I’ve wrote a few blogs on movement quality for our page. From “moving with purpose” and “pride in your movement”, to “arousal management” and “consistency in movement”. They all follow a common thread as a theme. Quality in movement which ultimately means “quality training”.
I’ve always been inspired and related well to the military. Working with the Department of National Defence for 7 years and then in a para-military setting in my fire rescue career. I read something that other day from one of these sources that was discussing quality in training. One quote struck me and really stood out in my mind:
We do not rise to the occasion. We fall to the level of our training.
Boom. There it is! As someone who really enjoys competing, at first this sat kind of wrong with me. “No way, bro! I rise to the occasion.” When i started to think about it more though, I really started to buy in to it. If you have never done something before, how would you “rise to the occasion”? If you were half way through the very first mile you had ever run, would you know what it felt like and rise to the occasion to be better? If you showed up for the very first day of a new job, do you have something to compare it to to be better than? In a gun fight when things get very chaotic and bullets are flying, you aren’t get any better in that moment. You’re going to fall back to your training.
I’ll try to keep this as on track with CrossFit and training as I can, but you get the idea. We need to have past experiences in something to know how the present are going. We need to have done something before so that when we are in the same or similar circumstance again, we know what to expect and can make a decision on how to react. I am willing to bet that the very first time you did Fran, you didn’t perform so well. You probably thought something along the lines of “45 thrusters and pulls up? That’s it....watch this!”. Seven or eight minutes later when you are doubled over trying to muster enough effort for one last pull up, you probably wish to go back and change your strategy. You now had past experiences to rely on.
When it comes to our training, this does not mean we need to go “guns-a-blazing” every day. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. What this would suggest if that if we come in like that and neglect quality and consistency in favour of intensity, we are going to learn that. We are going to learn to things really fast, but most likely really wrong. When it comes time for us to do those things again, we do them wrong because that is what our past experiences have taught us and so the cycle continues.
What we need to do is make sure that all those other blog titles I mentioned at the beginning and read and listened to. We need to train with high quality movements and with thoughtful purpose. That way, when is it time to hit that “go” button and we fall to the level our training, it is going to sustain us and make us succeed because we have been there before. And because we are one bad a$$ mother...