As many rounds as possible in 15 minutes of:
50 Double unders
10 Deadlifts, 135#(95#)
Post rounds to comments and BTWB
Don’t be good at. . . . By Courtney “I’m about to get blunt. . . but what’s new” Shepherd
In the great wide world of CrossFit, you know constantly varied, functional movement, performed at high intensity, it is in an athletes best interest to be good at everything and not great at any one thing. Our goal is to specialize in not specializing, have the ability to face the unknown and unknowable. With that said, as athletes, what would it be important for us to NOT be good at? I’m glad you asked.
A couple weekends ago I had an amazing opportunity to attend the CrossFit Football Seminar. During one of the breakout sessions where we are given the opportunity to practice the movements/ skills we just talked about, one of the instructors, Cali Hinzman, said something quite profound. She said “don’t be good at being shitty”. She followed that up by saying that if we know what we are doing is wrong, if we know we are doing half assed movements, we aren’t moving through full range of motion, we are quitting at pivotal points in a movement. . . stop it. Stop being good at being shitty. From the warm-up to the workout, our goals should be to practice good movement, our goal should be to be good at being good.
Now there are some of us that genuinely do not know we are performing a movement incorrectly and that’s why there are coaches. That’s where the cueing and correcting comes into play. But I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the person who knows their chin isn’t getting over the bar in the pull-up but keeps on keeping on. I’m talking about the person who is either too lazy, too ego driven, or quite possibly has a slight feeling of embarrassment, and will not scale a movement/ a workout/ a rep scheme or modify in some way, including grabbing bands, to assist in a workout. I’m talking about the person who knows what they are doing is “ugly”. We say it out loud, right after we perform a 1RM snatch we say, “wow, that was ugly”, and then we get greedy, add more weight, and prep ourselves to pull off another great feat of ugly. These people are practicing the art of, dare I say it, being shitty. I hope you will excuse some of this bluntness, my point is simply to use the profound words that instantly changed my behavior and hopefully change someone else’s. We all want to improve, we all want to get better and see some progress as we continue through our CrossFit journey. But it will be hard for some of us to see this progress if all we do is perfect the art of being good at being. . . . you know where I’m going with this.
I don’t have my own profound words to cap this blog off with. I don’t have some idyllic way to instantly make each of us change our ways, other than to simply say, stop it. Stop being good at being shitty, start being good at being good. Don’t let your “no reps” count as reps. Don’t be satisfied with close enough/ for the most part/ practically. Don’t skip the warm-up. Take the warm-up seriously, using it as the best opportunity to practice good movement/ prepare good movement/ see if we are even capable of the movement. Too often I’ve seen people just coast through a warm-up and find themselves crushed in a workout because they never actually tried their workout weight. Knock that stuff off. If you are asked to do 4 reps unbroken, do 4 reps unbroken. You won’t know if you can if you don’t. If you are asked for a 5 second negative down from a pull-up and you know that at the mid way point you can no longer control your down, it just turns into you quickly dropping off the bar. . . can you guess what you will never build strength in? Can you guess what you will always have a hard time with? All because we quit at a pivotal point in a movement rather than find a way to get through it correctly.
Being good at being good is work. Hard work. But hard work pays off. Hard work is the path to progress, to gains, to hitting goals, to the results we seek. This is not meant to be easy. And to be honest, we shouldn’t want it to be easy, because than what would we be bragging about?
