If you have followed my posts for the past two months, you have seen my wins and losses over the course of the 2015 CrossFit Open.
Last year I had managed to knock off a couple Toes-to-Bar and a couple Double-Unders. Enough to get points on the leaderboard, and to pat myself on the back.
This year, those moves cycled back into Open WODs, but I failed. Why? Because I didn’t build upon last year’s small personal victories.
What are you grinning for? You know you have done similar things. And that’s the whole point of today’s essay. We all know what we need to do to improve, but we allow ourselves to be distracted, and we simply fail to do what we must do.
Now is the time to identify your weak areas, and develop a plan to conquer them, so you can go into the next Open with confidence.
Where are you going to place your focus? How do you plan to achieve this? You know wishing about it will not make it happen.
It is worth reminding you, proficiency in movements does not necessarily come in your Box’s WOD’s.
You cannot become a Double-Under Ninja, waiting for the next WOD to come around that has DUs in it. Yet, that is often what we do. And when it does come up, we see no urgency in perfecting the movement, because we’re racing the clock.
In your Box’s daily WOD, it’s quicker to scale the workout doing twice as many Single-Unders, than it is to struggle to get the Doubles. And on it goes. Then you wake up and realize that CrossFit Games is announcing the 2016 Open, and you haven’t done a bit of work on your Double-Unders.
PUSH Yourself, cuz no one else is gonna do it for you!
If you’ve been CrossFitting for a few years, you know I’m telling the truth. Similar arguments can be made for Toes-to-Bar, Pull-ups, Box Jumps and many other standard movements in CrossFit.
Now I admit, there are those who are more elite. More dedicated. But if you’re just a regular person who does CF for fun and overall fitness, you may be prone to procrastinating. I get it. Nobody likes to do stuff that they are poor at. But then, if you do not practice them to perfect them, then you will always suck at that movement.
There is nothing new here, yet many of us need to be reminded of it. Heaven knows I have baggage. I just finished my third Open and still can’t do DUs. Really! Why? Because I am not putting in the time.
I have four movements that came to mind, that I need to work on, in the short time I have been crafting this note: Double-Unders, Pull-ups, Toes-to-Bar and Rope Climb.
Suppose I spend just five minutes every week on each of these movements, between now and March 2016.
- Monday, do five minutes of jumping rope, chasing that elusive DU.
- Tuesday, do five minutes of progressive work, to finally achieve a Pull-up.
- Thursday, do five minutes of T2B, striving for consistency in hitting the bar, then stringing multiples together, before dropping off the bar.
- Friday, take five with Rope Climb. Practice jumping up onto the rope and flipping the rope into position and gripping with the feet. Keep doing that until it’s consistent, then begin progressing up the rope, one grip at a time.
That’s about 50 sessions with each movement before the next Open!
I have a great deal of confidence that you and I can do any of these four movements after 50 brief sessions, done over the course of a year. The question is: Will you?
I will be writing about my progress in the months to come. I look forward to hearing about your progress, in whichever movement you may choose.
(photo credit: Andrew Malone – Creative Commons)
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