The Best Way To Approach your Workouts

Is your mindset about working out holding you back? We often fall into traps when trying to improve ourselves, and I see people fall into them all the time. At Timber & Steel, we do our best to guide people toward sustainable, lifelong health and fitness, but we often see people getting in their own way. If you find yourself doing any of the following things, let a coach know so they can help you reframe your approach to your workouts.

This is Not a Test

One of the wonderful parts of our training method is the idea of benchmark workouts. We repeat these workouts periodically to test our fitness and see if we’re improving. We need a way to test whether our training program is working; benchmark workouts give a glimpse into that. That’s the purpose of a benchmark—it’s a test. Like school, we don’t take tests every day because tests don’t drive progress.

95% of our workouts are training sessions. These workouts allow us to make mistakes, learn new things, have fun, and drive progress. Do not treat these days as a test. Instead, do your best, make some mistakes, learn, and have fun. If you try to treat every workout like a test, you will always be disappointed in yourself and won’t see results as quickly.

Modulate Your Intensity

In the early days of CrossFit, we believed that you had to put 100% effort into every day to get the best results. Over the past 20 years, we've learned that 100% effort every day isn’t sustainable.

Trying to work out with that much intensity every day will lead to hate working out, constant soreness, plateauing in your progress, and probably injury. It’s imperative that we learn to modulate our intensity. Here’s one way you could modulate your intensity over 5 workouts in one week.

• Heavy day - respect the heavy day and give it all you got (high intensity)
• 1 Workout with movements you’re not great at. It’s a practice day (lower intensity)
• 1 Workout in your wheelhouse or with movements you enjoy (high intensity)
• 2 other workouts per week (moderate intensity)

Plan out your week and know what your plan is going in. Even if you feel like you want to hit a workout really hard, but it’s supposed to be a moderate or low-intensity day, stick to the plan. Don’t get short-sighted; remember you’re playing the long game of health and fitness.

Keep Your Eyes To Yourself

There is something to be said about the power of competition. It can push us to work hard and fight to be our best; how people respond when you start giving out scores or rankings is incredible. But we need to be careful how far we take that into our training sessions. We record our scores at the end of every workout for our own benefit. We want to be able to use that information to help us in our future workouts, but that’s it.

After recording this information, we have a built-in leaderboard showing who performed the highest in the gym. That leaderboard is just that—nothing more. It isn’t a rating of how hard you worked. It doesn’t take into account your life and your journey. Just because someone ranks higher on the leaderboard does not make your effort any less valuable, nor does it mean you should aspire to do what they do.

You should do your best and push yourself to see improvement in your fitness, not have the same fitness as someone else. Keep your eyes on what you’re doing.

Expectations Shmexpectations

A phrase I’ve heard countless times over the years is that people are afraid of disappointing their coaches. They feel like they have to be able to perform at a certain level, or we’ll be disappointed in them or even ask them to leave the gym. Every time I hear this, my first reaction is to laugh at how ridiculous that sounds, but I quickly realize how sad that is. It makes me wonder who treated that person in such a way that they believed their value was attached to what they could do.

You are enough. Just be you.

Those are the expectations your coaches have for you. If you have goals, your coaches will expect you to put effort into pursuing them, but that’s it. We want to see your effort. I’m always telling people, “effort over outcomes.” The outcomes will come in time if you keep putting in the work and stay consistent.

There are many more pitfalls we can fall into, but these are some of the more common ones we see. Each of these is a mindset issue that directly affects your fitness progress. All of this stuff is connected, and we see that better than most. If you’re starting to connect the dots, congratulations. Keep it up, be patient with yourself, and celebrate your progress. You can do this, and we’re here to help.