This is something my football coaches in high school used to say all the time. I wasn’t the best player on the team, but I did enough to be needed. I missed most of my sophomore year with a knee injury. I never missed a game after that, but I was always dinged up with little bumps and bruises. I played the game much harder than I should have with my frame. It was always a question mark if I was going to play leading up to Friday, but one way or another I would figure it out and get out there. The best ability I had was my availability.
The same should ring true in the CrossFit world. One workout is not going to make you fitter. Yes, you need to push yourself, but there is a line. What is that line? Getting hurt. If you push so hard that you hurt yourself and can’t workout as effectively as you should be, we are not going to be getting as fit as we could have had we just taken that day a little lighter.
Knowing your limits is always crucial. Working out for 25 out of 30 days in a month at good intensity is much better than working out for 10 days in a month with high intensity and then missing the remaining days, because we got hurt. Your fitness is a collection of your workouts across a week, month, years. It is not something we look at in a day-to-day vacuum.
This should also lead into your thought process when judging results. What does your progress look like over the course of a week, month, and year? Do not judge results based on one day. There is too much variance in our program to do so. If we specialized in something, that’s different. However, even in something like powerlifting you might have diminishing returns day to day just due to the redundancy of movements.
The point being is that you have to always take results and performance into account over the course of weeks and months. Be sure to always be available. More workouts in a month is better than going really hard in one week. Play the long game. Be the stonecutter.
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was NOT that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
To learn more about being both available and able – and making your fitness work for the long game of your life, send us a text to chat at 210-361-3114.