With the recent turn of a new year, there’s a lot of talk about new (or renewed) goals or resolutions. At the same time, it’s conventional wisdom that people basically never stick to resolutions.
It’s not long before the community gym reverts to its natural state of mostly-empty
Besides the fact that sticking to hard goals is, well, hard, why do we drop our resolutions so easily? Could it be that we’re practicing dishonest goal-setting? A health psychologist friend of mine wrote a piece last year called “Integrity in the New Year” (read it and lots of other great stuff here). The gist of it is that, often, the goals we set for ourselves aren’t actually aiming at what we truly want to achieve, but are rather activities or benchmarks we associate with the state we wish to achieve.
“People don’t want to run a marathon,” says Coach Stevo “they want to be the kind of person who ran a marathon.”
That is, they want to be dedicated, and disciplined, and competent, and maybe even a little extreme. Are there other ways to exude these traits than torturing yourself through 42+km of jogging (no offense to the marathoners out there)? Of course! So if your enthusiasm for long distance running wanes after your first pair of worn out shoes, maybe there are other ways to continue to progress toward what you really want – as long as you know what that is.
Is your goal really to lose 10lbs, or is it to feel vital and energetic? Maybe the two outcomes go hand in hand, but if the focus is on how you feel, you might find hundreds of ways to enjoy the process this year, both inside the gym and out.
The bottom line? Spend some time this January doing a little soul-searching, and be honest with yourself about what it is that you really, truly want. If you know what your primary drivers are, you won’t become demotivated every time your “goal” doesn’t light you up like it used to. Instead, you’ll know what truly matters to you, and you can continue working toward that, using whichever benchmarks you define as you go.
Nat D
Tuesday
Warm-up: 15 miutes:
3 rounds:
10 Prone Snow Angels
10 Scap Pull-ups
10 Scap Push-ups
5 Ring Rows
Skill: Choose Between
25 strict pull-ups (as few sets as possible)
3×10 kipping pull-ups
3 big sets of butterfly pull-ups
Conditioning: 20 minutes
EMOM ladder UP and DOWN: Add 1 rep every minute
1 Russian KB swing
1 burpee
**Get as far as you can, and once you get knocked out, go back down again!
I asked this morning if hypothetically you complete round 10, fail round 11, do you have to do 10 again? The consensus in the 7am class was yes - so you end up doing 3 rounds of '10'. I ended up having to skip a round on the way back down (yes, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself)...not sure I recommend this approach but if you want to redline 3+ rounds go for it!
I like this idea of an up-then-down ladder. Since I'm generally bad a crossit, I am always out on the ladders SUPER early and feel a bit cheated out of a long workout. Moving back down the ladder will amp things up.