Be honest with yourself …
When you take on the Workout of the Day (WOD) there are many implied rules for a CrossFitter to adhere to. One of the most important implied rules is “don’t cheat”. It is never written at the top of the whiteboard, but it is a rule nonetheless and it is one that you need to follow.
Cheating is an ever-present temptation given the intensity at which we train, and can be incredibly subtle, so subtle in fact that you can often overlook that you are doing it. Of course there are the obvious cheats … poor range of motion, miscounting reps, missing rounds, misrepresenting the weight used etc. The obvious cheats simply lead to hollow victories and tend to piss off your training partners. But more insidious are the less obvious ones that over time hamper your progress. These are things like scaling down when you don’t need to, skipping your warmup to “save energy” or reducing the warmup, missing a training day so that you feel fresh for the next workout, not giving 100% or avoiding workouts that don’t play to your strengths. It is still cheating, it is just that you are cheating yourself. The effects and benefits of CrossFit are accumulative. These less obvious cheats rob you of the accumulative stimulus, and eventually rob you also of the accumulative rewards.
Honesty and accountability are essential cornerstones of progress with CrossFit. Strength guru, Mark Rippetoe points out that there is a significant difference between “weight” and “strength”. That is, it is possible to increase your weights numbers without increasing strength. Likewise, it is also possible to dramatically increase strength without changing your weights numbers. On the surface it may appear that weight and strength are the same thing, and in an accountable individual they often are. But for many, the desire to see the numbers increase (or in the case of WODs … decrease) at a rate that is greater than strength gains allow means that something has to give - form, quality of movement, range, volume … something suffers when ego drives your training. What Rippetoe is implying is that some people cheat to appear to stronger than they are. So the weight that an individual is lifting is only really representative of their strength development if they are being honest with themselves and maintaining the highest level of quality possible. As quality (form, technique, range, volume, intensity) drops, the weight lifted becomes less representative of the individuals actual strength. The same applies to CrossFit. As accountability drops and quality suffers, the numbers on the board become significantly less representative of the CrossFitters conditioning.
Cheating is inevitable if the rate of progress that you expect is greater than the rate of progress that is realistic based on your level of training. But why should you care? If your numbers are moving in the right direction what does it matter? Well quite simply, cheating changes the stimulus. CrossFit works because it is a powerful and effective stimulus. Cheating is changing the program. Change it enough and it stops being CrossFit. So one reason that you should care is that sooner or later cheaters stop progressing.
Next time you complete a CrossFit workout, reflect on your performance and consider how you would score it in terms of accountability and honesty. Enforcing and encouraging a higher level of individual accountability is the bane of a trainer, and unfortunately after a while you expect people to cheat. But every now and then something happens that restores your faith. I recently received an email from one of our CrossFitters …
“Upon reflection of my last workout of last year, I believe I had not actually completed all of the requirements to complete the workout.
I do believe that I had in fact missed doing the squats (25 reps for scaled workout). I do maintain this to genuinely be an honest mistake. It was not until later that day after the workout, when I was reviewing the activity, that I did in fact realise my mistake.
I will do my utmost to ensure this lapse does not happen again”
It is little suprise to me that this individual is on a rapid improve. Accountability and progress go hand in hand! Be honest in your training and CrossFit will reward you greatly, and importantly, your successes will be respected.