Crossfit BK (Bangkok, Thailand)

Crossfit BK, is the first CF affiliate in Bangkok, run out of The Aspire Club – a personal training/gym facility – that added CrossFit to their menu in October 2012. The coaches here are all full-time staff (as opposed to contractors that teach 1-2 classes and have other jobs.) This is their CAREER- as opposed to just a hobby- and it shows. They have weekly meetings to go over the programming/wods and analyze what motivates their athletes into pushing themselves. (I’ll talk more about this later).

New to working out? New to Crossfit? Join Crossfit BK’s fundamentals class. It’s similar to the regular crossfit classes, except they take more time showing the movements in depth and don’t write down any WOD scores on a board. This seems to be the most popular class they have to offer, as well, so you’d be in good company.

Their box is located on the rooftop of the Aspire Fitness Club right off the Asoke Skytrain stop. Just incase you didn’t get the most important part of that sentence- i’ll repeat it: IT’S ON THE FLIPPIN’ ROOF! That’s right. You work out, dripping in sweat, begging for rain, all while looking out at the glorious Bangkok skyline.

But wait… there’s more!

One of the main pros/cons with crossfit is that you develop a family with your fellow athletes. You start to wonder how they are doing, what’s going on in their lives, etcetc. This is a basic problem because people want to chatter– but you’re at a gym to WORK OUT…. not chatter. Crossfit BK figured this out and incorporates stretching with gossip time/announcements. (genius.)

We then went into skill and strength. The skill was EMOTM (6 min) of hollow-holds and glute-bridges. 6 minutes, as Andrew pointed out, was “just enough time for us to get sweaty and gross and whiney at him.” I agree with everything in this statement.

The strength part of the WOD was a difficult conundrum for Crossfit BK to figure out. They were noticing that a lot of people weren’t pushing themselves or getting stronger in the basic olymipic lifts. So they switched it up and have a program where they try to find their X-rep max on Y lift (varies by day.) The beginning of the week is 12-reps and works its way down to 1RM. The lifts switch up every day- but if you were to train here for 2 months, you would begin to see the pattern.

I appreciated having a spot during my back squat. They were relatively small classes so spotting and coaching was easy and not over-taxing. (I never felt ignored during the class, either. Again, appreciated.)

The WOD was an amrap- pretty cut and dry, though there were movements that I had never done before (like dynamic pushups (where you push off the ground and put your hands onto a 10kg plate… yay creativity!) The hardest thing is getting over the humidity and constant dripping that occurs while you’re working out. Welcome to SE Asia!

The fancy bits:

(read: being part of the Aspire Club has it’s privileges!)

I’m a girl. As a girl I like to check out bathrooms- especially in gyms, bars and airports. Some boxes are really simple and don’t even have showers (or flush-toilets). But Crossfit BK will give the Singapore Airport bathrooms a run for their money. Pink lights on the under-part of the sinks, huge lockers, stalls that are bigger than my college dorm (complete with bum-guns). Everything smelled fresh and clean. The air-conditioning is also something to write about (not that you work out in air-con… but it’s there after you work out, which, to be honest, just makes you feel fancy). The best fancy part? Post-wod you get a frozen towel that was dipped in eucalyptus! Heaven, I tell you….

Overall, I really enjoyed this box. The skyline, the coaching, the professional attention to my form and details, the tips on scaling/technique and the humor that was peppered throughout the whole hour makes this place worth visiting- if not joining. Thanks for letting me join you, guys! 🙂