"It's just another day of practice..."

My boy Ant said this yesterday as we were 'philosophizin' on the phone, and it's true.  Crossfit is a place to just get better. I say it a lot, but that's really why we are all here. It may be to regain functional competence or it may be to achieve athletic dominance, but really, CFDC is a place to train...to get better. I'm learning for myself that my goal is to achieve an increase in my work capacity over a long period of training.  If I try to 'game' the workout just to put up a faster time, am I really increasing it over a broad time frame? On game day, maybe, but not on a daily basis.  I love the sport aspect of crossfit. I love to compete, but there will always be somebody better and somebody worse out there.  I've found that training is a chance for me to be really selfish, because it truly is about what I can do. Take that and make it better.  Guess what, if I can crush the standard time of a certain workout, but it's with something I'm naturally inclined to..I'm awarded zero points.  I try to glory in the WOD's that I struggle with. My crappy sessions are what its all about...because it's just practice

Chapter One...

{*I don't pretend to be an original. Truth is, most of the information I posses in my brain is not unique, but what IS original are the experiences I've had. The ones' I'll share here are mainly related to the pursuit of "getting better". As a coach and a business owner, those will primarily be the lenses that I comment from.  There is a part (big one actually) that thinks this is really stupid to "blog" but the truth is, I get on other peoples' blogs too - a lot of them. So from time to time, I've thought "man, it would really be nice to verbalize that" - I'll get on here and attempt to do so}

"how hard can you make it" 

-Crossfit is hard. Sometimes I forget when a person first starts how hard it really is. It is a kick in the pants, but here is the cool part - our bodies are geniuses at adapting to what we throw at it, which is why we always go back to "moving heavy loads longer distances as fast as possible". I found myself a few months ago, focusing only on the clock, when really, that's just one parameter of increasing that work capacity, right? Heavier loads and longer distances is where its at, fella's. The clock is great, and it is what makes crossfit so potent, but to ONLY focus on it does a couple of things to you:

1) you will put yourself in a position to short-change the range of motion

2)you will miss reps or miscount

3)you will turn the workout into a skill refinement instead of a true test of work capacity over broad time and modal domains (this mainly applies to workouts like fran and other benchmark workouts)

Moral of the story? there are a ton of ways to manipulate these workouts to scale them down...and up. Heavier loads and longer distances will go hand in hand with superior fitness. That's one man's opinion