Similar Posts
- Close the Gap | Coaching | Fitness | Mindset
What I have learned from coaching ... so far
I arrived to coaching after teaching at the college level for fourteen years. I am a voracious learner. I loved (and still do love) universities, and I loved the idea of getting paid to create knowledge and help others learn. However, during all those years in academia, I always felt there was something missing. Despite being surrounded by amazing people, both good students and brilliant colleagues, I always felt lonely. Teaching in a university and academic research are solitary tasks. The whole building -the physical and the institution- is founded on medieval and early modern ideas. Books, authors, and teachers are the main players of the game, and everything revolves around them. It took me years of research to understand that universities by conception are not made for students, universities are made for authors. It was when I started coaching that I understood all this. It was really after spending thousands of hours within the walls of my garage teaching people the basics a human movement literacy that I saw what I felt was missing.
- Close the Gap | Fitness | Growth Mindset | How to be a learner? | Mindset | Train your mind in the gym
Why is mental fitness important in CrossFit?
Mental fitness extends further than your ability to suffer through workouts, and training your mind is just as important as your physical training in your path to becoming a better athlete.
Fatigue is Hyperbolic and How to Pace
In some of the previous posts, I have talked a lot about the idea that a good workout should leave you energized rather than destroyed. Not always, sometimes we have to go to the limits to learn what those limits are. But in general, getting above your threshold more than producing physiological adaptation produces fatigue. And fatigue is really not that cool. The video today presents one of the many ways to look at and understand fatigue. This video is excellent for my endurance athletes out there. Watch it and let me know what you think!
Build your garage gym
I love garage gyms. I consider myself a garage gym person. I believe in home-fitness. I think fitness is most productive when it becomes a personal and regular routine. If you are an avid reader for example, and you consider reading and learning new stuff an essential part of yourself, you can understand what I am saying. I love commercial gyms, I work in one. I understand their value. But I think nobody should need a gym to improve the way they move. It is like libraries: they are fantastic, but you don't need one to read. You should be able to read everywhere.
Don't be lazy, have higher standards
I bet you are thinking I mean you should go out workout more and workout harder. Memories of all those times you said you would wake up and work out and you didn’t will run through your head. You might remember those workouts during which you were tired and you did not push as hard as you feel you should have, But nope, that is not what I mean. That is just your guilt. Your consistency on a given program is often not a laziness problem as much as an organizational problem. How hard you can push on a given workout is very seldom a willpower problem, as it is a self-regulation problem. I am not here to guilt trip you. Let me tell you what I DO mean.
Training Hard
We all love to train hard. We love the feeling of working our asses off, yet I think training hard, truly training hard, is greatly misunderstood. Hours of media featuring Energy Drinks, Athletic Shoes, and awesome-sports-movies-action-montages has lead us to confuse training hard with intensity. We have this image in our head that training hard is finishing a workout sweaty and gassed, lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling like somebody just punched us in the face and stole all our money while quoting Jame Joyce. That outcome turns out to be fairly easily achieved: just do 50 burpees as fast as you can without stopping... it will take you less than 5 minutes and if you really commit to not stopping you will finish on the ground regretting life.
