Every Time You Quit, Someone Else Gets Your Prize: Stress, adaptation, and the art of showing up - E.375

What if the secret to leveling up this season isn’t a new cycle, but the courage to keep showing up when everything says stay home? We call it monsoon season: the messy middle when daylight fades, holidays crowd the calendar, and motivation leaks. The athletes who keep climbing the leaderboard aren’t chasing hacks; they’re mastering simple behaviors done relentlessly and refining how they think when the day gets heavy.

We break down two mental models that turn anxiety into action. Zoom in to shrink overwhelming sessions into solvable chunks: one minute, one transition, one cue. Zoom out to see the long arc: one bad interval among 1,500 training pieces is noise, not destiny. Then we dig into why resistance is a gift. Stress—applied in the right dose—remodels your body: stronger hearts, richer capillaries, better fuel use, calmer baselines. That same logic applies to the winter slump; train the “show up” muscle like you train legs and lungs.

Here’s the catch: your gas tank is one system. Life stress, training volume, and recovery all pull from the same reserve. That means more work can make you worse if you’re already cooked. We share practical ways to find the GPP sweet spot, avoid maladaptive volume, and recover on purpose with sleep, breath, sunlight, easy walks, and real downtime. We also connect sport-to-sport mechanics—how fixing early extension in a golf swing mirrors better positions in the snatch—so you can transfer skill, not just sweat.

Before each piece, define “get better today.” Sometimes it’s heavier or faster. Sometimes it’s better positions at 70 percent or composure when the plan cracks. And sometimes the win is simply walking into the gym on a day you would have skipped. That identity—rain or shine—compounds into results you can’t out-hack.

If this resonates, follow the show, share with a training partner, and leave a review so more athletes find it. Got a small win from today’s session? Tell us—we want to hear it.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Rain Or Shine: Season Theme
• 1:01 Housekeeping And Affiliate Updates
• 2:39 Reviews, Language, And Audience Fit
• 7:02 Rogue Recap And Programming Lessons
• 12:02 Paige’s Mindset And Final Event Grit
• 15:21 Teaser: Studio Move And Golf Win
• 17:25 Golf Mechanics And Weightlifting Parallels
• 22:28 Skill Transfer And Coaching Tools
• 27:07 Monsoon Season: Why Consistency Matters
• 31:06 Zoom In vs Zoom Out Mental Models
• 36:18 Resistance Is A Gift: Physiology Deep Dive
• 42:04 Riding The Ebb And Flow Without Quitting
• 47:20 The Stress Continuum And Gas Tanks
• 52:00 Exercise As Stress Relief: When It Backfires
• 57:15 Parasympathetic Recovery And Real Rest
• 1:01:55 Define “Get Better Today” In Simple Terms
• 1:07:05 Reflection, Small Wins, And Memory Hooks
• 1:11:11 Whatever It Takes: Take Your Medicine
• 1:16:15 Hunter’s Consistency And Ego Reframes
• 1:22:10 Paige’s Line: Just Show Up Anyway

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:18

Good morning, Misfits. You are tuning in to another episode of the Misfit Podcast. On today's episode, as promised, we are going to dig into scary season that has been rebranded to monsoon season. Our rallying cry for the 2026 season is rain or shine. As athletes, as the people who crush it, that are always talking to each other in Telegram and doing well on the leaderboards, their superpower is just continuing to show up. So we're going to dig into how to accept that, how to, you know, sort of execute on it, all that good stuff. But as usual, a little bit of housekeeping, a little bit of live chat. In our world, everything kind of happens faster than expected because you have to try to plan for things. So the only thing that that I'll I'll say for housekeeping is just that the new Misfit affiliate phase starts on Monday, December 8th. And I'm pretty sure we just recorded the phase podcast and we're going to record another one because there's another one coming up. Life just comes at you fast. So if you're looking for affiliate programming, you can head to teammisfit.com, click on the sign up now button and get two weeks for free at Sugar Wad, StreamFit, or PushPress. You can also email me, coach at misfitathletics.com if you want to talk about our affiliate programming. If you want me to send you two weeks for free via PDF instead of signing up somewhere.

SPEAKER_03: 1:51

Maybe only because we really, really love the back squat lots of times at affiliates. Anytime you get folks excited for a five rep max back squat, five by fives over another seven weeks, and then a chance to retest that. It's probably your best or you know, most consistently programmed lift across the year. We mix things up the rest of the time. Um and that works really well. But man, there's uh there's something awfully special about five sets of five at just the right weight on your back. Sit down and stand up.

SPEAKER_02: 2:22

So the stars align for me coaching class this morning. I thought about that too. I was like look at that. The universe gave me back squats. We have a really good segue into our first segment of the show here, whether there's some editing that will happen for the last 45 seconds of what's going on. Unlikely. New review for Misfit Podcast. Three of five stars. So I first I saw that and I was like, damn, like usually people give us the five-star review, which listen, if you give that to us, then it gets served to more people and that helps us. It's free for you.

SPEAKER_03: 2:54

But the headline reviews tough too, because that's like, fuck, someone put thought into this. It's like it's a it's a one-star. It's like, like, no, piss off. Yeah. Like five star, love it. Thank you. Three stars, man, what are you?

SPEAKER_02: 3:08

It might be legit. Headline unnecessary F-Bombs galore. Now, there's so many ways to look at this because if I was younger, I don't even know if I would have read the review. I just would have opened with the Jay and Silent Bob song from the beginning of one of their movies, which I won't do. So this review is actually pretty nice, and it's probably helpful that I am now a parent. So here we go. There's potential for a great show here, but the nonstop F bombs make it hard. It's still funny to read. Nonstop F-bombs make it hard to enjoy. Not only are they distracting, surely you can find some new words to describe things, challenge accepted, but they make it impossible to listen while doing dishes with the kids around. The passion and topics are great. I just wish the vocabulary were as creative as the content. Let me tell you, this person is really good.

SPEAKER_03: 3:55

Take exception to the last part. Okay. I I like to consider myself like fairly creative with my language. It might be colorful, but that that's where you lost me. The kids, got it. Dishes, eh. All right. Creativity.

SPEAKER_02: 4:11

But they're saying our content is creative, and that we have to figure out how to replace F-U-C-K with Yeah, the darn. I'm gonna stop uh friggin' around. So uh listen, we'll try. I'll try. I I don't know if I can I can speak for Hunter. I'll try. I'll try for anything makes sense.

SPEAKER_03: 4:32

We'll try for a minute. Kid show. It is a kid's show. We talk about that. It's definitely not a kid's show, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_02: 4:37

No, no, that the when we say it's a kid's show, it's a joke because it's not a kid's show. But that is a decent segue into my son loves the song I Swear to God by Tyler Childers, which opens with I only had a couple drinks last night and a few good hits from the end of the pipe, and I must admit I had a few white lines and I don't know what'll happen.

SPEAKER_03: 5:00

Go, Carter! Come on, kid.

SPEAKER_02: 5:02

I'm partying with a violin and some guitar, and it's it's it's a catchy start show. Tyler Childers. Isn't he a little country? Outlaw country guy, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 5:14

Do you do you is that authorized at the Crandall household?

SPEAKER_02: 5:17

Yeah, yeah. I grew up on Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings and all those guys.

SPEAKER_03: 5:22

It's along those lines, not yes.

SPEAKER_02: 5:24

There's a there's a you know, I'm a like Sturgeil Simpson, Tyler Childers kind of guy.

SPEAKER_03: 5:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 5:31

Pop country. I would I would I would probably use some some choice words to describe my feelings about pop country. Well get colorful with it, would you? Yeah. Um I do I do not like it. And it's I try to sing like I try to sing with it, but like make noises or make up different words because he says play Tyler and then he starts jumping up and down. Right. And and it's entertaining enough that like I remember when he got hooked on it, Maya was traveling and she came back, and I was like, All right, you're not gonna like this, but watch him. He's like, play Tyler, and then he's just jumping up and down. It's like, you know, eventually I'll have to explain to him what that means. Because people who don't swear a lot don't have the non-explicit version on Spotify, like they don't exist. That only exists for people who go out like overboard and they censor. So if it's something like I don't think there's a version of that song where he doesn't say that, right? Can like play it for him.

SPEAKER_03: 6:28

Do we swear enough that we might get a clean version? Spotify would definitely edit our podcast for us to make it. That would be funny. That'd be funny.

SPEAKER_02: 6:36

I have to go through, I still have to show you sometime the things that I have to click on on YouTube. It's crazy some of the things that you're allowed to say on YouTube, as long as you don't have like pre-mid and post-roll ads. Like the words are crazy. Like I don't know whoever clicks that box, but there it's it's wild. Necessary F-Bombs Galore reviewer would not like the list of things you're gonna do. Yeah, that's unauthorized for sure. And then I will well, I'll do a little, I'll do a little. The the reason you guys didn't hear us last week was was that was my travel day coming back from Rogue. Rogue was cool because rogue is cool. Aberdeen, Scotland is like a solid five out of ten. It exists and you can travel outside of it to some cool spots and there's some cool architecture in the city. But it I will admit it's weird to fly for seven and a half hours to that destination specifically.

SPEAKER_03: 7:30

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 7:30

I know a bunch of people hopped on the train on Sunday night to what is it, Edinburgh, Edinburgh? Edinburgh. Edinburgh. And apparently that's like a really cool place. And so a lot of it is just like when I was younger and we did those trips, I would stay and you know, explore a little bit more. But rogues just there's an element of like they have a really cool aesthetic and they push for it to be a spectacle. And you know, they have the money to do so. Like it's very clear that when they do it, it's like this is this is you're spending millions of dollars to improve your brand equity and your reputation, basically. Right. Emailing back and forth with Bill um in 2009 to order my CrossFit starter kit, uh, which was rower, barbell, plates, jump rope, ab mat, wall ball, or something like that. Like there was a kit that you could order on the side. For that to turn into this is just such a cool thing to see. And I don't think it's necessary. They've always sort of been like we're gonna be unapologetic about the programming because we're trying to achieve something specific. We're not searching for the fittest man and woman on earth. Um, that being said, there was just redundancy in movement patterns and rep schemes and things like that that that definitely could have been improved. Yeah. Um and I know that there are certain things that they do basically every year, like you need to be ready to do X, Y, and Z. But I think there could be more nuance in the way that they ask for certain things. And I do think that the criticism of the programming was met with like, like I think Bridges programmed it. And I I feel like he was basically like, I get it. This wasn't thought of, this wasn't thought of, and like we can improve over the course of the weekend, make changes, and then we can change next year. So I don't need to spend a ton of time on that. Um, we're gonna Paige and I are gonna do an episode at some point in December where we talk about what we learn from this year, and it's a lot. Trying to coach and program in this environment with the like, I'm competing every 30 seconds was a whole new challenge. So I'll talk to you guys about how we dealt with that, what I would change, and then she could talk about her experiences dealing with it. But I do think there was a like transformation from the beginning of the weekend to the end of the weekend of just her kind of competitive spirit being revived and knowing she was sick for four weeks straight, and then after that, had two weeks to prep and said she didn't want to prep. So she's she's she's prepped out, right? She'd done so many competition preps. You know, you don't get to do the progressions that we like to do, like you guys are doing right now in phase two. But it was really cool to see her, like she was going out for the final event, which like Rogue is kind of funny because it's a larger athlete's competition, and she is almost always the smallest person there. Like you're in the back and you're with the rest of the girls who are bigger than her, the guys who have gotten real big, and then Thor is back there as well for the strong man. So, like, just context of like Paige looking like a tiny human more than ever at Rogue. So it's it's one of those things where like it's funny because she's a power athlete. So, like you would like when she's in the duel and she ends up like getting into the finals or close to the finals, is like the corral is hilarious. Every person is so much bigger than her in the corral. And they might be bigger, more just based on how tall they are, but they, you know, leverage and all that good stuff. So that part's fun. But like the epitome of that was the final. She goes out there is bear hug, sandbag, carry, down and back twice, 50 cal Echo bike, bear hug, sandbag, carry, down and back twice. And it's one of those things where like we were talking about like there's the logistical just like, hey, you know, hold 65 RPMs or 66 or 67, whatever it is. But the idea of like the only thing that I like demand that you do is try the entire time. Like if you have there's no, you cannot let no mind virus is allowed. This is the final workout, which oftentimes feels like the last round of a shitty workout, right? Like I can do this one more time, and then it's short enough that like while it's probably the most pain you'll be in the entire weekend. Who felt like that? If I get any better, yeah, who connects? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it was just cool to see her lean into that. Obviously, resources are tanked at that point after no prep and you know, red eye flights and all these different things. So I would say we ended the weekend in a really good spot and have her looking forward to, you know, kind of taking some time off and then what's next for her. But that part was pretty cool. And then my last part of live chat will be a teaser for next week's episode. You will not see me if you watch on YouTube in this room ever again. Big news. Big news. But we'll drop that. We'll drop that on you guys in our episode next week. What you got, Hunter?

SPEAKER_03: 12:33

Oh man, did I uh that tell you about my uh season-long golf sweeps victory? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked about it. Did that do it on the podcast? No, we talked about it on your podcast? Okay, we have good that you remember that. Yes, uh though, yeah, I'll go there. So golf handicap season is officially over in the Northeast. So that means basically scored rounds don't actually count anymore. And at the end of basically throughout the season, there's a season-long points race that your boy took first place in. Fuck yeah, dude. Spent uh gotta lose money to make money, as they say. So every weekend you pay to participate in this thing. And at the end, I got a nice little uh I got a nice little bit. Did you just say you have to lose money to make money? You gotta lose money to you have to spend I don't know. That sounds worse. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. All right. Um yeah, so had a nice got a nice shop credit total at the end of the season, thanks to that. But then the question becomes just how much money did you spend in order to make that shop credit? No, no, no, no, no, no. That money, we talked about this the other day, that money disappears. It's exactly it's gone, and then the$400 in shop credit that I have, which is pretty sweet, um, got got me some new swag. So took a first place finish there. And then I guess I'll just keep it along the lines of golf, but I'm gonna try to relate this to CrossFit a little bit because there's like four and a half people that give a frig about golf. Creative. Yeah, thank you. Very good. All right, so current currently we're working on in the golf swing the rotational element. And I kind of told you about this a little bit. Bye, Katie. Katie gets a shout-out on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02: 14:15

Get a shout-out on the podcast, Katie. Bye, Katie.

SPEAKER_03: 14:18

Yeah, go to Drew's office for sure. Drew, Katie's coming to your office. Um, working on rotation. So you and I talked about this, the whole idea. Um, in like you're gonna come say hi to the people. There's Katie. Hi, people. Katie, you haven't eaten that banana yet? Yep. This isn't the end, Drew. This is just the beginning. I love it. So yeah. All right. Working on working on rotation of the hips, something we don't do very much in CrossFit. You don't really do in sports other than your kind of traditional swing sports, throwing sports, whatever. Um, and it's difficult. If you've never done it before, like the whole idea of separating your lower half from your upper half, so being able to turn your hips without turning your shoulders at the same time, like in both directions, is like once you work on it a little bit, it becomes a little bit easier. But doing it live in the golf swing is kind of difficult for me, and I'm working on it. The realization that I've had over the last couple of weeks working on that in golf, there's kind of a common fault called early extension, where like basically, so imagine that you're lined up about to hit a ball, and as you start to swing downswing in the downswing, basically the idea that your back half kind of lunges forward towards the golf ball. Okay. So, like for me, my trail side is my right because I'm a right-handed golfer. Um, and this whole idea that like the right heel comes off the ground, the hip, like the right hip thrusts toward the golf ball, and this causes a lot of problems. It forces you to compensate in weird areas. And like, I kind of had the somewhat of a light bulb moment because that fault is almost identical and super common in Olympic weightlifting, especially for crossfitters, that idea of early extension where if you filmed yourself, you're slowing down, you know, that bar is kind of below your knee, or it's not quite in that hip crease, hip pocket power position just yet. And you're already on the Michael Jackson, hee hee, you know, way up on the toes. And you're attempting to generate force from, you know, that much of your foot rather than the entire foot being planted on the ground. And it's a almost an identical concept in the golf swing. Obviously, there's a, you know, the direction is different, the rotation is is there versus like, you know, a very frontal plane dominant snatcher clean. But it was like, it was super impactful for me. And I was like, oh, I get it. This idea of kind of moving your hips while keeping your feet planted on the ground. And it's made a huge difference in my golf swing. And then the other day, um, I actually did some of the the hatchet extra from the affiliate program, some of the snatches and the it was like the two snatches on one minute, two vertical leaps on the other minute. I switched it out for a squat snatch, but I was able to like I could actually I was trying to kind of connect the dots between those two things because I kind of realized it like, wow, this is like the identical concept golf swing snatch. And it was super helpful. And I felt like I was actually able to like stay patient in my snatch, get the bar into the hip crease a little bit more. And then the timing aspect is the tough part because you need to obviously be extending and jumping at the right time. But it was just kind of one of those cool moments where the idea of, you know, regularly learn and play new sports and crossfit, you know, like I took, you know, the idea of core to extremity from CrossFit to golf, where it's like, hey, use your hips before you use your arms to swing the golf club. And then like it kind of came back around a little bit. Well, here's this common fault that you're seeing in your golf swing. It's also something that you and a whole lot of other CrossFitters struggle with. Like, what are the similarities here? And and kind of kind of kind of put my coaching brain on, really helped me kind of connect the dots between those two things. So maybe if nothing else that you just took from that five-minute rant about something you probably don't give a frig about. Uh creative. You know, thank you. Yeah, very good. I'm getting better at this. Uh, is like that idea of when you go out, like get out of the gym, go learn to do something different. This is something I've talked to like even games athletes about the idea that if you're just in the gym 2115 nining and are never taking your fitness outside to like move your body in a different way, you're probably missing out on a lot of like one, the whole concept of CrossFit to begin with. But if you want to treat it like a competitive sport, well, there's a whole lot of similarities between mechanical movements like a golf swing, throwing a baseball, throwing a football, whatever, that, you know, if you pay close enough attention to actually show up in the gym as well. So that's my life chat.

SPEAKER_02: 19:00

We had a member, send me some videos of her her uh maybe teenage. I don't know if he's 12 or 13, somewhere in that range. I don't think he's a teen yet, yeah. Of pitching, throwing a baseball. And what's fascinating and very similar to what you're saying is I think I know more about it now because of what I know about the human body and what I know about breaking down movement than I did when I did it every day. Just the way that I thought about delivering the information was like, oh wow, like it's crazy the parallels that you can have with this stuff. One of the things that I've I I wonder about golf is like, can you slow your swing down enough to practice the component parts the way that you can in other sports? Like, can you dry swing and really slow things down so that you are truly because like when I hear what you're saying, I would try to rephrase that to teach somebody in showing them the sequence versus saying do this, not that. And so, like literally just do this. And if their shoulders move, it's like not that isn't supposed to happen yet, right? That sort of thing. But I'm wondering in golf, can you slow down enough when practicing to get the concept and then go a little bit faster, a little bit faster?

SPEAKER_03: 20:23

Yeah. I mean, in my experience, and I don't know what an actual golf coach would tell you, but like the it's not as much about like, hey, I'm not gonna do a full swing, but at 50%. It it's actually like a lot of from what I've seen and heard, like a lot of guys will tell you, like, well, a chip, like just chipping is just a miniature golf swing. So it would actually just be shortening your swing significantly because the only thing that changes is just like the the length of the swing and like when things occur. Because there's still, there's still the weight shift into your lead side, there's still like the hips kind of firing first, there's still, you know, there's still a similar motion through most of the that swing. It's just a smaller version of it. And there's like, you know, just like any lift, you know, it's like, okay, if we want to get better at the snatch, we're gonna do some power position, we're gonna do some hangwork, you're gonna pause, you're gonna pause in the catch. There's all kinds of, you know, equivalent drills and stuff like that for a golf swing, depending on your your fault. Um, there's actually way more content out there for golf than there is like CrossFit and weightlifting just by nature of how big the sport is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm still still, man, I'm still rocking coach's eye. I'm gonna rock coach's eye until I don't know, I don't know when it's gonna, because it hasn't existed for years, it hasn't been updated for years. I tried it once and I just can't get behind it. I'm just that coach's eye, coach's eye sound. I can't do it anymore.

SPEAKER_02: 21:52

Coach's eye. And uh if you're a very longtime follower of me on Instagram, there was an app called Yak It where I could put a photo of Hunter up and I could speak and it would make his jaw move like cartoon style, and you could pitch the voice up or down. I used to make the best videos on that. Yeah, yak it just disappeared, and I didn't I just didn't think about it when I got a new phone once and I didn't do the full like app backup and Yakit was gone and something like that still exists. God, those are the best. Yeah. Right. So scary season is typically what we call this, typically how we address it. And it's this idea of like phase one is exciting and it's still summer, and we're just getting started, and all the misfits, no matter you know what level they're on, from open athlete to games athlete are back on a similar program. Phase three is that like open prep or quarterfinals prep, and the sports specific side of things is imminent, and you're doing more Metcons, and that feels very natural to you. And stuck right in the middle of that is phase two, which can feel like no man's land for the reason of it being the, you know, sort of middle child of the phases. And also you're always going through Thanksgiving, daylight savings, potentially getting into winter, Christmas, New Year's, the whole nine. And there's a bunch of reasons why someone could get into the mode of wanting to kind of give in to the dark side, essentially. And we've been doing this for long enough that you pay really close attention to the type of person that makes it through scary season unscathed, or at least for the most part. And it's this like baseline level of consistency, is really what it is. They continue to just show up. And it sounds so simple and boring, and we're actually going to dig into it more over the course of this episode. But if you take anything away from what we're talking about today, it's that other person is just showing up and you're not. And there are different versions of showing up. What does that mean? Is it literally physically just walking into the gym? Is it actually giving effort? That sort of thing. That's kind of a spectrum. But um, that's what we're gonna dig into today. We have again rebranded to monsoon season because of the rain or shine moniker for this year. Um, and I want to open with one of my favorite quotes ever. This, I don't know if it's top 10, but it's up there. Every time from ever to top 10. That's a pretty big spread there, guy. I mean, 10th of all time is pretty good. It's on my, I don't know if it's on my rush more. It's close. Every time you quit, someone else gets your prize. Every time you quit doing something, every time you stop, every time you don't show up, a vacuum is created and someone else fills that spot. And this is what can happen. Think of your highest level of competition, right? That you decided to quit and not show up to. This is the very literal sense. You go to the competition and Keith comes in first or second or third. And you're like, Keith? Who the f is right? Who the frig is Keith? Who's Keith? I work out with this guy all the time. I'm better than Keith. I'm stronger. I'm more skilled. I'm fitter. Yeah, well, you did not, you know, throw your hat into the ring. He gets to take your spot. And quitting comes in many different forms, right? Quitting could literally just be like, I'm done. I don't want to do this anymore. But quitting is also not showing up to, you know, if we want to go granular, it's not showing up for the rep you're about to do in the lifting session. It's not showing up to the Metcon. You know, you're just going through the motions, you're just doing your thing. It's not showing up that day in the gym. And every single time you do that, the version of yourself that you could have been, the version that did show up, is being replaced by another person on that leaderboard. Yeah. You slide down two spots, your rightful spot on that leaderboard, whatever leaderboard it is, open quarterfinals, semifinals, CrossFit games, is being given to someone else. So anytime we're making these micro decisions or macro decisions going in one direction or the other, we are either trying to take somebody else's spot or they're taking our spot. And thinking about it from that perspective is like there is a version of you that is essentially owed a very high placement, you know, in in however you're measuring yourself. But there's also a version of you that's going to be 10, 20, 30% worse just because we didn't show up.

SPEAKER_03: 26:26

Yeah, uh, I think who said that? Do you know who the quotes by?

SPEAKER_02: 26:29

I didn't, I looked it up today. I didn't recognize the didn't recognize the name.

SPEAKER_03: 26:33

I'll pull that up while you um I think one thing that came to my mind as you said that is the inverse is also true, right? So every time that you have the opportunity to show up and you actually do show up, there is one somebody else who didn't. And you know, in the same way that when you don't show up, someone else is taking your spot. Every time that you show up, you are in theory taking somebody else's. So the inverse is true. It's not all bad news. And then the idea being similar, similar, like, hey, every time that you are not feeling good and you do show up, you are moving the needle in the right direction. And we can, I assume that we will start to talk about like, hey, what does that mean? Because there is a difference between like, well, I'm at the gym, I just went through the motions, I did everything, but I wasn't really in it. It's like, is that showing up? Is that the same as, you know, okay, I'm gonna show up. I don't feel great. I'm gonna do one of my three kind of training pieces, but I'm gonna try hard. Is that more showing up than just kind of checking the boxes of all three things that I was supposed to do? I think the point being though is that like, you know, while it it sounds gray, the inverse is also true. That being said, I don't know what you're I don't know how I would equate the two things. My head immediately goes to like, unfortunately, the time you show up is uh like it, it is more impactful the time that you'd quit than it is the time that you just kind of like, all right, I don't feel great, but I'm going to do it. Like that moves the needle, but the quit element I think has a larger negative effect than the I do it has a positive effect.

SPEAKER_02: 28:14

And yeah, but again, it depends on yeah, it I think it just depends on I think of showing up and quitting at both as these massive spectrums. Like I quit this round of this workout, I didn't show up at all this week, or I literally quit CrossFit and then I'm gonna have to come back to it because it is actually what I want to do. For sure. Um, and then the showing up is the same thing, right? Today's a frickin' 10 out of 10. Um, then sound like such a bitch. Versus I I I'm literally just a body in the gym, right? Yeah. Like those are the two sides to that spectrum. So the guy who said it is the guy who wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Oh, okay. And his name is Razaki. Um, and honestly don't even know what the context was, but I just like there are some quotes where at surface level, read it in two seconds and go, cool, what is that, a fortune cookie? And then you think about what it could mean. And then that's when the scalp gets blown off. All right. So we're gonna go through some practical items here. First one is know when to zoom in and know when to zoom out. Zooming in is understanding that, like, there's some people that have the whiteboard at their gym and they come in and they write it all down. They write everything down that they're gonna do. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if you are interpreting each moment in the gym as seeing that full snapshot of what you need to accomplish, I think that's pretty daunting. And what we teach people is to understand how far you need to zoom in, depending on what you're trying to accomplish and what your headspace is. So if I'm not in the greatest headspace, a 20 minute amer app, I do out the math, like, no. Um, but if I think about like, okay, I'm I'm going to row at 900 calories. I'm going to have quick transitions. I'm going to think about this on my toes to bar. If I start to get granular with that, the things that we are trying to accomplish become much more reasonable. And then the totality of work that you do ends up being impactful and actually creating adaptation. So really zeroing in on the single piece. And if that feels daunting, then it's a single set, it's a single rep. It's working yourself to a place where you are accepting kind of the like breadth of the of the thing that you're doing by making it more granular.

SPEAKER_03: 30:37

Yeah. The like the I think the whiteboard thing's a pretty apt example. To me, this is it's this is ultimately just meditation, right? It's a level of kind of acknowledgement of maybe being stressed, anxious about all of the things that you have to do, and then kind of choosing to say, like, okay, like I've got a lot to do, but it starts with one, right? It just starts with just doing this first thing. It's let me get through my general warm-up. It's let me put the empty bar on my back and you know, do a handful of empty bar back squats. It's okay, I'm gonna put 135 on the bar and warm up. It's it's breaking that thing down into, like you said, it's kind of component parts and not necessarily, I think one the other thing that you said that I think makes a lot of sense is like the unknown element a lot of times can be stressful on athletes. So, right, even if you've done CrossFit for a long period of time, the odds that you open up your app, the blog, whatever, and see a workout that you have done before is basically zero, aside from maybe some bitchwork pieces or or a you know, a benchmark or something like that. Not knowing. So I'm already, I'm already a little bit stressed for one reason or another. And now I have this 20-minute grinder of a MECCon that I have no idea how it's gonna feel. A lot of times taking that like the extra time to do the athlete IQ of like, okay, how many, how many rounds is reasonable to get? How am I feeling today? And we can start to kind of put those puzzle pieces together and say, like, okay, this is actually just five rounds for time disguised as a 20-minute AMRAP, right? Or it's like, okay, the worst case scenario today, I'm gonna do this many thrusters or something like that. And that's not that bad. And just kind of filling in the blanks and turning this unknown thing into a much more known and approachable kind of enemy, I think has a lot of power when it comes to like, hey, I'm stressed, I'm not feeling great about this, what I'm supposed to do. Okay, let's let's try to kind of uncover what's actually making me anxious about this training day or whatever it is, and go from there.

SPEAKER_02: 32:38

Yeah, the another potential top tenor, fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. Just telling people, hey, I am only asking you to take one more step and then another step and then another step and another step, right? You feel like you're walking into the abyss, but then it ends up just being your next step feels the same as the previous step. Okay. Zooming out, obviously incredibly important. So we're bogged down. It's the the same but opposite. That single thing that we're referencing went to shit. It's the end of the world. I mean, I've got athletes who might do 1,500 pieces a year that will lose their shit if one goes wrong, right? One interval and one round of one piece. Right. And so that zoom out is it does multiple things. One, it's how what what how gigantic is my ego if I think I can go 1500 for 1500? Yeah. What? For sure. Especially like we're we're out here making omelets, right? We're breaking eggs. Like that's how you make adaptation. You know, you have you have moments where you don't go hard enough and you get nothing. You have moments where you go way too hard and you're cooked. Like, like that's how we make progress, you know. It's a little F around and find out. So again, sizing one event out of 800 to 1500 is kind of silly, but we have to zoom out to see that. And then if we zoom out and you follow a well thought out program and started CrossFit at some point, you're gonna see the most absurd level of progress. Like I know athletes that have taken a lift from 185 to 275. Come on now, right? Like I at one point added a hundred pounds to my back squat. So if I had one single session where it's like I didn't, I didn't hit my five rep max goal today. It's like you've added, you're doing first, you've now added a hundred pounds to you're you're trying to get to a hundred pounds over your one rep max with your five rep max. Like, yeah. So like there's so many things that you try to get better at in CrossFit that it should be pretty obvious to you what that progress looks like. And it can be more complicated. Like I've done this for a lot of athletes where I map out their career for them in terms of placements. They tell me they're not getting better. And I'm like, you were in beginner's class and now you're 26th in the world. Is this a joke? Like, yeah. So, you know, get out the whiteboard ever literally every year. Yeah. And it's like, you're actually getting better at a faster rate now than you were before, which is scary to think.

SPEAKER_03: 35:06

So yeah. I think that the zoom out tool is is really useful because you can kind of in what you just said there is like, you know, what you know, what the um trying to think of the right way to word this. So like you you can kind of decide how much you zoom out, right? So if you're if you're in a single session that's going to shit and you zoom out like three days, imagine imagine your brain is like literally the fucking friggin' the damn almost got one. Got one is the uh is the is like the it's a little the little scroll wheel on your on your web browser. Like you can zoom in to 50%, 75%, whatever. You zoom out to like a week, you're like, oh, this whole week's gone to shit. Then you zoom out a little bit further and you're like, well, like this last phase wasn't so bad. And then you zoom out further and you're like, well, over the course of this year, like, I mean, I snatched 225 at the beginning of the year, and then at the end of the year I hit 240. So that's pretty good. And like you can kind of choose how far you zoom out. And a lot of times what you're saying is, is like maybe you're not zooming out far enough to appreciate exactly how far you've come. And that's easy for me to say from behind a keyboard when you're like sitting on a bench failing, you know, a lift that you've made hundreds of times before, right? And that again, that's where like you as the athlete need to have the tool or the wherewithal to be like, okay, let's let's think about this on a really, really big scale and say, like, okay, I could, I could barely snatch 135 competently, you know, four years ago. And now 135 is the first weight that I warm up with, you know, with a bunch of positional work and stuff like that. So how much you decide to zoom out can really kind of like, I don't know, you're having a bad day, like zoom out further. Change the time horizon from which you're looking until you get to a place where you're like, okay, I like like I could see the progress, I see the trend line.

SPEAKER_02: 37:00

And a lot of times don't have to zoom out very far. Like, I'll have an athlete PR their PR their lift in test week, and then it makes their percentage work more challenging than they're used to, and they've decided they're not good at a lift, and it's like, that was seven days ago. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. 100%. Next thing we're gonna revisit here because I'm just so in love with the concept, is that resistance is a gift. And our most obvious is that meat head mentality, weight's lifted, tissue's damaged, muscle grows, you get stronger, right? Very straightforward. I had fun brushing up on my my physiology this morning. I am going to because you guys work so hard and breathe so heavy and are in so much pain, I'm going to say something to you right now that's going to sound a little bit confusing, but there is a point. Heavy breathing depletes ATP in glycogen, increases lactate, applies force to the walls of your blood vessels, elevates your core temperature, and elevates adrenaline. All of those things are stressors, technically bad for your body. Your heart gets stronger, literally. Nitric oxide synthesis improves your vasal dilation. New capillaries are formed to improve oxygen delivery. ATP yield increases efficiency in fat, fat and carb metabolism, antioxidant defense upregulates more red blood cells and plasma. Volume improves oxygen transport and thermoregulation. Rest and digest tone increases at rest, fight or flight, reactivity decreases, great for real life, and also lowers your heart rate and speeds up recovery. That is what is happening when you are in pain and then recover, right? So it's this beat down physically and mentally, and all of this crazy stuff is happening inside your body. And then, if done at the right and correct volume, that is what happens when you train over time. That's what happens when you train inside of your body, which I think is really cool. Now, can we understand, if we understand this so well in fitness and we keep showing up, can we understand it in life? In monsoon season, I don't want to train anymore. It's too dark out, cortisol and melatonin are all messed up. I'm more stressed out. Can you show up, anyways, and start that meathead mentality, linear progression? Old me didn't show up on these days. New me is going to show up at least once when I wasn't going to in the past, and then twice and then three times. And I'm going to work that muscle and we're going to have the same concept of the resistance, the thing that is like self-sabotage or holding you back or keeping you in your place is something that if you pushed back against it the way you push back against weights or your heavy breathing, you would make an actual adaptation and improve.

SPEAKER_03: 39:46

Yeah. And it's kind of it's really important to understand that the, you know, the resistance is a gift, is the moment that you get presented with the opportunity to quit or, you know, retrieve your prize that's theoretically, you know, the pot at the end of the rainbow. It's really, it's so fr and I like again trying to relate this to my own athletic endeavors currently. It is so difficult for me to see, kind of see that, that resistance as the gift while I'm doing it. So you're on the golf course for the third, fourth, fifth shot in a row. It doesn't, the ball does not do what you want it to do. The barbell does not move in the way that you want to feel it moving, whatever. And it's like you start to question, it's like, well, am I even am I even practicing correctly? Like, am I doing the right things to move the needle in the right direction? Am I like, is this actually just negatively impacting me? All of a sudden, all of these super negative thoughts start swirling around in your head. And it's again, it's it's so difficult to like identify where you are kind of in the, you know, in the trough, so to speak, you know, whether you're in the ebb or the flow of kind of where you're at and understanding that basically everything in life is kind of like an ebb or a flow, right? Things are going really well and or things are going really poorly, and it seems like it's kind of one or the other, and it just it just alternates back and forth, right? And that's just kind of the nature of things. In CrossFit, it's the same thing. And it's it's it there's not, I don't really have even a good coaching tip for you other than to say, like, hey, recognize that like it's okay to have all of those kind of questions swirling around in your head, the negative thoughts. It's a matter of what you kind of do next that dictates, you know, what the result is gonna be. If it is the, you know, here's the resistance, this feels bad. I'm questioning it, I don't like it, I don't like it. If you stop, right, it's like, there it was. That was the opportunity when you were supposed to go through the wall and you turned around and you and you backed off it a little bit. And that's hopefully only one of the, you know, that's not gonna ruin your career. It's not gonna ruin your season, right? But you stack enough of those or you start to build the habit of making that acceptable to you, all of a sudden, like, well, now we got to zoom way out to see the progress instead of say to myself, like, okay, no, I I need to take that step forward, even like I need to have a little bit of faith that what I'm doing is going to move the needle and will eventually kind of reveal itself as progress. I just don't know when it is or wet where, you know, that it's gonna reveal itself. And that's the hard part, especially for experienced athletes when you've been doing it for long enough that the the light bulb moments come far fewer, you know, further and far in between. PRs in the same kind of regard, it takes a lot more work to make that same amount of progress the you know, the the further down the re this rabbit hole you get. But you just have to kind of be able to recognize that that resistance point for you is the challenge, like saying, hey, I'm right here. It's right in front of you. You can either attack this and slowly chip away at it, knowing that like eventually you'll get to the other side or not. And obviously not, you're not gonna get to the other side.

SPEAKER_02: 43:03

I believe it to be counterintuitive at all levels. And what I mean by that is you siccos signed up for this intentionally. Hunter, whether he knows it or not, plays golf because it's challenging and stimulating. And it would be really boring for him if he felt like he got to the end of the rainbow. Like, we don't want to arrive at that place where you go out and you literally just do nothing, you swing, it goes straight down the fairway, and like everything feels the same and it doesn't have that challenge attached to it. And CrossFitters, like, that's a level up on being a sicko, right? Like people sign up for the challenge, and then what we're gonna talk about next shows up at some point and creates kind of the wrong headspace, and you confuse yourself. And the way that I would think about it on a on a more micro level is when you look at your programming and you see a wheelhouse workout and you smile, and you see a weakness workout and you frown, like that's backwards. Your ability to improve and the rate at which you will improve is significantly higher on the things that you are not good at than on the things that you are good at, right? Like that workout where it's like it's a triplet and it's the triplet from hell. It's those three movements you don't want to do. Guess what? If you go into that with like a smirk on your face, like, wow, I'm gonna get a lot better today. That completely changes the way that you think about things. So try to remember, again, zoom out, try to remember why you're doing what you're doing and what about your personality is like like I it's I go to a place and it's windy outside and this ball's an inch wide, and I'm gonna whack it with a stick and try to get it into a little hole that's thousands of feet away or a thousand, like what? Like you signed up to do that.

SPEAKER_03: 44:54

So dumb. Clearly so dumb.

SPEAKER_02: 44:57

You want a little bit of a challenge, right? You you wanna you wanna go do the thing, and of course you want it to to to improve and have your moments where it's fun so that it's not all not just a beatdown, but you guys signed up for this and you're gonna keep signing up for it.

SPEAKER_03: 45:11

Yeah, I think one the one thing I'll add to that too is like the as this is where having a coach is helpful, but understanding not everybody has a coach. This is what I thought to this myself too. Like, man, this is an instance where having a really good coach would be nice when like I played the last tournament of the year uh a couple weekends ago. I was playing, it was our four clubs. You get four, you choose any four clubs that you want and you play the round. So you're obviously presented with shots that like, well, I would use this club, but I don't have it, so I need to figure it out. And I played like ass. I shot 92, I think. I didn't even tell I didn't I didn't want to know my score. I was so infuriated. The number of times that I wanted to walk off the golf course was like at least once a hole, like maybe multiple times a hole. Part of what was driving me was like I was ahead by I was tied for first in that points race. The person that I was tied with was not competing. And I literally got get two points in the overall rankings just for participating, just for finishing the round. So part of me was like, okay, like you can't quit. You need the points if you want to win this like season-long race. So I had something else in my head that was like kind of trying to keep me motivated. There was that point. And then afterward, I tried to like, I tried my best to find wins. And like, I can't say that I did it, let's say, between when I finished the round and, you know, maybe later that day, probably didn't happen. I was too irritated with myself. But looking back now, I can say to myself, like, well, you didn't quit. Like, you did get better because you were, you know, you were trying to hit shots that you not you don't practice all the time. You know, you're trying to hit a 30-yard seven iron, which is kind of ridiculous for me personally. And so, like, having, you know, having the what my point was is having a coach who can say, like, hey man, like, yeah, no, the score didn't reflect a great round, could have just been one of those days, but you didn't, you wanted to quit, but you didn't. Because you didn't quit, here's the prize. Here's two points for the sweeps standing, and you won by a single what ended up being a single point at the end. And like, if you had quit, this is what would have happened. So it was kind of an immediate feedback of like someone literally would have gotten your prize. Someone literally would have gotten my prize had I had I quit. And just having the coach, having a coach, and if you don't, whether it's like a journal or just like some kind of internal self-reflection, there has to be an element of like, well, I didn't quit. And like there's something to be said about that. And, you know, there's a whole lot of like, you could still not quit, but effectively quit, and that's the same thing. But, you know, if you have that internal battle with yourself and you can like come out on top and at least or at least very at the very least reflect afterward to find something that like, okay, there was nothing about golf that went better today, but I did get a little bit stronger between the ears because I didn't quit. And it's like, that sounds like kind of a low barrier, but for me being as irate as I can get on the golf course, despite again, like zoom out for me, like progress over a two-year period's pretty substantial. All I can see is like every single day I log a score, the handicap goes up or down, you know, a decimal point, and you're it's the end of the world. And it's like, no, man, like here, look at look at the last year and a half. You zoom out far enough and you find the win. So just and you know, if you're a coach too, like the point there was like, you know, you've got an athlete who's not going to have a good day all the time. You got to be able to find that one little thing that says, hey man, that's okay. I don't give a shit about your score on a Wednesday, you know, in a Tuesday Metcon. Here are the things you did well, or like, nope, that snatch wasn't perfect. But at the end of the day, like you got better at X, Y, or Z or something like that. So I think it's just important to find kind of that that win as hard as it might be.

SPEAKER_02: 48:58

So we dug into kind of the physiological side of things just to prove a point of discomfort is leading you somewhere. It's a it's a good transition into the concept of your gas tank is your gas tank. Our stress continuum that we look at as coaches, and you can put this into everyday life, is too little stress for your capacity, um, and you're not going to get any adaptation. Like it's just not. The what you need to accomplish to adapt as you get better changes. Too much stress, which is a ton of people, so many people, is entirely maladaptive. Like it is possible for you to exercise and lift your way into getting worse. And there's lots of stories of it at the highest levels in CrossFit of people getting a new coach and saying, you know, bury me, and then they get buried. And then the sweet spot in this concept is where GPP comes from, right? It's the right amount of, you know, work for your muscles and for your heart, and you get better, right? Like the acute stress is what triggers the supercompensation that we always talk about at the affiliate level. And then repeating that over and over, creating cycles of repeating that stress is what makes you more resilient, not burying yourself. Like trying to get too much done in a short window literally does not work, right? Like you might be able to make mental adaptations by doing that to yourself. But at the end of the day, if you want to mix it up with the best of the best in relation to, you know, your potential, if they're not doing that to themselves, they will win. They will have an ability to go to an extra gear. So while intensity is so important, patience in sort of surrendering to the natural order of how someone adapts is incredibly important. Like if someone came to me and they said they wanted to go to the CrossFit games and I see it as like a four-year journey and they want to do it next year. It's just like, I either need you to agree that that's not possible or find another coach.

SPEAKER_03: 51:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 51:02

Because this is not gonna like like what you're trying to accomplish is not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_03: 51:06

Yep. Yeah, the like the too much stress versus too little stress argument or is interesting because the there's some like I'm trying to think. So things that I often see are athletes who, and this is probably more at the affiliate level, just because that's more what's right in front of me, but you come in and you ask an athlete to say, like, hey, I want you to go really hard in this Metcon. And they go what you clearly can tell as like you didn't go hard enough. Like, I know, I know what you're capable of, and I know like I could I could see it in the eye, like it just wasn't you just chose not to go all that hard.

SPEAKER_02: 51:43

And for whatever reason, entry isn't just this hurts because it's always gonna hurt. That's not enough.

SPEAKER_03: 51:48

Yeah, exactly. And then after class, they're doing extra work, and it's like, okay, so like what you're telling me is that you know, your perception of progress, or maybe it that's not even the goal. It's like you you're exercising, you're not training. You're light, you like the idea of sweating, but you don't like the idea of at least today, yeah, burning calories, but you don't like the idea, at least today, of going hard enough to legitimately make an adaptation. And that's that's ultimately the adaptation is the thing that we're after. So what I see as somebody who does kind of like, yeah, I'm gonna do the workout in class, and I did it, you know, at 75% of my best effort when the workout really required like 85 or 90%, you know, and then I'm doing additional stuff after. All I see is not only are you not doing what is necessary to create adaptation, you are actually just driving your car around in circles for the purpose of burning fuel. And I had a conversation with a member via email about this who was like, you know, I'm feeling burnt out. This is what I've been doing, yada, yada, yada. And I'm like, okay, you you have to under and she's like, Well, can I, you know, should I come in, should I do 7 a.m. class and then sweaty Saturday right after? Those are our two Saturday morning classes. And it's like, and the question was, am I going to be overtrained? And I said, Well, like, in this very singular instance, well, in I mean, in this very if if that this were the only day that you did these two things, would you be overtraining? Like, no. But the question is, like, is it necessary? Like, why, what is the purpose of what you're doing? And as a coach, I'm just, I'm always thinking about like, you know, when an athlete asks me a question like that, my kind of an assumption is like the underlying question is, what should I do in this scenario in order to get better? And for me, like, if you want to get better, the answer is not to do a class at 7 a.m. and then do another class at 8:30 a.m., right? It's like, that's no. The odds that you are actually creating adaptation is pretty low. And instead, you are just literally like, we're just bald in the tires a little bit more because you like driving. And there's a time and a place for that sort of thing, but it can't be like part of the regular kind of routine because ultimately, whether you're exercising, you're trying hard or you're not, you are still taking resources from, you know, your body, from the gas tank. It's all coming from the same place. It's still stress, whether or not you're trying really hard or not, like you are still putting mileage on your body, you know, a hundred squats is still a hundred squats, whether you did them for time or you just kind of you know went through the motions. Like again, are you're driving your car, you're still burning fuel, you're still gonna replace the oil, you you are still you know, forcing maintenance upon the vehicle that is not necessary. And I see that, I see that really often.

SPEAKER_02: 54:45

Yeah. So the intention of talking about all this is to arrive at the point that your mental, emotional, and physical gas tanks are not separate. Um and, you know, a lot of people use exercise as stress relief. And I think if you are serious about your place in the sport, that concept needs to kind of go away. Like when life is kicking your ass, high volume stress in the gym can can make things worse. So we get back into that maladaptive situation where it's not even just that you're doing too much in the gym, it's that you are arriving at the gym with too little resources or you're depleting all of them in the gym and then go have stress to the point where that supercompensation, you just end up staying below water.

SPEAKER_03: 55:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 55:36

So, so that's a huge issue there. And I just think that like this is this balance that we have to have, especially at the affiliate level. But if you are a competitor in the sport, you need to find a way to chill out. You have to. Like you will, you will, you know, sort of reach that point, that critical mass, that place of like, I can't get any better because I'm not the kind of person that can really get into parasympathetic, turn it off, and get all of the benefits that we talked about in our my little physiology rant. And it's funny because you see examples of this. And and I was I sent you the other day, Hunter, the video where it was just really cool that Chris Bumstead said that the back squat and the deadlift were in his both in his top 10 of muscle building exercises, which is a kind of a side note.

SPEAKER_03: 56:25

But someone in the comments for context C-Baum is a bodybuilder, not a fitness crossfit guy.

SPEAKER_02: 56:32

Someone in the comments was like, I think I understand his genius in this video because of how calm he is. Like that dude's muscles can grow like that because he can be incredibly intense and sympathetic and then very like ultra sympathetic. Like he can turn that back off. And people that are like that, that can relax both physically and mentally and emotionally, they're recovering twice as fast as you, right? Like it's almost a little like blissful idiot type of thing. Like every once in a while you come across an athlete and you're like, athlete IQ might be low.

SPEAKER_03: 57:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 57:15

It might be low, but it's not, it's it doesn't have enough of a hit on them as how great it is that they can recover so fast because they're not thinking about anything.

SPEAKER_03: 57:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 57:29

And it's very reductionist to say that. Like you don't actually know what that person's like. A lot of time the calmest people are got all kinds of wild turmoil going on in their brain. But if you truly are serious about trying to compete, like you have to find ways to like really shut off and put yourself in a spot where you're not like Garmin's cool because you get your stress graph throughout the day. And like, I'm the kind of person who has to be incredibly intentional to have like just a small section of blue versus the like giant orange lines that are like, how is it possible that I'm this stressed out on the couch? It's because my ADD brain is swirling. I'm cooking in there. I got stuff going on. So like that would be a reason why you could train your butt off and do a lot of the right things and not be getting as good because the stressors outside of training are holding down your recovery.

SPEAKER_03: 58:25

Yeah. I think the only other thing I would add to that is that like what you said is really relevant, I imagine, to a lot of people who are listening, and that it's like the concept that the gym is where I come for stress relief, right? Or it's like this is the spot that I want to be at. And I I think I see this as being two different things for, say, an affiliate athlete, a general population person versus a competitive CrossFitter. I see like if someone, someone at the affiliate level is tell telling me about their scenario where they're stressed, they're like their fitness isn't going great, whatever, they've got a lot of shit going on. It might be the case that I tell them, like, you know, at the end of the day, it's a cost-benefit analysis on your part, right? It's like, you know, the the coach in me says, like, well, there's like you are not going to create adaptation by coming into the gym today in your current state of high stress, low sleep, and I'm asking you to do three sets of five really, really heavy back squats. Like the odds that you are going to be able to put the right amount of weight on your back to create adaptation with it not negatively impacting like life outside the gym is pretty low. The alternative, though, it's like if the alternative is that you don't come into the gym, you don't see the people who give you, you know, the relationship element, the friends and stuff like that. And you come in and say, like, you know, you do your three sets of five and you kind of mail it in. At the end of the day, it didn't necessarily create adaptation, but it also might not have created any more like stress in the sense of all of the physiological. Things that you just kind of rattled off. And maybe it actually was beneficial because, you know, I got to be around the people. It was, it was never about the fitness to begin with. It was just coming in and being around people for an hour. And that actually, you know, you know, almost elicited a parasympathetic, like kind of a rest and digest response that was positive, right? For a competitive CrossFitter, I it it I'm willing to guess it's way less likely that that is the same thing. It's like someone comes, it's like if you come into the gym five, six days a week for three, four, five hours a day, and you're saying to yourself, like, you know, the the odds that the gym is the place that you also go for stress relief is I don't know, you you work with more high-level athletes than I do. Like, I don't know if that's the case that the athlete is like my happy place is to go into the gym where I'm used to beating myself up multiple hours a day.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:52

There's usually a tertiary, like a thing off to the side. Like when I go there, so and so is there, and it's really cool to see them like that. There's usually something off to the side where if someone's in a really good gym situation, you know, it has more to do with their training partner, or someone brought them a coffee, or that there's a launch spot near the gym. Like things like that are gonna be what helps someone in that way. And to be honest, it's you know, it's a profession versus a hobby. Like those are two really different things.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:25

Well, that's the point, right? Is that someone's using it for the purpose of improving their health and their life versus well, this is this is a job, or this is like this has a performance component to it that has to be there in order for it. And it, you know, if if that's you, odds are like the gym is not the place to go to for that rest and digest, right? Like you need a sauna, uh, you know, to go to go meditate somewhere, go get some sunlight, go for a walk, whatever. It's probably not coming to the gym because that elicits that kind of fight or flight response.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:58

Yeah. And the like one thing that's so cool is there that benefit of what happens to your nervous system doing a cube test and meditating are doing the same thing. That is really crazy to think about. Yeah. You become less reactive, less sympathetic activation, and you are able to be in parasympathetic rest and digest more often. So I would say, especially at the affiliate level, 10, 20 minutes a day, like that would be one where it's like, why doesn't everybody just get one of those apps and see how long they can have their streak? And there's tons of different versions of it. You know, some people do yoga, whatever. So a lot of that is built into what we're going to talk about last. And it's just like, what does getting better today look like? Like literally just today, or not today in its totality, but today in what I'm about to do right now. One rep, one set, one workout, etc. Some days it is exactly what we've been talking about is lifting heavier weights, going faster than you normally do. And man, I never do sets of 10 unbroken. I did today, and it didn't mess up my workout. Some days that is the adaptation that is taking place. Some days, that same barbell, we are getting better because we're moving faster, right? Like we give or moving more technically sound, could be faster as well. Um, but you're you're moving more technical, and that's one of the reasons why I love to give percentage ranges to people when we're doing certain styles of training. Because it's like, what is today? Is today, you know, we we flirting with 90%, we making real adaptation here, or like, hey, bud, you move like shit. I don't don't even talk to me about 90%. I'd love to see some 70% here and and kind of work on that. So, you know, those same reps are not unbroken, but they were they were two sets of five instead of one set of 10, but they were the the best looking gymnastics, you know, insert gymnastics movement that you've done that you can remember. They felt the best. And the, you know, the glassman quote of the greatest adaptation takes place between the ears. That could be your battle for the day and your focus for the day is going to a place mentally. And that could be like, I don't care how much this hurts. My aha moment with that, where I realize that like a lot of times your body's just telling you to calm down because it's scared you're doing something bad to it when you're doing CrossFit was the original air dyne. Such a weird combination of like you get to use your whole body, but there wasn't that much resistance. So you could really rip on that thing and put yourself into this. Like, how are my muscles and my lungs in the state that they are currently in? And there was just a moment powered by ego where I had reached threshold, completely reached threshold, like was unable to basically do anything, and I still had X amount of calories left. And then there was some motivation to start going hard again, and I did, and my mind was blown. I could not believe it. I could not believe that you could feel that way and still go hard. It made no sense to me before and has made perfect sense to me ever since that moment. So is your battle that day proving to yourself that when it does get really bad and I normally kind of back off that I'm gonna push into it? I'm not talking about your outcome and your score and what's happening there. I'm talking about like sort of working yourself into a place where you can make that mental adaptation instead of physical adaptation.

SPEAKER_03: 1:05:25

Yeah. Um, I I think this for me, this section of the podcast is more about what kind of how you choose to reflect on things afterward. And maybe we're talking about the same thing here, right? So you you finish your session and you, you know, maybe you did move something heavier, faster, more technically sound, whatever. But it I think it's much less about like it can be really easy to think about the entire training session that you just did, for example, and pick out a dozen things that went poorly and one or two things that went well. And it's like when you put those on the scale, it looks a little bit more daunting than it is. And for me, the key is like, don't put anything on the shit scale, like on the bad on the negative side of the scale. And I don't mean to like ignore those things completely, but if the difference is like, well, I can walk out of here thinking that I I did one or two things well today and I'll take those wins, understanding that, you know, a week from now, maybe I take home a dozen things that I did really well, or, you know, whatever it happens to be, I think to myself, like, you know, in the last couple weeks working on, you know, golf-related stuff, I can think, I I can still hear. I had there was one day I went out, I play it was playing with a buddy. I had a super a long approach shot into a par five, and I put everything that I had been like working on with my rotation and swing kind of came together. It was one single swing. I still missed the green by 10 yards, but it was because that I caught the ball so cleanly and so purely, and I can still like you've you like everybody's got those, that one lift that was just like, oh my God, that was the one. Like, why can I not put that on repeat? And it was the same thing, just the sizzle on that golf ball. It sounded like it sounded, you know, as as close to a professional golf shot as as a as someone like me is gonna get. But I took that away and I still remember that. And I'm like, okay, that that's in there somewhere. It's just a matter of how long you're willing to wait to kind of like work on those things to see, like, you know, is it four weeks between when you hit your next shot that feels like that? Is it a week? Is it a day? And then eventually, you know, hopefully over a long enough time that all of a sudden that shot starts to become a little bit more frequent. And it's like, yeah, like I'm getting this thing. Like, there are gonna be days where you have way more bad things that happen than good. You still have to kind of like dig for those good things and be like, okay, I did that well today. Like, I hit a long putt, that was positive. I hit a couple of good drives, that was great. Like, it's okay that on a certain day you're only taking home one or two or three positive things, even if the rest of the session was bad. You have to stock those like positive ones because those are, you know, everybody knows the negatives stand out a lot more than the positive. So it's important to reflect on things that really went well in a given session, given in a in a week, whatever it happens to be.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:21

Another element to this is acceptance of whatever it takes is whatever it takes, no matter where it lives on the the boring to sexy spectrum. This, along with this concept of taking your medicine, has changed so much in what it means to me as a coach in year 15 compared to, I mean, honestly, even year seven, eight, nine. Taking your medicine was explicitly listed as everyone sprinting on a machine, basically. I mean, and and honestly, an assault bike for the most part. And whatever it takes is effort-based. Are you willing to go to threshold every time you do something? Those things have changed so much because what everyone needs and what everyone avoids is different. So the overall concept of what do you need, the amount of people that need squat holds and couch stretch and to warm up so that they don't feel terrible one round into an anaerobic piece, like is that that list is so high because these people have done that version of whatever it takes that is all effort-based. And then the taking your medicine, you know, what is it that you avoid? What is the thing that you don't want to do that is holding you back? And man, the list could be so long. We could be looking at all these different places in your life, but like you have to take your medicine if you want to improve. And like the final thing here on the list is if your medicine for this phase is showing up five days a week, just showing up, then that's what it is, right? If you just during this time of year never make it all the way through and find an a million a million excuses for like, well, it's the day before Christmas, it's the day after Christmas, it's New Year's Eve, it's New Year's Day. Stop it. There's there's two days, honestly, for most people that are a problem. And they just don't need to be a problem. You just need to plan out. But again, if you didn't used to show up on those days and now you do, that is the victory. That's what I thought about when you were talking about that affiliate athlete. Like that adaptation is incredibly important, right? If that builds your self-esteem as a person in general, and you're like, no, I'm not that person. There's some some narrative about me that I remember from when I was nine. Like, you know what? I can just, when I don't want to, when I want to eat Cheetos and watch Netflix, I'm gonna go to the gym like a drone. I'm I'm not I'm just gonna walk to my car like I do every other day, turn the car on, drive to the gym, and like I'm not promising anything, right? I haven't even promised to work out yet. And then you're like, that'd be weird if I just sat here. Not many people are doing it. I'll warm up. All right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:02

I'll do it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:02

Like and then you end up at the end, like you said, in a better mood. And part of that is just, you know, being lonely is the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. They found out in studies, and then self-esteem is huge. The way people think about themselves, talk to themselves is incredibly important and a huge part of this entire ecosystem. So it showing up could be the thing. Getting better today could just be arriving, right? And then you build on that and you ask more of yourself each time you show up on a day that you didn't want to show up.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:37

Are we in final thoughts mode?

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:39

I think we're in final thoughts mode, and and I'm gonna I'm gonna put something out there before your final thoughts. Please. Hunter is essentially a subject matter expert on this topic because of his consistency. And like I've always asked him to like reverse engineer it. And like there's a there's a like a student teaching the sensei moment of you uh of you just being like, hey man, literally just it's not a negotiation for me. I just walk out there and work out. Yeah. Like it doesn't need to be more than that. And like that's just me wanting like everybody else, that secret that doesn't exist. Hunter, talk me into it. It's like, no, I don't talk myself into it. I just do it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:12:20

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, like, like, you know, fortunately, I think it's because it's just like been a habit. It's it's more of a habit thing for me than anything else. It's less about performance nowadays. But like the I've recently, I would say that I've recently gotten to a place where like my, you know, I'm about to be 35. So statistically, the things like strength, strength and power are are gonna start to, you know, technically they've already started to to dwindle down. But I can I can feel things that used to be a little bit easier are now getting a little bit harder. And the shift, like that's a that's a tough pill to swallow for me, especially having been, you know, at a competitive level for a period of time and then like still holding my own as you know, usually being able to put myself toward the top of the leaderboard. And like gradually over the last year, I'd say, like, we got a lot of really friggin' fit people at Misfit Gym Portland. And like that, that that first place spot is up for grabs every single day by you know, a dozen members at the gym who can really hammer it. And for me, like that's kind of hard, that's kind of shitty. I don't like that. I like whether it, you know, for ego purposes or whatever, I might say that I don't care. I don't like I don't care about my, you know, the performance or whatever. And there are some days where that's very much the case, but there is a little bit of the ego element that's like, oh, like piss off. Like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lose to you in this workout. But like it is. That was probably your most creative one. And we can keep going with that. Piss off. Yeah, sorry. That was the best feeling. Feel like I'm hamstrung here, all right? But nowadays it's like there's a I'm in a period where I'm kind of like, okay, it's okay that for, you know, even weeks, months, even if I like if I zoom out far enough, having exercised for what is now basically a decade over a decade of like consistent fitness, whether it was insanity, P90X, Scarborough High School gym doing terrible hang power cleans, whatever, it was like on the grand scheme of things, a three-month, six month, even one year period where fitness for me was just kind of checking the box, like, all right, I'm gonna go to class, like I'm gonna try as hard as I can for the day, given how I'm feeling on that day. And if it's first place on the whiteboard, great. If it's both place, bottom of the barrel, like it is what it is. And the, but because I've banked so much time of like, yeah, that's okay. Like, you beat me today. You only got only got five more years of being the fittest person at the gym, and then then we can talk, you know? And I don't I don't say that as like trying to be arrogant. It's more just like, no, I've banked my time and I know that like if I zoom out far enough, I could say to myself, like, it's okay to just use fitness as fitness, to take a break from work, to go sweat for 30 minutes and like try to try to do one thing really well today, hold yourself accountable for a little something. Today's three by five squat was like, okay, you gotta at least hit three thirty-five, which for me, you know, a few years ago would have been 350. And just kind of being okay with like, well, the fact is that I squatted more than 335 pounds for 15 reps, like in the grand scheme of things, like that's pretty good compared to like the rest of the planet, for example. So kind of changing the framework for how you view how I view like progress and what it means to like actually do CrossFit and use it for the purpose of being healthy for a long period of time, just like changing how you kind of frame that thing and you know, zooming out and zooming back in can be really helpful. And like you said, it's not like there's nothing fancy about it. Like I basically go do the warm-up that I just made my class do, maybe a couple extra things that I need for myself, and then it's it's I'm just doing what everybody else is doing. I just do it five days a week for 15 years, 20 years. Like, that's pretty that's a pretty good amount of time. It's nothing fancy.

SPEAKER_02: 1:16:24

The final thoughts here is the story that I tell three times a year, roughly. Training camp, five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. Time doesn't mean anything to my brain. I apologize. Got a QA session happening, lots of games athletes up front in the gym, and a lot of questions about this topic. And the questions about this topic were very relatable to everybody. Hey, like some days I just don't have it. I don't want to go into the gym. And a lot of the responses were like, you got to give yourself grace, like you don't need to go in on that day. It's not a big deal, it's just one day. Um and camper, Paige Cemenza, was like, so I just show up anyways. Come on. And it was she she continued on to say, you know, it's not gonna be your best day. And sometimes you surprise yourself, and it actually is, ends up, you know, your second thing ends up being really good because you convince yourself to go. There was there was more nuance to it than than just that. But being really good is one thing. Being really good for like a long period of time is is really kind of a crazy thing. And I think that what she was saying ended up foretelling the difference between I made it to the games, I went once or twice, you know, I I did my thing, incredible life achievement. So like like people with like people that compete against Paige are just like, will she go away? Like again, really? Like, you know, the whatever, however many, you know, sixth time, seventh time, whatever it is. And going to the CrossFit games again is, and like, you know, you got people rolling their eyes, like there's no way she's going again. Yeah. And that's where that kind of thing comes from. So all the way back to the beginning of the episode, the people that we see excel at all levels. And I'm blown away by people who get way better in the open and people who are consistent at the game's level. Like, like what excites me and keeps me doing this are people at any and all levels just, you know, trying really hard and showing up and doing their thing. And those misfits, the ones that like you continuously see climbing the leaderboards, that's the only thing that I that's the only connection I can draw between all of them is they just they're consistent. They keep showing up. You see them in Telegram all the time. You see them on the leaderboards, you know, you see them doing two or three comps a year. Um, and they just keep doing it. And that's how they're getting better. We wish I don't wish there was a secret. Um the only like that's the like coach versus athlete thing, right? The athlete in you is like, nah, dude, there's a there's there's a beetroot powder and a squat progression that's taken me to the top. I'm just gonna squat cycle away from hit making it big. And then there's that coach where it's like, I know exactly what it takes, and it's way more boring than you think it is.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:17

Yeah, you don't want this. Yeah, I think that uh the my final thought when as you were saying that uh recently got served a YouTube short um of Alex Hormuzie. Uh you know, you know who I'm talking about. Uh I do entrepreneur. He was like he was talking about the um he was talking about like one of the basically like one of the elements of success is just just do it for a long enough time and you'll be successful. And he was like the Panda Express guy. I'm gonna I'm gonna cluck this up real bad here. I'm gonna cluck this up. Yeah. Uh and say basically it was he was mother clucker. He was basically like, you know, if someone came to me and presented me with the the business idea of what is panda express, right? We're gonna sell really cheap Chinese food quickly. All of the ill he listed like three or four things that didn't really sound very appealing, and it was like, and like, and it's gonna make billions and billions of dollars. You're just like, you out of your clucking mind. And it turns out like that actually was the the strategy. The dude just did it over and over and over and over and over and over again. And now there's, you know, I don't know, thousands of panda expresses all around the world doing the exact same thing. And he's been doing it for X number of decades. And the secret wasn't has nothing to do with the quality of the food, has nothing to do with the ex the dining experience, and has everything to do with the fact that he just kind of kept going and kept doing it, and now it's you know a multi, multi-billion dollar company, you know, franchise, and all of it had nothing to do with like this supreme product or service or whatever it was, although I clucking love orange chicken from the good orange chicken puns.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:03

I feel like that was that was uh yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:06

I saved I really teed that up at the end here. Um yeah, the the whole point of that story was like the ones who win at the end are they just kept they just kept they just didn't stop. It's not a matter of like, these are the best people, it's just like just everybody else below them just stopped at some point. They just fell off, and these people just kept going. And it turns out those are the people who are at the top.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:27

Everyone, right now, go to Google and type in Marshawn Lynch over and over. And the very first thing is a 29-second clip called Beast Mode over and over and over and over and over. Watch that, and that will be the end of the episode. Do we do it? Later.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:44

Damn, I thought you were just gonna sign off there and you were gonna add the Marshawn Lynch clip to the end.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:49

No, I could add it in if I can figure out how to do that technology. Thank you for tuning in to another episode. Thanks to the Team Misfit podcast. If you're looking for our individual programming, click the link in bio on our Instagram. You will be sent to Fitter or Strivey to get all of our individual programs. If you're looking for affiliate programming, you can head to teammisfit.com, click on the sign up now button, get a two-week free trial at Sugarwad StreamFit or Push Press. We'll see you guys next week. Later. Fuck.

unknown: 1:22:21

All right, you big big bunch of misfits.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:24

You're a scrappy little misfit, just like either.