Putting Your Skills to Use

I’ve had a really interesting year so far in terms of my own fitness. I started out working really hard, fell off, lost motivation, gained a little weight, then got bummed and sat around for a couple of weeks wondering why I couldn’t force myself to push the way I wanted to. I made a handful of excuses: “I’m too busy, too tired, my knee hurts, etc…” Even as a coach and someone who spends all day in the gym, I’m not immune to losing that fire from time to time.

It took some digging and some dedicated time reflecting on myself to figure out what the problem was: I didn’t have any goals.

Since I started doing CrossFit, I’ve always had something I was working towards. Muscle ups, Snatch PR’s, improving my endurance (no, really...), I've always had something in mind that I wanted to get better at or some deadline where I needed to be as prepared as possible. For me, I’ve learned that this can be a double-edged sword.

Now, If you are someone who can work out consistently week after week and never lose stride, please teach me! I’ve learned that if I don’t have something to work towards or a target to hit, I’ll just kind of go through the motions and let things slide too much. I’m not saying you should always be training to compete, or you should only be motivated by hitting new PR’s, but what I think we should all do is set an expectation for ourselves that we keep moving forward.

Recently, I set a goal to complete in a weightlifting meet (with a little push from Jenny and Ashley. Thanks to you both!) Now that I have a goal in mind, it’s lit the fire again, helped me really push and hold myself to a high standard, and made me practice what I preach.

To be honest, when I started training for this, I felt kind of guilty about not doing as much CrossFit and focusing so heavily on weightlifting. My thought was, “I’m a CrossFit Coach, I write all of the CrossFit workouts, so I should only be doing CrossFit.” What I’m realizing now is the main thing I’ve always liked about CrossFit. You can set a pretty high baseline of your fitness, and then leverage that to do anything you want to do. That’s always been really appealing to me but not something I’ve put into practice for myself.

I love CrossFit, and it’ll probably always be my main form of working out, but for now, I love that I can take a step back from MetCons for a little bit, focus on something else, and my long-term fitness isn’t going to go anywhere. Doing that has me super excited about trying new things. So when this meet is over, I’ll try something new. Maybe its a Powerlifting comp, or a (half)marathon, or even letting Peter beat me up at Jiu-Jitsu haha, but the best part of CrossFit is how it can prepare you for anything. I’m pumped to see what else I can do.