What I have learned taking 4 years off Crossfit

Most of my fitness journey has been performing Crossfit at a moderately high level. The volume of my training was between 15+ hours a week from 2011-2016.

As a washed up competitive crossfitter, I feel like I have restarted my journey. The past 4 years I have done little to no crossfit style workouts. I have done 3-4 days a week of strength training trying to maintain a minimal amount of strength.

The past 2 months I have gotten back into it. It has been a weird journey, workouts that I would have crushed in 2015 are miserable, I do not have a tolerance for pain, my conditioning is abysmal, and the strength I though I was maintaining has not been maintained.

Takeaway 1

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Knowing that I want to train at least 3 days a week has forced me to slow down. I was always good at pacing a workout, but now I feel like I am moving at a snails pace. This has allowed me to get back in the gym the next day, and not feel like crap when I am done.

Takeaway 2

Scale, Scale, Scale

I was never the strongest person in the gym, but I could always move the RX weight no problem. This past week we did a previous Open workout and it crushed my soul. 95lb thrusters should be easy, they were not. My breaks on the thrusters were LOOOONNNGG. I spent a total of 2 minutes just resting on the thrusters.

I could still get the workout done under the time cap, but it was not the stimulus that was expected from this workout.

The goal of every workout should be to meet the stimulus not boost your ego.

Takeaway 3

My conditioning sucks.

That is pretty much it. I feel like I am starting Crossfit over again. I am sore everywhere, getting out of a chair is difficult, I cannot do the required volume for RX in a lot of the workouts. This has been the most frustrating part. In the peak of my training I was doing 100-150 pull ups in a session. Now a workout with 45 crushes me.

These take aways for everyone, whether you are just getting into fitness, have taken a break like myself, or have been training for a while and still have not hit your goals. Take a minute to think about which one you can implement into your next workout, this will help you get one step closer to your goal!