At the beginning of February I started doing a fitness program called CrossFit. Having not been in a gym class or played organized sports since 7th grade, I'm quite surprised to find that I now know a bunch of ways to, for example, pick up barbells. Each day the CrossFit web site has exercises posted that anyone can do (I follow those of CrossFit Knoxville). It's different every day, and there are a set of benchmark exercises that will, for example, have you do something as many rounds as possible in a given time (AMRAP, in the lingo) or to complete a certain number of repetitions in as little time as possible. In a conversation about CrossFit Daniel Wilson said that he applied CrossFit principles to his academic work, and would, for example, say that he was going to read 100 pages for time. This got me thinking about whether an academic program could be developed using these same principles.

Activities

So what are the basic movements? In CrossFit, they are air squat, overhead squat, front squat, press, push press, push jerk, clean, dead lift and sumo high-pull deadlift. And then there are other basic movements like sit-ups, pull-ups, and so on. For SmartFit they might be reading, writing, computing, estimating, researching, problem solving (perhaps too vague/broad).

And then you could apply the same notions of "as many as possible for a particular amount of time" and "do it as quickly as possible" to the various activities.

Or maybe what you'd do is have the activities be domain-specific. So in math you could work up to doing particular movements like multiplying, doing square roots and so on. And in history, you would provide some evidence of basic knowledge of an event or era. In English, you could write various kinds of things. For example, a WOD would be to write something on a given topic and you would then be given a particular way to write it, like a 5 paragraph persuasive essay, a 160 character text message (the Haiku of the 21st century), a poem, a letter, blog post, email, and so on.

OK, this activity was as many words as possible for time, and my time is up.