Misfit Podcast
Misfit Athletics provides information and programming to competitive Crossfit athletes of all levels.
Misfit Podcast
How to Get Better at CrossFit - E.333
Ready to elevate your CrossFit game and connect with a community that shares your passion? Discover the secrets behind optimizing your performance with insights from Misfit Athletics. We've got exciting updates about our content hub, now relocated entirely to the Misfit Athletics YouTube channel, alongside the rebranding of Team Misfit to Misfit Affiliate. This change is all about unifying coaches and athletes on our Misfit Athletics Discord, setting the stage for high-quality programming and unparalleled connection.
In this episode of the Misfit podcast, the coaches discuss how to get better at CrossFit, emphasizing the importance of understanding the methodology behind the sport. They explore the balance between strength and overall fitness, the journey from novice to professional athlete, and the significance of variance in training.
The conversation also highlights the need for proper scaling and execution in workouts, encouraging athletes to make small adjustments for significant gains in performance. In this conversation, Coach Drew and Coach Hunter delve into the intricacies of CrossFit coaching, emphasizing the importance of understanding athlete capabilities, execution, and the concept of athlete IQ. They discuss how novice athletes often overlook mobility and foundational movements, leading to poor performance and potential injuries. The conversation also highlights the significance of reading workouts strategically and balancing knowledge with simplicity in training. Emotional intelligence in competition is touched upon, illustrating how it affects performance. Ultimately, the hosts advocate for a holistic approach to CrossFit that combines technical skill, mental awareness, and a willingness to push boundaries.
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We're all misfits. Alright, you big, big bunch of misfits. You're a scrappy little misfit just like me. Biggest bunch of misfits I've ever seen either of the Misfit Podcast. On today's episode, we are going to be talking about how to get better at CrossFit. What, why would we do an episode about that If you haven't been listening? Recently, within the last few months, we've done an episode on how to improve your engine, how to get stronger and how to do skill, and if that wasn't leading anywhere, you might think that we're I don't know fucking High. And if that wasn't leading anywhere, you might think that we're I don't know fucking high rocks or hybrid or God knows what ripoff is coming next. We need to funnel this down to the actual thing. Hunter, I've got my notes but, like I do want this to be a bit more free form, part of that was part of it. You can probably tell by looking at my notes is a little bit of word vomit, just like getting my thoughts down on paper a little bit.
Speaker 1:Um, before that little housekeeping um, if you are watching this on the misfit podcast YouTube channel, um, make sure that you are also subscribed to and have the alerts on for the Misfit Athletics YouTube channel, because all of our podcasts are now being posted on the Misfit Athletics YouTube channel and will stop being posted on the channel that you're listening to. Now. If you are on the Misfit podcast, after a few episodes, we're going to keep it running for a little while just to make sure that we bring it up a handful of times, give you a little bit of runway here, but make sure that you are subscribed to Misfit Athletics on YouTube. That's where you're going to be able to get all of your content moving forward. Also, it's been mentioned on social media, mentioned on a few episodes of the podcast, but we are rebranding Team Misfit, our affiliate programming, as Misfit Affiliate, bringing it back under the umbrella of Misfit Athletics, just from the standpoint of and there's no real big changes here from the standpoint of, like, we get a lot of eyeballs on Misfit Athletics and we're very passionate about the affiliate programming and the affiliate side of things. So we're going to make sure that we can deliver that to as many people as possible, and one of the things that we're also doing sort of as part of that rebrand is moving our team Misfit gyms coaches all of that from its own Discord to the Misfit Athletics Discord. So you're gonna have a private channel for coaches. So that'd be the person.
Speaker 1:Typically, the first person that makes it in from the gym is the affiliate owner or whoever's in charge of sort of signing up for our programming etc. But you can also ask us for an invite for any people on your coaching staff. If they've got questions for us, if they want to see the questions and answers, all that stuff, they can be added in. And, last but not least, this is a bit of an experiment, um, but I think that if the largest group of misfit athletes in the entire world, um, like is the athletes following the affiliate programming, that they should also have an opportunity to communicate with one another and that one's as simple as can be.
Speaker 1:If you are a team misfit gymsms athlete, that includes Misfit Gym Portland. I know a bunch of our members here listen to the podcast discordgg forward slash Misfit Athletics. That is how you get into the free Discord and then under Programs you'll see Affiliate and go in there and let it rip. I think it could be fun for people to be able to do that. So, all that being said, of course, head to the sugar wad marketplace and get your free trial for misfit affiliate. Head to misfit athleticscom and get your seven-day free trial for individual programming needs.
Speaker 2:Okay, hunter life chat what you got yeah, we are in, uh, full off-season golf mode and uh, in Maine, thanks to four inches of snow in the last two days, it's unclear whether my home course is going to open back up for like three days when the snow melts before it closes for the year. But uh, yeah, we are in. We are in like the equivalent of post CrossFit games or post open of like hey we're, we're rebuilding a little bit.
Speaker 2:Checking in on the swing. We're trying to find a couple of light bulb moments here and there, and so we're in the simulator looking at numbers a couple times a week now to try to dial in for next year. Okay, so lines up pretty good with how to get better at CrossFit, how to get better at golf. I don't know how to, I'm just trying to. Yeah, that's fair, we can do a podcast on that next.
Speaker 1:I don't want to jinx myself, but the Steelers are cooking. Ponch Burger, my fantasy football team is cooking. What is the name of your team? Ponch Burger, my fantasy football team is cooking. Uh what?
Speaker 2:is that.
Speaker 1:That's the name of your team, ponch Burger. Well, so Ponch Burger is the name of my guillotine league, which starts with 18 teams and is whittled down to four, so actually in the playoffs now. So it is cumulative points. I did cumulative points from I actually think it's just because I'm better at math than other people because you get a free agent budget and when a team gets chopped, you get to bid for their players. Yeah, in this past week I I literally got the two no, potentially the three best players in all of fantasy football, just because other people didn't like take the 10 minutes to figure out the bidding and everything.
Speaker 2:Um.
Speaker 1:I got Saquon Barkley, derek Henry and Justin Jefferson all on waivers, which should not be a thing.
Speaker 2:Even I know that's a good, that's a good deal, right, it's a good deal, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then Miami chills um is my fantasy football team name, um and we are solidified in second place. This is the last week of the regular season going in and I will be in the playoffs. And that's the league where I jinxed myself. I was a dynasty. I made a video making fun of my friends and I've been cursed since, but I'm back in the playoffs somehow.
Speaker 2:And I think, whether I fucking lose or not, that video was dope, so that'll live in history far longer than all the yells you've taken after that.
Speaker 1:That'll live in history far longer than all the L's you've taken after that. Oh, dude, 100% Would not go back. There was one year where I took I didn't say anything, I took all of the fantasy football money because I'm the commissioner and I put it into an AI crypto thing and the money it didn't double, but it wasn't like 1.5x and I was willing to eat it if it didn't like work, um. And there was a run during that season where I thought I was going to make the playoffs and that I had like offset the fucking karma of the situation. Nah, didn't work, um.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I listen, the odds are higher that I'm gonna be really happy about the final product of one of those three things, sure. So basically, what I'm saying is three things are going pretty well and I'll fucking take it. Um, yeah, but I don't want to jinx myself, I don't want to get too far ahead. The the thing that sucks in the real football. The actual football is you have to beat, uh, lamar jackson, josh allen and or patrick mahomes with russell wilson and while he's been way better, he's not them. It's not patrick mahomes.
Speaker 2:No, no, he's not patrick mahomes yeah, really begs the question how much further can work smart or not, hard or take you, you know, very true, pretty far Looks like yeah, pretty far All right.
Speaker 1:Um. So, like I said, whether you noticed or not, this episode has been um teased by us talking about the single modality stuff. Um, we, we talked to you about, to you about how to improve your engine. We talked to you about how to get stronger in a bunch of different categories and we went deep on skill acquisition. Now, a lot of athletes like those topics for the wrong reasons. A lot of coaches like those topics for the wrong reasons. A lot of coaches like those topics for the wrong reasons. They're fun and they make so much sense in their own little bubble. And that's why if someone and this has happened multiple times someone outside of the crossfit space, or even someone that's maybe like retired or something, is like do you think you could get me better at like bench pressing, or could do you think you could get me better at like bench pressing? Or could do you think you could get me better at like I'm so bad on the c2 bike and it's like please, that's all you're asking me to do.
Speaker 1:That's the only thing you know fucking easy it is for someone who is trying to figure out how this puzzle goes together to go attack that thing. Um. So the the note here is you are not smarter than the methodology and every single one of us, even the most devout, like like I, only program in, whatever it is, wms and g's, and it needs to be exactly what was said at the very beginning of the methodology. Blah, blah, blah. We get these dumb ideas. We get these dumb ideas of like I don't know um, some people, just the single modality stuff. They think that they can just go get better at the thing without doing the thing at all.
Speaker 1:And then some people uh, an advanced version of that is um, we've got some really funny stories from back in the day. But we knew people who wrote a 2k um as their only workout of the day every week and they only did Fran as one of their workouts every time. And they you know what I mean. They basically just did the same workouts over and over and over and it was like, well, uh, uh, like really high level crossfitters have a whatever 159 fran. So if I just get my friend down and it's like now you're just fran specializing, that's the, that's also the money ball, that's yeah, exactly um.
Speaker 1:So again, we've all been there, we've all tried to go, do that, like, like. We've all had those moments of well, this is the missing link in the CrossFit space, so I'm going to go outside of it to come back in.
Speaker 2:And we'll talk later about when that's appropriate.
Speaker 1:It makes a ton of sense. Yeah, it's just not right.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it makes sense. It like on the surface it makes sense. It's like I'm. You know, I do well in the open in some workouts, but as soon as the heavy barbell comes out, like I get buried. Therefore I need to get stronger. Therefore, I'm gonna do a strength program and maybe ignore crossfit or do less of crossfit for a certain period of time and therefore like I should get stronger and it's like you're. That's in my opinion. That's where it falls apart. It's like right, so we've identified the deficiency. It's it's strength, specifically like crossfit strength. Let's say, like I can breathe hard, but if there's a heavy barbell I get stopped in my tracks. Okay, so we need to get. We need to get stronger. We're not just going to do zone two work and that barbell is going to get lighter. It'll help, but that's not going to work.
Speaker 2:So, we get stronger? Okay, right idea, but that's the place where that's the gray area, right? It's like am I solely focused on getting stronger at the expense of my overall fitness? Because that's the line that people tend to cross. It's like I am willing to sacrifice my fitness for this one specific area which, oh, by the way, helps define my overall fitness. So by isolating the thing that you want to get better at and sacrificing the other 10, other nine things, let's say we'll use the 10 general physical skills. If I increase my, you know I pull the lever that says increased strength, but all the other levers, you know I lose some endurance, I lose some stamina, I lose work capacity. It's like you got stronger that barbell is not as heavy in the Metcon anymore, but you just lost 300 places in that workout because your fitness dropped off. And that is where people, I think, can't kind of wrap their heads around the idea If, like, if I need to get stronger, why can't I just do a strength program and get stronger?
Speaker 1:It's the yeah, so much of the stuff that we talked about in those episodes is auto built in to crossfit. It's already there, yeah, and like especially for and we'll get into it in a second kind of the difference between the novice and the professional and the the gaps in between. But we talked about in the engine episode about going different distances and time domains. That speeds CrossFit we talked about and has the variance built right into it, right. And then we talked about within the strength, we need to have those moments where we're being super powerful and we need to have the endurance and we need to squat and we need to pull and we need to press CrossFit right.
Speaker 1:Like why do people think that all crossfitters that have decent genetics are on steroids?
Speaker 1:It's like, well, like mixing bodybuilding and endurance sports, like what's gonna come out of that? You know what I mean. Like you go into the meat grinder and that's what comes out the other side, so, so, um, I think that's so incredibly important and what happens is an athlete at the very highest levels earns the right to do more single modality work at certain parts of the year, and people assume that that's what you need to do to get to where they're at, yeah, and that is just such a huge problem. And the funny thing is a lot of not a lot of some of the high level CrossFitters don't know that, because I've had conversations with them where they're like I think this program or so-and-so that's around me, their program should look more like mine and I argue that that athlete hasn't earned the right to do that yet. Like they haven't gotten to the point. They haven't gotten that baseline level of CrossFit is the thing that you're trying to get better at and you didn't get good at it before. You then went and tried to refine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a little bit of, I guess, maybe cognitive dissonance, and it's like it's not out of ignorance per se, it's like the high-level CrossFitter that makes that recommendation is so far separated from. There were a lot of steps that they had to take that was doing, you know, building their engine, building their strength, improving their skill, getting better at CrossFit to get to a place where, like their baseline fitness level and capability in the sport of CrossFit is so high that they then actually go kind of back to like separating things out for a couple of reasons, not least of which is, in a lot of ways, longevity like the like, and, and physical, like the physical kind of beat down that occurs from doing one, two, three like traditional crossfit Metcons per day. Like you accidentally accumulate 150, 200 jumps or you know, 200 squats, wall balls, stuff like that, and you just do that over and over over the course of the season. It's like that's not sustainable for somebody whose capacity is high enough to withstand that sort of beat down. So they have to, in a way, kind of almost go back to a more traditional style.
Speaker 2:It's kind of weird. It's like we use think of CrossFit as GPP for life or like use CrossFit as a program to get better at your specific sport and in a lot of ways, once you get to a high level in CrossFit, it's almost the reverse. It's like we can get really we can maintain a high level of fitness in CrossFit by doing borderline, traditional strength and conditioning protocols, because we already have that baseline like sports-specific CrossFit fitness somewhat in the bag. So it's kind of a weird inversion that happens as you get to a higher level, but that high level is attained by a fraction of a percent of the population right, and there's a I really like rites of passage, um, and I think that there is a rite of passage within crossfit of like, basically one workout a day.
Speaker 1:You're going really hard, like three or four times a week, and then you just get these little glimpses of what that can do for you. Like I play, I strength trained a ton growing up. I played baseball a ton growing up and crossfit for a short period of time, literally, like I went from I had C level speed relative to the people that I played against, to A plus and I went from like I like am like a crafty hitter who's like putting balls wherever to like being able to hit fucking bombs in a short period of time, and it's just like. That was that rite of passage moment. I took almost 10 minutes off my 5k time without running.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, like those, those things that happen, um, give you this level of buy-in and you're not really gonna like, you're not really gonna like turn on the methodology. At that point you're gonna need to give yourself breaks from it. If you're at a really high level and again, you're not really going to like, you're not really going to like turn on the methodology. At that point You're going to need to give yourself breaks from it if you're at a really high level and again you're going to need to specialize to like get to the tip of the spear.
Speaker 2:But there's something really special about the early parts of your, those beginner gains that you get from it that blow your mind no-transcript is the one workout executed at super high intensity, no longer moving the needle as well as it could, and, for the most part, your average everyday person you will never get to that Like. The thing before we ever start adding training pieces is when we start talking about the other 23 hours right, the nutrition, the hydration, all that sort of stuff. It's super easy. It's objectively easier to just do a second workout. It's to do that 10 minute amrap in class, then, you know, rest for 10, 15, 20 minutes, whatever, and then hit another workout.
Speaker 2:Or just, oh yeah, I'm just going to hit another workout, or just, oh yeah, I'm just going to do another lift and it's like, yeah, I can, I can sustain this and it. It's true, you could probably do that for a little while, but again, we haven't kind of settled down on the basics of, you know, the, the, the, the other kind of 23 hours. And then the other element that, like I I'll interject at some point in this conversation is the, that kind of mechanics, consistency, intensity that has to precede any sort of like addition of a volume or, or you know, specialized work that that you perceive is necessary to move the needle on your fitness and that's the perfect segue.
Speaker 1:So, so I typically, if I'm trying to figure this out within an athlete, I have an exercise that I'll do, where I'll go through how I feel about what they're capable of and then how they execute, because unfortunately, those things are not always in perfect harmony. Right, and when it comes to capabilities, of course, the goal of the listener right now is to develop what they're capable of, to enhance to further what they're capable of. But before you do that, you need to know where you're at, and one of the things that you're talking about is like okay, so we know that the novice, um, they develop their engine strength and skills in couplets and triplets that are short, medium and long, like it just, we already referenced it, we already alluded to it. Um, you know, we, we do it out on the black mats, um, at a pretty amazing rate. Um, it just do CrossFit, like, if you're, if you are anywhere near the beginning of your journey, that's what you need to do Now. The it's like all the way down the road, we have the professional athletes who refine their engine strength and skill to bring them back to the couplets and triplets that are short, medium and long.
Speaker 1:And why I said it was a good segue is because there's like 10,000 stops on novice to professional and a lot of people get it wrong in terms of when they need to, when and how often they need to sort of get out of this and go specialize in the other direction. Because, again, it's what you see that's put out there and there is a little bit of the like what got me here won't get me there, but you have to know, like what that split is, and I just think people get too smart. Like that's one issue that I see a ton of. You're more cerebral athletes, you're the athletes that enjoy programming and getting into the weeds. They're overthinking it because we don't really we still don't really have like amazing data or nomenclature whatever. Like that doesn't really live in the crossfit space and it still feels almost kind of magical, right, like like what happens, what takes place, feels sort of magical relative to measuring a single modality, like it's just so much easier to, you know, sort of have the science behind no-transcript to do those things.
Speaker 2:They understand how their body works with respect to like okay, what do I need to do for this two-minute workout versus this eight-minute workout versus this 30-minute AMRAP? The experienced CrossFitter knows that they also have the current capability to do all the movements in the sport. Right, we're not throwing a random new movement at an experienced CrossFitter and it doesn't happen. They're practicing things that haven't shown up in competition yet, because they've established the capability to not only do the existing movements but do them very, very well and in high capacity.
Speaker 2:The novice CrossFitter is like, hey, we're fighting to be able to do all of the movements. Maybe we can do most of them, but not all of them. And then, if we do have the capability to do most of them, odds are like the movement mechanics still need some work, the capacity still needs some work, and it's not. We're not at a point yet where specializing is actually going to move the needle on our entire fitness. We need to keep plugging along on the path that kind of got us there before we start to think about, like you know, am I, am I good enough at everything to be specializing? And unless you found yourself on a semifinals floor or higher? The answer is probably not.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, the part of the journey that I think someone listening to this podcast would need to be able to identify, more than the bigger picture, the more macro engine strength and skill is sometimes within a program. Depending on your volume, it could be under exposure to certain movements and it's like, it's like almost like what you don't know. You don't know, like you can't sort of put yourself through that experience and we'll identify that as like right, so she's good at front squatting and pressing and not thrusters Like let's let's do a few EMOMs every once in a while. Let's just make sure it's like I know how to brace in this movement, I know how to breathe through it. Maybe they're holding their breath while they're doing it, maybe they are lowering the bar too soon, or you know, like quarter extremity's not there, whatever it is, but those are just these tiny little like like nuggets that get added on to the programming, that aren't going to derail everything that you do. Um, and that's actually the.
Speaker 1:I've told this story 10,000 times, but I'll my way. That was fast, twitch or high skill. I could keep up because I would catch up in those moments. But anytime there were more burpees, more double unders, more rowing, more running, whatever it was, wall balls, things of that nature. I just was like I don't know how I'm supposed to like figure out how to catch up in these things, so I wrote bitch work in. This is CrossFit MF was an affiliate, in my garage, um, and we did the the uh spray paint, uh chalk, the like spray paint chalkboard thing, um, very yeah this is a class affiliate owner Brain hates you.
Speaker 2:Oh dude, it was a classy joint, Don't worry about it.
Speaker 1:Um and I just listed out the movements, and I would make sure that I did some form of what I just said once a week, like a wall ball ladder and just be like can I breathe through these things, am I moving the way that I'm supposed to, et cetera, like that comes before. Okay, now three days a week are two strength sessions and like all of this different stuff, because what you mentioned precedes all of that the baseline development of the movement patterns that you need to be able to succeed in CrossFit. That comes first, before we can even talk about some sort of specialty program related to you know, you overdoing it and bringing in all of this like endurance terminology, or I got to lift nine times a day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean the nice thing about that anecdote and just kind of would apply to a lot of people, is the idea that, like hey, we don't necessarily need a specialized program to get better at a specific thing.
Speaker 2:Right, like, if you have a baseline. If you're doing CrossFit, then, like, by definition, you have a baseline level of fitness, and if we're saying that there are one or two small things, or maybe there's a couple of small but related things that are interfering with your ability to move the needle, it's like we don't need to just go all in on those specific things. We can do exactly like you said. Like hey, once a week or twice a week, after you finish up your class workout, hop on the pull-up bar. Let's do an EMOM of some butterfly pull-ups, try to like dial that skill in. We're not sacrificing any like overall fitness and we're not introducing a volume of a movement or a program that is going to skew us so far in one direction that, like, we lose overall fitness. We just need to like address, identify and then just put like two more eggs in that basket as opposed to. You know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the One of my favorite ones that I think at the affiliate level is like If you have the time is just so perfect For like a hundred reasons Could be its own episode is A lot of people struggle on a particular machine Classes at 5 pm. You show up at 4.45 and row slow as hell for 15 minutes before class starts because that's actually what your body wants, to be able to warm up. And then you row slow as hell for 15 minutes once class ends because that's also what your body wants and you're going to be able to perform better. And also, holy shit, 30 minutes times one, minutes times one, two, three, four, five days a week. You think you're going to get better at that thing.
Speaker 1:That slow changes. It's a 220 and then a 219, a 218, a 217, etc. Um. So again, these things, especially when they're outliers, they don't like make sense. Like you get that remote client who's six foot one and really fit and bad at rowing and you're like, yeah, you're gonna just warm up on the rower every day yeah, forever like this makes no sense you don't make sure enough, I'm gonna exposure done like box checked, that sort of thing, um.
Speaker 1:This may seem obvious, um, but it is not.
Speaker 1:This may seem obvious, um, but it is not executed in an obvious way.
Speaker 1:You need to be on the right program, um, and then that would infer the scaling needs to be where it should be at. So, like, the best case scenario ever is someone has a coach who changes the workout for them, um, although you could play devil's advocate pretty quickly and just say you should fucking know too, because that's going to be important in terms of the whole execution conversation that we have. Um, but you need to understand the intent of the workout and have the ability and the humility which is huge. You might know better and not fucking do it anyways, because you're in a class and suzy q is over there and you want to show her how fucking sweet your delts look after deficit handstand pushups, um, to make the adjustments either to I'm not on the right program or this is not the right workout for me.
Speaker 1:Like, this part of the conversation is huge because you can just go do the wrong workout all the time and just get all of these other things that we talk about. That can be right in that context and the program is not going to work very well for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh yeah. I mean I think, like I think of this just within the context of our own programs. Like if you're somebody who is following the hatchet track, for example, I'm going to assume that you can perform all of the workouts in the Misfit affiliate programming as written with a high level of intensity and be toward the top of the leaderboard, right? So it's like, yeah, it would make sense that I could crush for lack of a better term the affiliate program that is, either you know, the misfit one or whatever the gym that I'm at is doing in order for me to be qualified to follow a competitor program, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If I have to scale the shit out of a competitor program like it might lose, you might get some might get lost.
Speaker 1:In translation there, what what I'm saying?
Speaker 2:no, no, like, like, if you, if, if it becomes butchered to a certain extent, it's no longer what the program, oh yeah, yeah, for sure it's like if we, if we have to scale a program so severely or just so consistently, then yeah, we are maybe losing the efficacy of what the intent of that program originally was. And then it goes back to, like the humility, the ego thing. It's like, oh, I'm a, I'm a competitor. It's like says who Says you Like congratulations, like what, like follow the program that matches your current capabilities.
Speaker 2:We talked about this a little bit in the podcast last week, kind of that zone, the zone of proximal development.
Speaker 2:It's that this program challenges me just slightly outside of what my current capabilities are, such that I move my fitness, my skill, my strength, whatever to the right a little bit.
Speaker 2:But if that program is, if it's the equivalent of doing a CrossFit Games workout every day where the intensity is low I can't, you know, my movement patterns suck and I can't actually obtain anything out of the training then we're not moving the needle in the right direction. So and it's, it just goes the whole all the way down the ladder from I'm following the MFT program because I'm a CrossFit Games athlete all the way down to I'm just an everyday person following the affiliate program, like how do I get the most out of this program and the answer is to perform the workouts like you said, understand what the intent of the workout is, whether that's your own athlete IQ or more than likely asking your coach program or whatever your own athlete IQ or more than likely asking your coach program or whatever and then being willing to make the adjustments to match what is appropriate for you. I think fortunately we've the community is has gotten past the kind of RX or die mentality.
Speaker 1:It seems like that's probably wonder if that is like community wide, like across the country and across the world, or if it's just us, or if it's just here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I get the vibe, though that, like when we travel, I don't really get the vibe that I used to Like people just don't like need to see RX written next to their name.
Speaker 2:You're saying it's moved in the right, the direction of?
Speaker 1:I think it has, but again, that could just be like me noticing that, yeah, um, so choosing the right program isn't just choosing the right program for you. Um, one of the things that you need to be able to develop your capabilities to the point where you could excel in the sport is broad time modal domains and then downstream, that should create varied stimulus. Um, now, instead of you going in to the program and doing a full audit on it and being like, okay, so this is, you know more of this energy system and okay, now we have these movements, that should be taking. Proper programming does that and it takes care of so many of these things and that brings us all the way back to the beginning of like. Crossfit in and of itself takes care of so many of these problems.
Speaker 1:But if you notice, in whatever program you're following, that you're continuously doing the same thing over and over, there's a pretty good chance that you're not doing the same thing over and over. There's a pretty good chance that you're not hitting all of those things. But it's incredibly important to go short, medium and long in a different stimulus, to have the different movements built into it, for that to be able to like again, that's just this meat grinder that you're thrown into, where properly programmed variance takes care of all of these things. But you, as an athlete, either need to find a new program or audit, like what's going on here, is this, is this, is this, because varied is not random, like I remember that argument from back in the day. Yeah, but the program in and of itself, aside from your capabilities in terms of using variance as a guiding principle, is like very, very important are all are intertwined right.
Speaker 2:Because think back to when you first kind of started crossfit and it didn't matter if it was fran or let's say, let's say a two-minute workout, because nobody was new to crossfit was doing a two-minute fran. It was a two-minute workout, two minutes as hard as you can go on a bike up to a seven or eight minute fran up Cindy. All of those workouts for beginner CrossFitters feel the same. They're fucking gas tank stimulus. I'm too stupid to know how to pace this. I'm not fit enough to actually like pace myself correctly in order to make it the full 20 minutes without falling off a cliff. And that's part of that.
Speaker 2:That experience that is, that is gaining fitness, especially for a like kind of un of unindoctrinated athlete coming into the gym. It's like, yep, I'm going to let you suffer for the first couple months of this experience because that's just kind of how it works. You don't have the level like a lot of athletes simply don't have the fitness like allow the variance of the program to kind of show itself. If every single workout has your heart rate at 190, just breathing, hands on knees gasping for air, it's like I'm okay with that for a novice crossfitter because it's like that we're just getting that person's fitness like to a baseline right. The scaling thing. This is when it's like, okay, I've been doing this for long enough time that I know like I'm experienced enough to know that when I see something on the whiteboard that looks easy, it's probably not. It's like, okay, great, we've, we've, we've crossed the first threshold of crossfit is understanding that that's a trap.
Speaker 2:We can then start to adjust our you know the scale, understand like OK, this is how this workout is supposed to feel, and then I can adjust and scale accordingly, rather than the person who says, like, ok, the whiteboard says what I'm supposed to do. Workout just continues to be that metabolic beat down every single day. That doesn't move the needle as well as it does for somebody who's like okay, we can be a little bit more, we can refine this a little bit better, we can be a little bit more nuanced about our approach to this. But for a lot of athletes, like the first few months, every workout's a gas tank stimulus, and that's how it kind of has to be. Once you get smarter, though, there should be a difference. You should be able to adjust your pace, and maybe you only have two gears. Maybe it's only like I have hair on fire gear and I have like slow as balls gear. Okay, well, at least we have the two bookends of the spectrum and we can slowly start to fill in the middle, but like that's where the scaling.
Speaker 2:And we can slowly start to fill in the middle, but like that's where the scaling and choosing the right program comes in. Because if every workout just fucking annihilates you, something's wrong at past a certain point in your crossfit experience and that's so.
Speaker 1:So people will have that be the case and they'll start to know better. Because you don't really get better scores, like. One of the issues in that world is eventually, like the person who's not trying anywhere near as hard as you is crushing you in an amrap, which means they rode a thousand more meters than you and did 50 more wall balls than you and did 600 more double unders. Whatever the metric that we're looking at is and that is also part of why CrossFit works that accumulation that you get within that zone.
Speaker 1:So you need to be able to go hard, but you also have this like mountain of reps that you get when you learn how to pace, and I don't know I don't hear it as much now, um, but it's. It's the people who like to run through the brick wall that think they get these crazy strategies. They'll say to you like I'm going to interval this 20 minute. Amrap, they're going to work really hard for like a minute and then they're going to do like a 30 second transition I need you to stand 4.3 feet away from the wall ball target, throw it at a 72 degree angle with five backspin.
Speaker 1:And it's like no, you, you, you. You need to develop your aerobic capacity or at least try to use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you. But those strategies, like again, a lot of what we're talking about is from like the early days of CrossFit. Every once in a while you do still see it Someone will say to you you're like, yeah, I think I'm going to like like a hundred cows for time on the echo, echo bike or something like that. They're like I think I'm going to go like 45 hard, 15 easy, like they just come up with the craziest shit because they have one energy system.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're like I'm gonna fucking use said energy system today and I'm gonna figure out the best way to do that.
Speaker 2:It's my favorite. When open season comes around, it's like, all of a sudden, a different part of people's brains like opens up. It's like some dude was just underground for like 364 days and they like opens the hatch and just like, here we go go. I have the dumbest idea possible. You're going to do this in an open workout and then you're going to read it.
Speaker 1:You guys make fun of me too, because I'll, like I'll go deep with a member that I like don't even know. I'll have like a 20 minute conversation with them about this, like beautiful plan, and you guys are standing in the background laughing at me like there's not at me, like they're not gonna do that. No, what are you doing? They're not gonna do that don't, don't.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be like who is this guy, don't he's smiling the rower for the first three minutes of their?
Speaker 1:workout, you're gonna be real so upset, it's so upsetting, um. So again, we'll wrap up the capabilities thing by saying you get better at crossfit by executing and that's our segue to execution on the variants that we talked about and a lot of times it needs to toe the line between challenging your energy systems and challenging your capabilities, that scaling also. There's another side to that coin. We've got some over scalers out there. We've got some people who always do the 75 pound thruster instead of the 95 pound thruster and we don't get that overreaching. We don't. You know we're, we're making omelets here, we're breaking eggs. There's going to be moments where you choose the wrong thing, and that's okay as long as you don't do it too often.
Speaker 2:I got to have those occasional conversations with athletes where it's like hey, you know they're. They're like 20 pounds between 75 and 95. Like it doesn't always have to be like convenient plate math here, like if we always do 75, why isn't it 80 today, or 80 and then 85 and then 90, that sort of thing. So, um, the only thing I want to add on the capabilities side, before execution and this is again kind of affiliate coach brain here, but like the other, the other element of this is that a lot of athletes come into CrossFit. They get kind of going as a coach. I see people come in with with already kind of like a certain you. You come into the gym with a level of capability, whether you know it or not. Maybe your fitness is extremely low, but you have certain capabilities as far as like can we literally put our arms directly over our head? Can we squat without our knees caving in? Can we like just very basic fundamental movements and a lot of athletes let's say you're somebody who just you know, who just came into the gym, or maybe you're a weekend warrior type, you work a desk job, we're kind of slumped forward at the computer all day and my arms don't go over my head super far. We start with like hey, we're just going to do CrossFit. After a little while, though, we get to a place where it's like, hey, man, your mobility, your ability to get into good positions is actually what's hindering you. A lot of people will skip that step and say kind of like, I'm just going to work with what I've got, and that kind of works in certain sports where it's like it's like the sidearm pitcher Right, it's like, hey, you're, you're an anomaly, it works for you. And because you're a professional baseball player and a pitcher like I'm not going to, we're not going to screw. Like I'm a pitching coach, I'm not going to fuck with this too much, we're going to dial it in a little bit, but you're an anomaly For the most part.
Speaker 2:The mechanics consistency, intensity conversation applies to 100% of people. The mechanics there is a correct and an incorrect way to do movements. That's the mechanics. The technique is the nuance of the athlete. It's like, hey, I got longer femurs, so I need to adjust where my toes point when I squat to make this mechanically advantageous. Okay, but they're like.
Speaker 2:Those nuances come after we've established like, hey, if you can't keep your knees from caving in when you squat, like there is nothing that we're going to work on that is going to make that better. So we need to like make that better in order to open up capacity in other realms, and I think a lot of novice crossfitters kind of skip over that just like, yeah, like I got a bad shoulder, like you know, I I sit at a desk all day, like my hips are kind of tight, so like let's just work around that. It's's like no, actually, no, we're not going to work around that, we're going to, we're going to improve that so that we can increase your capacity later on. No, by the way, we're going to help prevent you from being injured, because that's how people get injured is just by continuously and repeatedly compensating because we're just working around things rather than getting to kind of the root of the problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the humility and ego side of it applies to what you're talking about as well. There's a lot of people that don't want that from a coach and I'm telling you right now public service announcement you want that from a coach. Don't make it about a power struggle or I'm just the kind of person that can't tell me what to do. You want whatever part of the equation that's really missing for you. You want someone to apply that resistance and be like hey, you've got a lot of these boxes checked, but if you don't do three minutes per side of couch stretch every day like we're going to, we're going to become stagnant. We're going to, we're going to get the beginner gains and then it's going to be over because you just don't have access to being able to do these things.
Speaker 1:And it applies to a bunch of different places. Um, and I just think it's important to put that out there because it's part of the coach's journey you might not, as a as a novice coach, push back on certain elements of this equation and then you finally learn everyone needs the pushback somewhere and you're the one that has to sort of hold that line and be like no, this is this. Is you paid me to get you better and even though it sounds boring, this is the thing.
Speaker 2:This is what you need to work on yeah, and the result of that is so me being having coached for a while now and I'm pretty comfortable with telling an athlete hey, the problem isn't like you need to squat more, the problem is is that you need to do some squat therapy. Like I'm comfortable having that conversation with somebody. Where this actually shows up is when I'm coaching. I have somebody who walks through the door says, hey, I just moved here. I've been doing CrossFit for eight years. I'm looking for a new gym. It's like awesome, sign them up. They come in to take class and the first day there's a barbell movement.
Speaker 2:It's like man, that's too bad. You move like dog shit. And nobody ever told you otherwise. Because you were an RXx athlete at your affiliate, the coach either didn't know how to work with you they weren't as fit as you, so you didn't feel like you could like coach somebody who was fitter than you or it was just like, yeah, that person's fine, I'm gonna pay attention to other members and me. I'm like heart a little, I'll shed a little tear for that person. It's like man, you got screwed. You were just good enough to fly under the coach's radar, but somebody could have really really helped you because now you've got really poor movement patterns. That is going to be so fucking hard to relearn because you've ingrained them so deeply in, you know over the last handful of years.
Speaker 1:Don't be that person, shout out to mike tomlin the standard is the standard, doesn't matter who you are.
Speaker 1:That I like that yeah it's just like that's what it is. So if you're the best of the best, huh, we can make you better. Or I mean like when you actually think about it, you're basically saying saying if you're, if you're following the opposite advice, like I'm just going to stay on the beginner's ass for the entire class and berate them the entire time. You know what I mean. Like, hey, this is going to take a little, while they did a lot of things they can fix. Like we're going to give them a few nuggets here and there and that's going to be part of it. So, like each person needs what they need while you're coaching. Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1:The other side of the coin here is execution. Um, and so much of a lot of people reach out to us and ask us how we know what we know. Um and Hunter and I actually a lot of times have different answers to this question. Um, which I think is good. Um, so Hunter will have um, we had had a. We had a coach from a previous camp. Reach out, hunter had a response that's extremely helpful with like here's what I've read. Here are links to this. Make sure you're developing here. And then my side of it is is so much like and of course you do this as well, but, but like observation, like this thing has just felt so new and like there wasn't anywhere for me to go other than like, deep into what I see out on the floor at a competition, et cetera. And then you know, you guess and check when you're in Google sheets and rinse and repeat early on for sure you know 2011 to 2015.
Speaker 1:Maybe you would just feel in a lot of cases as a remote coach, like you moved the needle where you needed to and then the person just could not do it on the floor and it's like why, why is that the case? Like what can we do to make sure that someone and you would think in a lot the things that these people that seem to be gamers are actually doing? And that is essentially where athlete IQ came from. So, mind, body and experience the three points of the athlete IQ triangle and every once in a while there's an athlete that embodies all of them, but a lot of it was like this really good athlete, what do they bring to the table? This other athlete is really good, but they bring something else to the table Can? Is there kind of a Venn diagram here, and one thing that was almost always a non-negotiable for the gamers was this intimate knowledge and like memory of every fucking workout they've ever done, and some of them like really high level intelligence, like, hey, they have a great memory, thumbs up. Some of them.
Speaker 1:The opposite of that, I'll just say maybe not the like you know, if they took a traditional iq test, it might not be the highest thing in the world, but they developed it through conversation and almost like storytelling. It'd be these little powwows after workouts where these athletes would be like I went 9.75. Oh, I actually broke it up this way. I did a ton of small sets, I went touch and go. I thought I could hold 13.50 on the rower, but it turns out with all these transitions and you get 15 minutes into the workout. I actually had to go back to down to 1200.
Speaker 1:And it was fascinating to listen to. It was like holy shit, like they have a ton of information from this and they like remembered all of it throughout, having their heart rate in their throat and what it reminded me of was, I mean, at least 10 people listening to this podcast have been cornered by my dad where he has talked to them about a very specific story about baseball that would honestly have no context to anyone other than him, but he's going to tell you what happened in the seventh inning in 2001. There's two men on like just like he would call me at baseball tournaments as a kid and I could like it'd be like talking to like a girlfriend in seventh grade on the phone, like you can set the phone down. He's like yeah, and you know, jimmy, jimmy was up and he sprayed one and I'm like how the and he remembers all this shit. He remembers it from my brother's little league games, like and it reminded me so much of that. And it's like okay, what is the thing about this? And it's the student of the game, it's the. I really do actually like this like.
Speaker 1:We had a bunch of athletes who were incredible athletes that didn't really like crossfit, like, and we didn't. We just they were so good and so gifted genetically that it's like you put a bunch of eggs into that basket Cause it's exciting, but it's like, no, like the, the the runway wasn't long enough for a lot of these athletes Cause they were like training sucks, yeah, or like, like this, like. Why are you guys still talking about CrossFit? This is so boring. Um so the execution, understanding that there's a level of just like I really like this and I like to talk about it and I like to talk about you know, like I rested 14 seconds between my legless rope climbs and it's just like at first.
Speaker 2:when you hear stuff like that, you're like what is happening right now and then you realize, do you think at the, at the highest level, there is a spot for the athlete who is so gifted and it's like I hate training but I can go execute? Can that person be successful? I mean, we know, cody Cody's the first one that comes to mind as far as somebody who didn't care for training but could turn it on when it was necessary. But I gotta feel like that's an anomaly.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is they can't reach their potential. So if they could be there.
Speaker 2:Just good enough to hang with the squad, but not Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yes, You're like, oh, this person could win the CrossFit Games and every third year they qualify for it. So the gap of who you are and who you could be is larger for a lot of those athletes. And there are there's nuance to it, right? So like he would train like the equivalent of three times a day for like four months leading up to the CrossFit games and they need a break up to the CrossFit games and they need a break. You know what I mean, like that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:So, um, and he didn't like hanging out in the gym when he wasn't training, like that sort of deal. So, um, there's, there's definitely nuance to that. But I just it was so fascinating to me to notice that that was the case with these athletes and like they're the ones who knew how to actually execute on workouts, have a strategy, know what's going on there, I would say, would you say that intimate, in-depth knowledge of your capabilities comes first, or understanding how to read workouts come first, or it doesn't matter, you need both, like if you're at a certain point in your journey, like I think.
Speaker 2:I think, I think, Ooh, that's a tough one. I think you can.
Speaker 1:there might not be an answer to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean cause, like you can if I know how to read a workout, but I don't know what my capabilities are. Yeah, that's a, that's a good, that's a good one. Chicken or the egg, sort of thing. Cause, if you know your capabilities, but you can't read a workout. Does it matter if you, if you can read a workout? You're just like. I know where I'm going to get stuck here, but I don't know how to approach it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I think the question would be like who's?
Speaker 2:who's the athlete who knows one but does not know the other?
Speaker 1:And I don't know if that person exists at that level. Um so, and if you are going to execute at an extremely high level in the sport, you have to know how to read workouts. Um, and knowing how to read workouts is there are a lot of layers to it um, can I?
Speaker 2:I'm gonna change my answer. I'm gonna say an in-depth knowledge of your capabilities. I think that's more important. I think that at the highest level, the coach helps read the workout. How many athletes do we know that? Like, just like, yeah, I'm gonna go unbroken, unbroken, then I'm gonna row at a 132 pace and then I'm gonna be done, be done with the workout and you're like well, and you so.
Speaker 1:So, uh like. Third option over to the side that's scary is athletes can know how to read workouts until they're the one that has to do them. So that's a whole.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah. Hey, I got a great strategy for you, yes, exactly, yeah, they, they know.
Speaker 1:And it's funny too, because some of our high level athletes are also remote coaches and they give amazing advice and then, when it comes to their own programming, they turn into a fucking mackadoo yeah, um, so the at the highest level.
Speaker 1:We do the know your enemy exercise and know your enemy is showing an athlete this workout has six minutes of rowing in it and four minutes of muscle ups and three minutes of double unders and probably 14 two second transitions, whatever it is, um, and then you sort of just start to understand what's going to go on there and then it develops into the nuance of like, okay, well, if it's, it isn't just muscle ups, if it's rowing and muscle ups, because it's pull, pull, we have to decide how we're going to break this up. It goes into a ton of different sort of realms with that. But you, as the athlete, need to be able to look at it and know, like, what is the total volume here? Like that, like that, like you you take an amrap and then an athlete like, especially if it's long, like I just didn't do the math on this like, yeah, this is a hundred squats, and like a hundred moderate weight squats, like that's a lot, like that's going to be an issue here, um, so, knowing how to read workouts, um, in terms of what is the total volume in them, how long will certain movements take, and then what is the stimulus. What am I trying to do here If I know that it's possible for me to have the cardio stimulus where it's just the merry-go-round, if I'm going to be stopped dead in my tracks because a specific movement stops me, or there's just like and this happens a lot in the sport, so it's easy to call out your gas tank stimulus where it's like large loads, long distances, it's just like, oh like.
Speaker 1:There's really no way power snatch, burpee, box, jump over, like things like that. Or it's just like, like this ain't going to be cardio for anybody, that sort of thing. Just knowing what about the workout could stop you is incredibly important so you can understand how you could be very fit, very strong, very skilled all of these things Very dumb. What the fuck is this workout? Yeah, yeah, there's a level of ignorance that can be brought into this and I'm telling you right now there are a thousand people worldwide that are fitter than you, that you could beat in whatever competition you're in, because you know what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again kind of the inversion of the CrossFit experience. Right it's. I'm a beginner, I don't know what this workout is, how it's supposed to go, so I'm going to go as hard as I can from the start and we get really fit that way for a little while. You're an experienced CrossFitter who makes that approach. It's like what the fuck are you doing? How much, how much? How many points are you leaving on the table? How much faster could you have gone?
Speaker 1:How many more rounds could you have gone with the correct strategy? So it's another kind of interesting inversion. As you get more experienced with the sport, I can do 20 muscle-ups in a row. Congratulations. If there's 20 muscle-ups in a workout, how are you going to break that up and what does that mean compared to a stimulus? What is your rowing pace in?
Speaker 1:I don't know 100 different situations and I'm not going to list out everything, but you can understand what sort of like intense spider web of data points would come from doing that kind of exercise. You need to know what you can actually go do in the moment. And now we get into how this becomes a feedback loop. You need the variance to know that. Like again, one of the things, one of the pieces of feedback where oftentimes we pat ourselves on the back is of feedback. Where oftentimes we pat ourselves on the back is how did you know that there was going to be rowing and wall balls and power snatch? How did you know that that was going to be the case? It's like they program like 15 movements, so we're going to make sure you do that movement combination a few times. Um, but, like you, you got to know what you can do, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like that seems simple and kind of silly to say, but a lot of people don't.
Speaker 2:Which, again, is the intersection of like can you read the workout Right? Can you look at the workout and recognize that, like holy shit, there's like I'm going to end up doing 40 muscle ups in this workout, Like there. And now, all of a sudden it's like what is 40 muscle ups do to me in a vacuum, Like how do I, how do I even approach that in a vacuum? Now, what's going to happen if I'm now? What's going to happen if I introduce rowing? If my heart rate's in my throat, Like what?
Speaker 2:does that do to my capability to do a movement that otherwise feels really comfortable for me in a vacuum or in very specific instances. But if I can't again read the work, if I understand what my capabilities are but I can't read the workout to recognize what's about to happen, that's just as useless as like oh yeah, I can read that workout perfectly, I just don't know how long it's going to take me to do 30 muscle-ups like period. I have no concept of it. It's like they'll equal both their problems.
Speaker 1:We will complicate this further now, perfect by talking about how. So so many of the instances that we're talking about is gaming workout. We're talking about how do I get the absolute best score in relation to the sport anyways? How do I get the best score on the workout? How do I get the most reps in the AMRAP? How do I do it faster than everybody else?
Speaker 1:Um, that is one way to look at a workout. That is the most important when you're competing, but then it's typically not how we train, which is like just a whole new thing and why coaches need to be part of this equation, because I might go in and say to you, like we're going to work on your rowing today, so we've got a triplet, and I want you on fucking easy street with your sets and your transitions off of the rower. I want you at a thousand cows a hundred cows per hour, higher than you would normally be in this workout, because we're going to try to develop this. We're going to try to see what happens to the other movements.
Speaker 1:Um, so you need to know how to strategize the workout based on reading it, and you also need to know how you will improve at the thing in the workout, when you're training and not at a competition like those are two very different things. Um, and another way that an athlete could get confused about which thing that we're talking about. So we might be all over them in a muscle endurance workout about you need to break this up more or the opposite you need to do huge sets and fall apart and see what happens like that a lot of times. That advice that you're giving them on how to improve in the offseason would be the opposite of the advice you'd give to them on game day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's the training versus testing mentality. It's like the testing is like okay, the hay's in the barn, what do we know about your capabilities and how do we leverage them maximally to get the best score in the workout? If you suck at muscle endurance workouts and there's a 30 spot of muscle up smack in the middle, it's like, okay, so we're not going to approach this with max set out of the gate the way we might in training, because that's a bad idea. It's like what is the appropriate strategy to get through this with your capabilities in training? It's hey, we're actually going to reach a little bit on that first set and kind of see what happens, like what's the? And then maybe we, we use a, the clock to manage rest in between our sets or whatever to push our capacity to the right, but otherwise the, the idea that we would try to um, sorry, us sub your typing was throwing me off here um fired, um the yeah, straight like now. Now I'm all fucked up.
Speaker 1:He's gone don't apologize, that's that's his fault um so I thought he was typing at first. No, we have a question. Hunter. Do you think athlete IQ is affected by emotional intelligence, specifically during competition?
Speaker 2:Emotional intelligence.
Speaker 1:You want me to go first?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to do my usual ask for clarification of the question. Is this, like you mean, like their, their psychological state or like emotional intelligence? To me is like my awareness of somebody else's current emotional state are you referring to?
Speaker 1:a coach, coach to an athlete, or like so emotional intelligence would be specific to the person, um, and how they're dealing with their emotions. So, like the, the easiest example of of emotional intelligence is your friend that is very smart in a practical book smart sense, or they've got a great memory or they've got whatever, but their, their, their emotions run the show. Um, they're not able to use their intelligence because they're like, they are their feelings right, so they're up, they're down, they're left, they're right, they're not unable to do that. And then on the other side of the equation you could have someone who has less book smarts. You know genetic disposition to intelligence but knows themselves very well, like that sort of thing. So I would say athlete IQ we actually talk about this.
Speaker 1:In athlete IQ, um is in the mind section, so you have mind, body experience in the mind section. It's like, like a conversation that I've had with a ton of athletes is you are not your feelings, like we talked about the whole monkey mind and the computer and all that. And one of the episodes, like if you're always back there in the amygdala you're going to, it's going to be a fucking problem, and you see it in competition fairly often, like it's the, you know you have the person who realizes adrenaline is like increased power, output and endurance, and the person who's crippled by it, that sort of thing. So I would say huge in competition, huge across the board.
Speaker 2:To be honest, yeah, no response I, yeah, I mean I, I guess it was more like are we talking about it from a coach or an athlete perspective? I mean, yeah, of course, obviously, like you can have, we can have a spreadsheet that says, like, if it's this duration, it's, it's this pace on the rower, like that's easy, that's the, that's the easy part and, honestly, like you get an athlete who is cerebral, like that they fill in their gears matrix, they know, like we have all of the component parts, but it's's like once execution happens, like all of a sudden the actual execution is a small part of it and it becomes like how do you handle the pressure? What is the actual situation that you're in in this workout? Are you in a competition where you need to beat X number of people in order to win, to make a cut to whatever it is? Those are just intangibles that I think when we talk about how often somebody should be competing.
Speaker 2:A novice competitor or somebody newer but who wants to move into the competitive space needs to get reps competing, because they need to know what it feels like to have all of the capacity, to have all of the work done and then have their emotions all of a sudden be like hey, what's up?
Speaker 2:Like you didn't notice me in the gym because you were comfortable, you were in your environment, you got your pull up bar, you got your grips, you got your chalk bucket, it's all happy. Go lucky at the clock where you like it. And now you're in a completely different environment. So we're in, you know, in a competition. So we're dealing with that unknown element and also, like, all of a sudden, like I don't have the same confidence that I just did I didn't have four workouts under my belt across the last 24 hours that are making me tired and are now making me question my strategy and is now making me emotional. And now I'm gonna start crying. And now I'm upset and like I need somebody to calm me down, like I'm not and I'm not, uh if, like I've seen that happen, live as you have, you know, dozens of times.
Speaker 1:Like people always apologize the first time, and it's like I don't go to a lot of competitions where the person doesn't cry, so let let's get past that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so do your thing, come back and then we'll have a conversation. Yeah, Um, so yeah, absolutely Like that is. That's, that's the competition mind, kind of that's. That's like the next step out, Once we step outside of the training bubble. It's like all of a sudden there are other factors that you forgot about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to. This isn't final thoughts, but it's a topic that, like I think is important but is a little off the path of what we're talking about today. You can go too far with a lot of this, and the only thing I wrote in notes is too smart, isn't smart at all. Like people get a lot of. They really go down the rabbit hole and they become a student of the game and they're trying to develop their athlete IQ and they get, as you would say, hunter wrapped around the axle. They should get a little bit too cute with some of their ideas or they think no-transcript.
Speaker 2:get a little bit too cute with the way that they program, the way that they train, the way that they execute, the way that they coach, etc yeah, it's a and again kind of the the bob and the weave of the experience of the CrossFitter is like I, at the start line, it's I'm like ignorance is bliss right, it's I'm. I'm too dumb to know that I should pace this workout and I'm going to get really fit by being dumb. By being dumb you start to develop the awareness that I said. It's like hmm, that whiteboard that looks suspiciously easy, so I'm going to approach with caution. It's like ah, very good, we are learning Grasshopper that that was a trap.
Speaker 2:But a lot of experienced CrossFitters never go back towards that. The beginner mindset of like hey, sorry, sorry, man, like you need to light your hair on fire for the next two to three minutes. You're not going to like it, but there is absolutely no other way to approach this workout unless you want to take last place and like. For a lot of the experienced crossfitters, we we forget to occasionally not always, but occasionally revisit that kind of that, that era of your CrossFit experience. I've I talked a little bit about one of my athletes who we've been working with as far as like, hey, you actually move too well, you move too perfectly. Like, why did your 30th snatch in the standard. Look like your first snatch, like you were at the CrossFit Games, like I want that thing to be fucking heinous by the time you finish.
Speaker 1:The person who won had a ton of snot pouring down her face.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like you look way too good to have just finished that workout, you know. And it's the. It's like I would to be fair, I'd almost rather have that than the opposite of that. But it's like, hey, there is a point at which it's like it's that threshold training concept in CrossFit. Like, if you're moving perfectly, I'm going to tell you to go faster. If you're moving like a jabroni, I'm going to ask you to slow down a little bit. But I'm not looking for flawless, I'm looking for pretty damn good, definitely safe, especially in training. But like, we have to have that gear in competition.
Speaker 2:That's like, hey, I actually have to turn my brain off a little bit. There's too much swirling around in the old noggin. That's like, you know, it's the, it's the meme of the. We're doing fucking calculus, the woman's doing all kinds of math in her head and it's like no, no, no, stop that. Turn your brain off for a second, put your feet on the pedals and go as hard as you can. And it's like, in a lot of ways for those athletes, they get scared because they are too smart, they know what the workout's supposed to do, they know what it's going to feel like. And it's like I cannot experience that if I just ease up just a little bit and it's like you're right, You're fit enough to do that, but the adaptation isn't going to be there.
Speaker 1:The gains aren't going to be there. The the gains aren't going to be there unless we kind of occasionally breach that, that line of I'm too smart for my own good. Yeah, and I would say honestly I'm like thinking back. I would say, on our team, you probably hold the line, have the jedi level version of that more than anybody else, because you have the knowledge that you're talking about. You have the knowledge to be able to get wrapped around the axle and you make sure that you don't and that other people around you don't. Um, and the funny example of that is austin and I talking that day about he can't go. Pennies is a misfit benchmark running heavy squat cleans and muscle ups. And Austin was talking about with me how he had tried every strategy he could think of to get a faster time and he couldn't. And what did you ask him, hunter?
Speaker 2:Have you tried harder? Have you tried? You could have you tried harder? Have you tried?
Speaker 1:trying, have you? Yeah, have you tried trying, or have you tried going harder um and that's what it was.
Speaker 2:Have you tried going?
Speaker 1:yes, yeah, I don't remember which one it is. I actually think it might be on video somewhere. Um, but austin, who, like in such a perfect austin way, was like no, oh yeah, like like a lot of people wouldn't admit to that he would immediately be like I haven't tried, just like running faster and like transitioning quicker and basically just doing the workout faster. Um, and you know another funny one would be like digging into the world of RPE and Hunter, just being like don't you do it, don't you fucking do it. So a lot of people can like you need it's good to have the knowledge, it's good to go down the rabbit holes and have perspective from all of these different places, but, especially if you're going to teach, if you can't synthesize and break things down and deliver them to other people, that's going to be an issue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to say that's the equivalent of the coach at the whiteboard who does have the knowledge, and it's like I'm going to break this workout so fucking far down for you guys that you're going to like we're going to analyze every letter of what's on this fucking whiteboard to the point that you're blue in the face.
Speaker 1:It's like that it's the magic affiliate that I want to create, where it's like I have three members and it costs 30 grand, so your membership is 30 grand a month.
Speaker 2:They're going to be the smartest three members in the history of CrossFit. Uh huh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the, the, that's no-transcript fucking knowledge right, right yeah like that's.
Speaker 1:That's the thing, and you have to. You have to go through a lot of iterations of yourself as a human and an athlete and a coach to arrive back at that point. And that's the, the midwit meme that I bring up all the times, that the the um neanderthal on the left who says the simple thing, and then the dude in the like robin hood cloak on the right who says exactly what the neanderthal says, and then the guy up in the middle who says like a billion things and he's got glasses on and he's crying, and it's like you arrive at the same conclusions by making your way. You like start as the Neanderthal, you become the midwet, and then you realize that that Neanderthal kind of understood what was going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. Uh, final thoughts. Um, I'm going to keep this real simple Do CrossFit.
Speaker 2:How do I get better at CrossFit? Yeah, how do you get better?
Speaker 1:at CrossFit, do CrossFit, um, and be a student of the game. So that could be just. As you could break it down even further, Like ask yourself if you enjoy all of this, like if it's interesting to you, because that might be a predictor of how far you can take this like you, if you can't do a hollow and arch position laying on the ground, it's like I don't give a fuck what your supposed muscle up looks like.
Speaker 2:It doesn't look right. I already know the answer to that like move, you have to learn how to move. Well, you have to learn how to move correctly. You don't get to just say like this is how I move, so I need to figure out a workaround for this sort of thing, barring some sort of surgical intervention that legitimately glues you into a specific position like that is part of what it means to do CrossFit. It's like learn how to do the movements correctly.
Speaker 2:There is a correct and incorrect way to do these movements. You can adjust and add nuance to it based on you know, like I talked, find yourself in the correct positions, moving the way that you should. Your ceiling is so much lower on your fitness and if you have a lower ceiling on 80 plus movements that we're supposed to be proficient at in crossfit, like holy fuck. The good news is is there are so many. Although there are so many movements, there are actually only a handful of movement patterns that you have to get really good at. But like, those sorts of things take time. It's way more fun to do a crossfit interval than it is to do couch stretch or squat therapy or do your pliability or whatever it is. But your ceiling is so much lower when you can't move properly and you aren't performing the movements correctly. To begin with, amen, did we do it, and also with you.
Speaker 1:Yes we did it. Thank you for tuning into another episode of the Misfit Podcast. The free Discord community is at discordgg forward slash. Misfit Athletics. The Sugarwad Marketplace is where you're going to find a free trial to Misfit affiliate. Make sure that you are also subscribed to Misfit Athletics on YouTube if you are listening on the Misfit podcast channel and MisfitAthleticscom for your free trial for all of our individual programs. See you next week Later.