What Happens When We Don’t Scale

There is a rhythm from one week to the next at Modig Fitness. We warm up, we work on a skill and then we complete the WOD. The first few days of a new cycle take a bit of getting used to, as the skill might be based on different percentages or class based versus individual, at a point it becomes familiar to most. While we hope everyone is getting stronger and more fit, our primary goal (especially during skill work) is to help you perfect the skill  and to be safe. Not to see how much weight you can throw around in a matter of minutes. We’ve all been there. We’ve all been tempted to add another 5 – 10 lbs, when it would be wiser to stay at the same weight and work on our form.  It is doing it this way that will enable you to become stronger and faster during the WODs. The following article is a good, short read and articulates this very point.

I said ten-minutes and I meant it.

Most needed only eight.

“Ten-seconds,” I warned the only athlete in a class of a dozen still moving.

“Time.”

He spiked the bar, kicked the bumpers like they were flats and clawed at his belt. The rest of his class, a team victorious and eager to celebrate a hometown win, high-fived each other and avoided the pouting child of a man as if he had leprosy.

“I trusted you to pick the right weight, not necessarily the weight on the board,” I said. “Fail me again and I’ll load your barbell for you every time.”

Annoyed at himself and wanting to punch my audacity in the teeth, he said,”I know … I didn’t think I could do it, but I wanted that RX.”

We’ve all been there, tempted by two little letters, desperately hoping to improve. But performing the workout as “RX” isn’t always the way to get better. And when it’s all said and done, better is exactly what we want. Because my friends refused to scale his jerks–a movement he struggles with–he turned a Metcon into a Skill: exactly what I said not to do.

We may surprise ourselves when we don’t scale tomorrow’s training. Records may be broken and we may do things we’ve never done. But most of the time, like my irritated friend who let his desire overcome common sense, we miss the point entirely.

When we don’t scale, we turn fragile knees into smoldering coals.

When we don’t scale, we take 20-minutes to do a 10-minute workout.

When we don’t scale, tomorrow becomes a rest day when we should be training.

Fitness can be a fortress built on good decisions, or a shack plagued by shortcuts. You decide.

This article was originally posted on January 11th on Practice CrossFit  and was written by Josh Bunch