CrossFit Rx

HQ Rest Day

An excerpt from “Managing Your Way to Mediocrity,”
courtesy of the cool folks over at Again Faster:

Patrick and I went to the track last week to blast through a quartet of four hundred meter sprints.  He blasted, and I ran like a prosthetic-free amputee.

There was a brutal headwind, inexplicably extending three-quarters of the way around the track.  It was an interesting twist, but I don’t think it caused my paint drying, grass growing slowness.  That honor belongs to my ever-so-awesome habit of managing my way through daily workouts.

This practice is score-driven, meant to maximize the numbers on the whiteboard for any given level of fitness.  Basically, you perform a workout multiple times, systematically varying your strategy in an attempt to either maximize work or minimize time from attempt to attempt.  The idea is to find the limits of your ability, and to exist at that level.

Unfortunately, ability management has a monumental downfall—the latent tendency to cause detraining.  If one trains at the limits of ability, never trying to push the pace beyond current capacity and never exposing the body to an overwhelming stimulus, improvement does not occur.  Even worse, ability slowly travels in the other direction, gathering speed on the gradual slope of suckdom. [keep reading]