drills.
Powerlifting Foundations — build strength in the big three: back squat, bench press, and deadlift.
Bodybuilding Accessories — target weak points and build lean muscle with classic hypertrophy work.
Each 75–90 minute session is structured to maximize your time in the gym: start with a lifting complex, follow with a heavy power movement, then finish with accessory supersets. Over the 4 weeks, weights and intensity progress to keep you challenged and seeing results.
Whether your goal is to lift heavier, move faster, or simply look and feel stronger — this program will push you to the next level.
Upcoming Anniversaries & Brithdays
Birthdays
Eriko Moore Sep 22
Grant Griffin Sep 28
Sarah Little Sep 28
Trevor Lampe Sep 29
kara Everill Sep 30
Anniversary
1-year
Joshua Bristow Sep 30
Dalton Brumfield Sep 30
2-year
Levi Samples Sep 27
Natalie Gordon Sep 28
Santez Kindred Sep 30
Upcoming Schedule & Events
Pensacola Beach Brawl is this weekend. Good luck and safe travels to all of our athletes going to kick some A$$!
Join the HYROX Sim Changemaker Challenge!
CrossFit Bound athletes—train with purpose! Noble Clay’s motto, “The fit will fight for those who are not,” is at the heart of the HYROX Sim Changemaker Challenge on October 25th in Norcross, GA. This half-HYROX event is not only a great tune-up for Atlanta HYROX the following weekend—it’s also a fundraiser supporting Noble Clay’s mission to strengthen communities through fitness.
Why you should participate:
Test your functional fitness in a HYROX-style competition
Support a powerful local cause
Train alongside elite athletes focused on positive change
Prepare for Atlanta HYROX the next weekend
Represent CrossFit Bound while giving back
Special Offer for CrossFit Bound athletes:
Use promo code: BOUND (ALL CAPS) to claim 50% off registration—available for a limited time until October 3rd!Bonus: The first 150 participants receive complimentary Lululemon performance gear (shirt + shorts worth $140!)
Don’t miss this chance to push your limits and make a real impact in our community.
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: Why Standards Define Everything: How CrossFit Delivers Results
by: Stephane Rochet
Our standards aren’t arbitrary rules or outdated traditions. They’re the foundation of our program. CrossFit’s movement requirements, nutritional guidelines, and intensity targets exist to find the perfect balance between safety, efficacy, and efficiency — the three factors that should be used to evaluate any fitness program.
Safety: the risk of injury associated with the program
Efficacy: the results a program delivers across the population using the program
Efficiency: how fast the results are achieved
When these factors are out of balance, the usefulness of a program is compromised. If a program is 100% safe, you’ll find, as you dig into the (lack of) results, it is also 100% ineffective. A program that delivers incredible results quickly, but in the process sidelines 80% of the users with injury, is just as unusable. Or, if the results delivered are great but it takes years to get them, this is also not the scenario we’re looking for. Ideally, a program optimally balances safety, efficacy, and efficiency in a way that delivers exceptional results within an acceptable timeframe, safely. This is how a program measures up and stands out as a quality option among other offerings.
CrossFit’s Standards
So there’s no confusion about what our standards are, elite fitness requires that we:
Learn, practice, master, and work out with functional movements.
Incorporate variety across all workout parameters.
Get uncomfortable regularly.
Eat in a way that supports our efforts in the gym.
To understand why these standards are so critical to the results CrossFit delivers, we need to examine them through the lens of balancing safety, efficacy, and efficiency.
Functional Movements
Movements like squats, presses, deadlifts, lunges, Olympic lifts, push-ups, pull-ups, jumps, sprints, and carries are the nuts and bolts of our workouts. These movements develop all of our musculature, tendons, ligaments, and bone, enhance general physical skills to a significant degree, and allow us to move large loads, long distances, quickly to generate high intensity. The results we achieve are, in large part, due to the potency of the movements we use.
We relentlessly obsess over proper technique and range of motion in these movements because this enhances safety and efficacy. For example, when our standard is that an air squat always goes below parallel rather than stopping at parallel, those final inches aren’t about perfectionism; they’re about activating the posterior chain, building essential mobility, and developing the full range of motion your body needs for real-world challenges. Every rep counts because every inch delivers measurable benefit. As we learn to move more efficiently (with better technique), we can complete more work, more easily and more quickly, thereby increasing our power output, or intensity, spurring greater results.
At the same time, our refined line of action supports orthopedically sound (safer) movement and develops capacity in the ranges of motion life demands. As a result of our technique work, we have a good balance of safety and efficacy. With our teaching and cueing methods and highly effective progressions, the time investment to develop proficiency in a wide variety of functional movements is relatively small, adding a dose of efficiency to the process.
Variety
We don’t just vary some things in our workouts; we vary everything. Loads, reps, sets, rounds, duration, and distance. This comprehensive variety is what builds the broad, general, and inclusive fitness that CrossFit practitioners value. It’s not just about kicking ass at the gym; it’s about kicking ass at life, and our program prepares you for that.
This variety also provides elements of safety. First, by using a wide variety of functional movements, we develop our musculature, tendons, ligaments, and bones fully by stressing them from all angles. In addition, variance allows us to train more often while avoiding overuse injuries.
While it may take extra time to learn more movements, we are experts at teaching them. And one of the great things about functional movements is that they share many common movement themes. Once you learn one, you have a foundation to learn many more relatively quickly. The variance in our program supports the balance in safety, efficacy, and efficiency.
Intensity
To get the results we’re looking for, we have to get uncomfortable regularly. This doesn’t mean redlining, flailing around out of control, or wrecking ourselves only to have to take time off with an injury. Getting uncomfortable means pushing ourselves to the point where we’re hanging on to maintain our technique while holding our pace. Our lungs and legs may be burning, we may be breathing hard, but we keep going and fighting to keep the arch in our low back, reach proper depth, and lock out fully. We refer to this as threshold training, and this is how we strike a balance between safety, efficacy, and efficiency every day within our workouts.
With threshold training, we push ourselves to an uncomfortable place of relatively high intensity because this is where we get results in the shortest time. Simultaneously, we labor to preserve the technique we developed over months of honing proper mechanics and consistency in these movements. The charter we emphasize is one of mechanics, consistency, and, only then, the judicious application of intensity, which is our way of balancing safety, efficacy, and efficiency for the best results.
Nutrition
We need to eat in a way that supports our efforts in the gym and our overall health. That is, we can’t eat like a 5-year-old (yes, I’m looking at myself in the mirror right now). Chicken nuggets, candy, Pop-Tarts, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, French fries, and ice cream will not fuel elite fitness. We need to experiment — which includes weighing and measuring our food — and constantly refine our diet to find the right combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fats from whole food sources that support our activity level and performance, but not excess body fat.
Eating this way allows us to push harder more often in the gym while still recovering better and supporting all of our organs, metabolic systems, and bodily processes. In this way, proper nutrition enhances the efficacy, efficiency, and safety of a program. Without addressing the nutrition component, a fitness program will diminish its impact on all three of these factors and dramatically blunt the results achieved.
That’s it. Those are our standards. We implement them day in and day out for a lifetime. Simple but not easy. This is our unvarnished truth — no dumbing it down or compromising, no flashy gimmicks. These standards are not just about being hard for hard’s sake or morally superior somehow; we hold them unrelentingly because this is how we get the best results. We owe this to those who are searching for a way to be the best version of themselves or for a reason to take that first step on a journey that will save their lives.
This is why we will not waver in holding the standard.
