Having been Crossfitting for 4 years, I’m now at a crossroads in my fitness journey

manuelbeaty

New member
My motivation to start was simply the desire to achieve a relatively high level of fitness. But I never asked myself - ok, you’ve achieved that - now what?
Keep moving forward to become even more fit?
Maybe I should see it as “the journey is the destination” type of thing?

Anyone else ever find themselves in this dilemma?
 
@manuelbeaty Short answer: find somewhere you can use your fitness and you'll be using CrossFit for what it was designed for.

Long answer: imagine your fitness is a stone wheel. When you're first starting, it's very tiny so you can get that wheel moving with little to no effort. As you get fitter, it gets bigger and it takes more and more energy to get it to budge even an inch. Everyone gets to this point as it's about training age and how your body adapts as opposed to how objectively fit someone is.

So at a certain point, you'll have to ask yourself "what do I do with all of this?" If your answer "I want more fitness," then you will necessarily need to do more than you've done in the past to attain it. That equation's balance never changes, just the amounts do: you must put in more and more effort, focus, time, and energy in and out of the gym to gain smaller and smaller amounts of fitness.

If you are looking for another path, then embrace something new. Your level of fitness (and the pain it took to get there) are invaluable in learning and adapting to new things. These can be new ways of training or new sports (triathlons, weightlifting, jiu jitsu, boxing, basketball, shooting, rucking, soccer, etc) but your base level of fitness and the lessons you learned developing that fitness will help 100% across the board, bar none.

So my suggestion is to embrace learning something new. There are a lot of reasons why this works so well, but my personal favorite is that novice gains are intoxicating. Being awful at something in the right environment is the first step to being sort of good at something, and that process of going from rank novice to intermediate and finally to advanced is absolutely incredible.

The best part of it all is that you don't need to give up on fitness. You can maintain a high level of fitness without training CrossFit 15 hours a week and if you ever decided to be better at CrossFit, you just come back to doing it all the time.

And when I say "you'll be using CrossFit for what it was designed for" I mean that literally. CrossFit is explicitly made to improve General Physical Preparedness, and it's probably the best program on the planet to develop and maintain GPP.

You've developed a high level of GPP. It makes a ton of sense to ask yourself what you're going to do with all that fitness, and there isn't a right or wrong answer. I just personally love learning and improving at new things.
 
@manuelbeaty

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”​


Socrates
 
@manuelbeaty I’ve drifted away from some of the aspects of CrossFit. I think the community is a great thing but I spend more time training at home and have invested time and money creating a home gym.

I still do CrossFit, but I’ve taken to mixing it up a bit more. I set a challenge to tackle (virtually) a set distance via C2 Bike/row/ski/run/assault bike during a set time whilst in lockdown and I enjoyed that.

I think you need to think about what it is you want. I think for most the novelty of getting a new skill or a PB lift wears off the longer you do CrossFit generally.

I follow a great guy in Instagram. He talks about looking at the ends, not the means. Very few of us will ever be anymore than bang average crossfitters, but the fitness it brings can be used in the real world. Maybe set yourself a physical challenge of some type?
 
@manuelbeaty I got burnt out after 4 years. I moved across to powerlifting and general break.

What I didn't appreciate was how fit I was even at the point of burn out.

Now I'm desperate to get back to that point. :)
 

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