Creating Change

Many people expect or act as if the mere fact that they want change is all that is needed to create change. Change is a process that requires self-sacrifice, intentional effort and plain hard work if it is to be meaningful and lasting. What do I mean by change?

My business coach always says, ”You are who you have been becoming.” The reality is very simple. When it comes to health and fitness especially, people often play the victim. They blame poor genetics when it is generally the lifestyle “inputs” that have the created their current output or reality. Who you are, the body you have, the mind you have, what you do or don’t do, for the most part – YOU HAVE EARNED!

It is true that you will never exceed your genetic potential, but you will never reach your potential until you hold yourself accountable for your current reality, and own the process of change. Change does not come easily or through intention alone. You have to earn it through self-sacrifice, hardship, hard work, and lots of action. You also have to be willing to fail and get up and try again.

You are the only person stopping yourself from becoming who you want to be! To start creating change, take action now:

1. Get a blank piece of paper and draw two lines down the page to create 3 columns.
2. In the far left column list specific adjectives describing your behaviors today. Use the fill in the blank method such as “I am not _.” For example, “I am not physically active.” Documenting your behaviors instead of who you are helps to leave your emotion out of this and creates a list that is easy to convert to action steps.
3. In the far right column list out all of the behaviors you documented in the left column but without the negative. For example, “I am physically active.”
4. In the middle column write down the specific action that must be taken to create the desired behavior in the right column. For example, “Go to CrossFit Plano five days per week.” OK, just kidding; that was too easy!
5. Keep an action journal. Commit to changing one or two behaviors per month. At the end of each day, write down 3 things you did that day to create the desired behavior. For example, if you want to be more active, then it might look like this:

* Parked 4 blocks from store so I could walk.
* Took stairs instead of elevator.
* Scheduled Elements class at CrossFit Plano.

By having clear, specific goals, and by taking daily action, you will effectively change your behavior within one month. By creating change you are leading your life instead of accepting it. As you continue to changer you “inputs,” you will eventually have the output that you want! Good luck!

Go Hard, or Go Fast: Get More Out of Your Workout

One of CrossFit’s main tenants is to maximize work capacity in as many movements, exercises and time durations as possible. Power is king. The more work you can do in the least amount of time the higher the Power or Intensity. Striving to maximize your power is hugely beneficial because it taxes the entire system much more than low power activities including all three anaerobic and aerobic energy pathways.

“The magic is in the movements, the results are in the intensity.” – Greg Glassman

I recently completed our “Jack Bauer” workout and it was a beating! It took me 1 hour and 23 minutes for me to complete it! I bring this up only to demonstrate to you that as the level of work increases the intensity with which you can complete the work drops because you energy systems cannot keep up with the demand. It is like a 100m Olympic sprinter trying to sprint a marathon! It just wont’ work that way. Read more

Top 5 Tips For Kick-Starting Your Skill Practice

Here are my top 5 recommendations for kick-starting your skill practice:

1. Don’t avoid the Workout of the Days that have movements or skills you can’t do or can’t do well. On the same note, don’t skip the ones that you just don’t like doing. If you don’t like doing it or can’t do it well, then chances are great that this is the thing you need to work on the most! If you have to, scale it down, or just practice the movements.
2. Don’t skip designated Skill Practice days as they are vital to your skill development and give you a chance to recover so you can go harder on the next WoD.
3. Come in/stay late and practice skills with a focused, intentional mindset. Don’t just go through the motions! The best athletes at our gym (and throughout CrossFit) are the ones who do the most and best quality skill practice.
4. Learn and train joint mobility exercises to restore your capacity for functional movement and restore lost ranges of motion in joints so that you develop CrossFit skills and movements much more quickly.
5. Use our forum to log your workouts AND skill practice. Keep a log of your skill practice, including your weakest skills and log each time you practice them. The forum is also a great way to get other’s feedback on your training and find out what is working for them.

Make Every Workout A Success

As a coach, it never fails to amaze me how the longer you train a group of people you begin to see behavioral patterns emerge. You see the same people consistently skipping workouts – maybe because they perceive them as too challenging. You witness the same people skipping warm-ups because as they say unconvincingly, “I don’t need to warm up.”

You also see the same people skipping skill practice days because there is not a workout involved or they simply suck at the skill being practiced. They generally skip run workouts such as 800 meter repeats, 5k and 10k runs. Sometimes they say, “I can do that at home,” but usually don’t, and other times they just don’t understand that training all 3 energy pathways in the body, including the aerobic pathway, is part of CrossFit. These same people are also asking, “What can I do to get better at ‘X’?” or “Why am I not improving at ‘Y’?” Read more

Your Best Body — Discover the right way to succeed.

I started doing CrossFit for myself in late December 2004, and experienced tremendous results throughout 2005. In the first 8 months of 2005 I dropped my body fat from 20% plus to 8.5%, and took my pull ups from 1 to 30. The first time I did “Fran” was with a 35 lb barbell. I could not get the bar in the rack position and all of my pull ups more closely resembled flailing then pull ups – let alone jumping pull ups. Not a single pull up was an actual pull up! My overall time was 17 minutes and some change! I thought I was going to die – it was a very memorable experience. I have since done “Fran” in 3:33 with the full 95 lbs and all pull ups. Read more

2 Reasons to Scale Your Workouts and 3 Ways to Do It

Scaling your workout is very important because it gives you the ability to safely and effectively complete a CrossFit workout of the day. Furthermore, scaling allows you to correctly match your intensity with your recovery and continuously strive for higher levels of intensity.

Purpose of Scaling:

1. Form/Safety – Simply put, incorrect form leads to injury. If a weight is so heavy that proper form cannot be established or maintained under that load, then it should be scaled down to allow for good form.

For example, if you cannot get your thoracic spine into extension for a deadlift using only a PVC pipe (thoracic and lumbar extension are vital for lifting heavy, injury free), then throwing on a few hundred pounds is not going to change anything. It will actually ensure that your spine never reaches anything resembling extension thus forgoing the mechanical advantage of the spine, which makes lifting really heavy weights possible. You will only prevent a flexion wound of the spine IF your muscle tension around the spine is adequate enough to compensate for and prevent the spine from going into flexion.

Instead of painting a dirty car, why not develop the capacity for functional movements (trunk flexion, and extension, hip flexion, and extension, etc.) by intentionally and methodically practicing the skills needed to develop them?

2. Intensity – Intensity is what we seek, and high intensity is enabled by good form. In a CrossFit workout that is properly scaled to your fitness level and abilities, you will experience higher levels of intensity than you would have if the workload were higher. For example, if you do ‘Fran’ in 9 minutes with the full 95 pounds but bust out a 6-minute Fran with just 65 pounds, then the Power you generate and the Intensity you experience will be much higher. You will gain results faster at higher intensities, and you can always test yourself against higher loads as your times continue to drop.

Factors for Scaling:

1. Elite Level Duration (to scale down) – For example, if you are completing a workout that takes the Elite guys and gals 15 minutes, you should try and scale the load or reps to the level that allows you to complete in about the same amount of time. Make sure to log your results so you can adjust your scaling, as needed the next time.

2. Bodyweight Factoring (to scale up or down)– You can use this to determine what weight to use for your Elite level. You can assume that an Elite level male is 175 pounds and an Elite level female is 120 pounds. For example, if you want to do ‘Fran’ with the full 95 pounds and you weigh 150 pounds, then you would calculate the Elite level BW to Load ratio and multiply by your bodyweight. (95 pounds divided by 175 = .54, .54×150 pounds = ~ 81 pounds) This method is bad news for big guys!

3. Perceived Effort – This is very beneficial for days when you do not feel like working out or going hard. Just come in to the gym anyways – give yourself permission to either do reduced Intensity or quit and go home if it isn’t feeling right. You start off trying to keep your perceived effort between 50 and 80%. After the first few minutes of the workout, you can reassess and see how you feel. If you feel much better, then you can go for it and let loose (I’ve gotten Personal Records this way), or you can continue at your reduced effort level.

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A Mindset for Maximizing Your Results

All too often I observe people who seem to think that just by showing up, they will achieve all of their goals. Here is a mental approach to help you get more from your workouts:

1. Let Your Weaknesses Drive You
If you hate doing a certain thing, and avoid it like the plague, or you just plain suck at it, then use that as your guide to do more focused work on that item. Your goal should be to train your weaknesses to the points that they are now your strengths, or at least you don’t wince at hearing that we are doing that particular movement or workout today. By avoiding certain activities: 5k runs, and strength/skill development of all sorts, you are cheating yourself because you are failing to develop all of your body’s energy pathways and the skills that are crucial to your success. Plus, you are only reinforcing your mental weakness and you are limiting your ability to excel.

People who are serious about their results use their weaknesses to drive their behavior. This means that they are humble enough to remove their ego from the equation and they show up to do the work that they dislike the most! Because they are willing to pay the price, they reap more rewards in relation to their fitness and their health.

2. Silence the Weak Voice Within
I hear voices inside my head when I workout! Don’t you? Is it just me? Actually, everyone hears a voice inside their head, and that voice gets louder as the intensity and resulting discomfort gets ratcheted up. The voice can either weaken you or strengthen you; it can cause you to falter or empower you to complete the task at hand.

In the beginning, for an untrained individual, as discomfort gets piled on with Intensity, people’s self-talk turns to: “Stop! Slow Down! You can’t do this!”

Our bodies are capable of much, much more than we give them credit for. Most people’s tolerance for the discomfort, pain, and the uncertainty that comes with pushing their self past their preconceived limits is set way too low. When you give in to the voice telling you to stop, you are simply being too weak.

Start expanding your ability to go beyond your comfort level by flirting with the edge of your comfort level, take small steps over the line and with time you will notice how pushing yourself is becoming easier and the voice in your head is becoming more of a cheerleader than a critic. Remember, it is the mind that leads the way, not the body!

3. Attention to Detail
Don’t just pay attention to your workouts (reps, sets, loads, times), make sure to put your attention and thus your intention on your daily lifestyle. Nutrient intake (quantity, quality, and timing), fluid intake, sleep, relationships, fun/fulfillment factor, and stress, etc. all play into your body’s ability to adapt to your workouts. By making steady, but small improvements in all you will start getting more from your time in and out of the gym.

It takes a proactive mental approach to achieving the results you want. Like most things worth achieving in life, you have to be dedicated and work hard, and you have to have the work ethic to do the right things the right way instead of taking the easy way out. Pay the price in hard work, sweat equity, and reap the rewards!

The Secret to Unlock Your Performance Potential

Do you ever wonder why you are not achieving a personal record on nearly every workout? Everyone, including you, is capable of it. Read more

Three Unconventional Measures for Fitness

How can one measure fitness? It is a term that is often used without great
definition. This document outlines indicators to help identify key factors.
The Eyes Have It
Is your body changing from more water storage or fat storage? Do you have more
lean muscle and less fat? While these may be technical and physiological, here are
the true priorities for fitness: Read more

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