IT’S THE CROSSFIT GAMES! HOW TO TURN YOUR FITNESS ENTHUSIASM INTO PROGRESS

If you’re anything like me, the CrossFit Games motivate you to train like nothing else! But it is easy to get carried away with all the excitement. Do all the fun workouts and bring this energy into your training without beating yourself up (too much) while moving you closer to your fitness goals.

Unfortunately, just doing workouts that resemble the CrossFit Games Events won’t make us Games Athletes, and probably won’t support our goals either. The goal of the Games is to test athletes and find the fittest people on earth. There is a reason they stopped calling the events “workouts”, they would crush the average CrossFitter, while not giving an appropriate stimulus to create fitness. So what should you do?

Though it is dependent on your specific goals we can all use this one piece of advice. Go to your class and push yourself harder against your friends. The beauty of CrossFit is in high intensity. The CrossFit Level 1 teaches that “intensity is the independent variable most commonly associated with maximizing the rate of return of favorable adaptation to exercise”. Often we see athletes who train 13 hours a day and think volume is the key to fitness, so we bump training volume up and then go at 60% across all of our pieces. This is a flawed idea. We are losing intensity to volume.

Now if you have a specific goal, you want to do better in The Open or qualify for Quarterfinals then look to the areas where you need the most improvement and add 2-3 training pieces a week dedicated to that modality. For me it is strength, I should add some extra volume there while focusing on keeping my intensity up in the WOD.

But most importantly keep this energy up! We all have felt days where your energy is low and training sucks, so ride this high and enjoy your training!