“Learning without thought is labor lost.” – Confucius
It’s getting to be the time of year where local competitions and qualifiers are taking place and athletes are signing up to see where their fitness is compared to others. It brings to mind the concept of training vs competing when it comes to working out. Knowing what your goals and intentions are can help you to set the right intention for your workouts. The majority of us want to use the one hour of working out each day to develop strength, cardio, and improve our overall health and wellness. This would mean we want to be in a training mindset when we step into the gym. Let’s look at these two approaches to our fitness.
Training Mindset – This is characterized by focusing on our form, technique, trying to learn how move more efficiently, how to test out new and different strategies, how to take feedback and implement it, and typically a lower intensity. It means we want to move with purpose, challenge ourselves, and then see what we can do differently the next time we workout.
Competing Mindset – This is characterized by focusing on the score, the weight, and the outcome. It means strategizing how to move as quickly as possible while still adhering to the standards of the movements. It means turning up the intensity to the max and seeing what your capacity is.
Knowing and understanding these two approaches can be helpful when we think about how we want to tackle a workout. There may be days where we move intentionally and adjust the weight or movement so that we can get a great sweat in, learn more about ourselves, and be ready for the rest of the day and the next day. This would be a training mindset. This should be our focus many more days than not. If there is a workout we are looking forward to, want to measure ourselves against a past score, or really feel good and want to compete against ourselves or others than we can take on the workout and really lay it all out there.
For this upcoming week, notice how often you are in a training mindset vs competing mindset. To help us stay in CrossFit for the long haul and experience the benefits it has to offer in terms of health, fitness, and pushing off disease, we want to approach the workout each day with a training mentality to see what we can learn about ourselves and move on to what’s next on our daily agenda.
