Today's Workout
For Time:
Run 800m
5 rounds:
5 135lb Thrusters
7 Burpees
Run 800m
*Thanks to CrossFit East Sac for the WOD
The response yesterday was not as inclusive as I would have hoped (Start chiming in on the comments guys. I wouldn't want to have to break out the "motivational consequences" as Coach Burgner calls them.); however, Miguel and Derek's input was awesome.
You only get one life and one body, why not make the most out of what you have? CrossFit is hard work. Hard work is something that is becoming increasingly less popular in a society based heavily upon convenience and technology. There is so much misinformation and "get fit quick and effortlessly" gimmicks in the fitness industry it is astounding. If you have ever seen the infomercial for the "Shake Weight" or magic diet pills you know exactly what I am talking about. With all of this silly bullshit constantly bombarding our consciousness it is often hard to discern what is genuine and what isn't. This is why I train:
Growing up I was the fat kid. My nickname among my own family was the "Blue Pig," because I liked the color blue and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, a lot. I was constantly ridiculed not just by the kids at school, but by my own family as well. I was always a little depressed because of my weight, but I had no idea or guidance on how to effect positive change. When I got a little older and moved to Sacramento I was terrible at athletics and still quite overweight, but I was getting to the age at which I could begin to do something about it. So I did. Without actually knowing what I was doing and with little guidance I began to experiment with diet and exercise, unfortunately even though my heart was in the right place my methods were more self destructive than helpful. I tried wrestling for a season in high school and learned how to "cut weight" using starvation, dehydration, and lots of exercise. At first this method seemed effective. I went from weighing 180 down to the 140s, but then the shit hit the fan. I developed an eating disorder through the constant attention to body weight wrestling and my personal experiences growing up as a fat kid had instilled in my mind. I broke down. Literally. For about 10 days my junior year of high school I was so sick from what I had done to myself I could not get out of bed. At that point I realized that I had to figure out what "healthy" was. My good friend Adam Attia, at Arden Hills in Sacramento, helped me to learn how to program strength, albeit using old school bodybuilding methods, rest, and nutrition. I went from a broken down 144 pound kid to a 190 pound young man-beast in one summer, but more importantly I was hooked on healthy eating and living. Since then I have always sought to increase my knowledge of all things fitness related and to share that knowledge with others because it is hard to know exactly what to do to get fit. It seems that a lot of the time people have a closed minded view about exercise; I know that this was definitely the case for me for a long time. When I first stumbled upon CrossFit I thought it was stupid, but I was also fed up with the monotony of bodybuilding. I was a dumb meathead who just wanted to get big, but I was bored with what I was doing and almost ready to give up on it. How was a workout like "Cindy" (AMRAP 20 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 air squats) supposed to help with that? I also thought I was in good shape being a Rugby player and one of the strongest dumb meatheads in the UCSB Rec Cen. When I first tried "Cindy" I got my ass handed to me in a way I never could have imagined by a workout that I thought was going to be a joke. At that moment I underwent another huge mental paradigm shift: there is more to fitness than the bench press, bicep curls, partial range of motion squats, and machines. CrossFit is freedom. It is the freedom from having to go to the artificial world of the big box gym, because the world can be your gym if you are creative and motivated. The freedom to self educate and learn from the open source style community. The freedom from worrying about silly bullshit, because it no longer matters when you shift your focus to performance. Constantly varied, functional motions, performed at a high intensity build not only fitness, but also mental fortitude and they teach us that we are capable of accomplishing whatever we put our minds to. So why do I train? I train because I love it. I believe that mental and physical health are not separate pursuits: they are one in the same. We are all animals as much as we would like to think we are advanced and civilized; CrossFit embraces the natural instinct that I believe we all possess and gives us a vehicle by which we can push ourselves to be the best we can be in all aspects of our lives.
