Only YOU Can Know Your Body
Listen To Your Body
As I’m taking a short break between my post-workout protein shake and my meal, it’s a good time to write out today’s first blog post.
I totally understand the whole “push past your mental barriers” thing. I get it. I understand that with CrossFit, you want to push your limits so you can grow and mature as an athlete. However, after a while of getting at it on your own or in the box, you know what’s right for your body. I’m not saying to take the easy way out with WOD’s. I’m saying to be smart about the decisions you make with your fitness.
For my size, I can lift a decent amount of weight for 1 rep maxes. Sure, I’m no Irving Hernandez or Chris Spealler, but I’m pretty happy with my progress. Gotta love my box’s programming 🙂 Even so, I know there’s a weird disconnect between my 1 rep maxes and the weight I can carry through in WOD’s. That’s why I tend to use a weight lower than most people would expect in WOD’s.
I really appreciate it when people around me are trying to inspire me to go heavier, but they just don’t get me. Rather than blow my WOD within minutes (you see what I did there? :P), I want to get a good workout in with the right intensity that the WOD had in mind. Everyone’s body is different, and after 2 years at the box, I’ve learned of this weird discrepancy between my maxes and my WOD weights.
No matter what people say, and I mean this with all respect, I’m just going to stick with what I do to continue my gradual progress. When it comes to fitness, I was never the kind of person who lifts heavy weight or does butterfly kipping pull ups of out nowhere. I’m the kind of person who sucks right off the bat. Then I take gradual steps to build up my strength and skills.
Someone today complimented me on my double unders, which weren’t that great since there was a lot of shoulder work involved. It took quite some time to get those to decent proficiency. For serious…when I had my 3 one-on-one sessions (in place of on-ramp because of my crazy schedule at the time), I could barely do singles. I wasn’t coordinated at all. My coach even joked around, “Um…let’s move onto the next thing…” I was that bad with jump ropes 2 years ago.
Know When To Take It Easy
This sure was a rough week, although it was definitely the first excellent full week of CrossFit I’ve had since coming back from vacation. And it feels great. Still, because of the intensity of the past few days and the roughness of yesterday’s workout, I wanted to take it easy. One of my friends was egging me on to Rx the dumbbell burpees (yeah, that sounds terrible…) at 25# in each hand. Like the WODFather said in this entry, sometimes you just need to take a day off or just go easy on a WOD.
That’s what I did with today’s WOD. I had no intention of Rx’ing this baby. Here’s what we did:
For time:
100 double unders
25 dumbbell burpees (25#/10#…did 20#)
100 kettlebell swings (55#/35#…did 35# because of my back)
25 db burpees
100 dubs
Finished in 18:34
It’s my last WOD for the week, and being happy with my performance the past few days, I knew it was right now to go all out on this. Even scaled down, it was quite a beast of a WOD.
I seriously believe that meditating in the morning puts me in the right state of mind for WOD’s and the rest of my day. Today I just knew it wasn’t an Rx’ing kind of day, so I made my adjustments and got exactly what I wanted out of this WOD. Despite the pain during the workout, I feel pretty fuckin good right now.
It’s Your Call
So no matter what people tell you to do, it’s your call. Of course, I believe you need to have some experience first with the various movements and lifts so you can gauge what’ll still give you a great workout yet won’t damage your body. It’s all about showing up. Eventually you’ll know what makes your body tick.
Call the shots. Take control. Get the results you want.
