What Are You Saying When the Workout Gets Hard? | CrossFit Oklahoma City

I was working out with our coaches one day when my mind quit before my body did.

The workout was 10 power cleans at 135 pounds, five 30-inch box jumps, 10 snatches at 135, then five more box jumps. On paper, I knew I could do every movement. Somewhere in the middle of it, though, the bar got heavy, the box looked a little taller, and my mind started making predictions.

You can't lift that.

You can't jump that high.

Coach Richard at a CrossFit Competition

I wasn't injured. My technique hadn't fallen apart. I was tired, uncomfortable, and starting to listen to the loudest voice in the room, which happened to be my own.

The week before, Coach Mike had pointed something out to me. I was negative when workouts got hard. Which is funny, because I've coached people through hard workouts for years. I know exactly what I would tell a member standing over that same bar.

So I decided to coach myself.

Keep the bar close. It'll feel lighter.

Jump high. You'll make the box.

Good rep. Do another.

I stopped spending mental energy predicting whether I could finish and started using that energy on the rep in front of me.

I finished.

Actually, I won the workout.

Winning is a cool ending to the story, but that's not why I remember it. I remember it because only minutes earlier I had completely convinced myself that I couldn't do something my body was about to prove I could do.

My strength hadn't suddenly changed. The bar was still 135 pounds. The box was still 30 inches.

The conversation changed.

And that made me start paying a lot more attention to what happens in our heads when things get hard.

When a CrossFit Workout Gets Hard, Your Mind Starts Writing Stories

I see this every week coaching CrossFit in Oklahoma City.

A member is doing fine. The workout gets uncomfortable. Their breathing changes, fatigue settles in, and then I see the head shake.

Sometimes I know exactly what's coming next.

“What if I time-cap?”

“I can't finish this.”

“This weight is too heavy.”

“Everybody else is ahead of me.”

Something interesting has happened before they even say the words. Their mind has left the rep they're currently doing and traveled into the future to predict an outcome that hasn't happened yet.

They haven't capped.

They haven't failed the next rep.

The workout isn't over.

But their mind has already written the ending.

We do this because thoughts can feel incredibly convincing when we're uncomfortable. You don't hear I can't finish as one possible interpretation of what's happening. It feels more like information being delivered directly from headquarters.

But sometimes headquarters is tired.

Sometimes it doesn't know.

That's where I think we need to create a little grace and space between what enters our mind and what we decide is true.

The Same Stories Follow You Out of the Gym

This might be one of the biggest reasons I believe CrossFit, meditation, prayer, walking, and learning to sit quietly have made such a difference in my life.

We're practicing the same skill in different places.

Your kid does something that frustrates you. Somebody at work sends a message that rubs you the wrong way. A person doesn't respond how you expected. Something goes wrong in the business.

An event happens, and then the storyteller gets to work.

They don't respect me.

They always do this.

They're doing this on purpose.

Now my entire day is screwed up.

Before long you're not only reacting to what happened. You're reacting to the entire story you've built around what happened.

I've done this plenty.

And when my head gets loud, I'm trying to get better at asking different questions.

Why am I upset?

What actually happened?

Is the story I'm telling myself true?

Is it 100 percent true?

What part of me is getting so fired up about this?

Those questions don't mean the other person was right. They don't mean you shouldn't be angry or that every situation needs to be calmly explained away.

They create space.

Research on emotion regulation has found something similar. When people reconsidered how they interpreted an anger-provoking event, their anger decreased, while continuing to ruminate on the event didn't produce the same reduction.

That's one reason I don't think meditation is about becoming a person who never thinks.

Your brain's job is to think.

We want our heart to beat. We want our lungs to breathe. We want our liver doing whatever weird liver stuff it does all day.

Why would the goal be to make the brain stop?

I want to learn how to hear my thoughts without automatically becoming every thought I hear.

Be the witness, not the storyteller.

That can take years of practice. It can start during a quiet walk or ten minutes of meditation, but eventually you need that skill when your child is testing your patience, somebody disappoints you, business gets stressful, or you're standing over a barbell with your heart trying to leave your chest.

The environment changes.

The practice is the same.

Notice what your mind is doing. Create some space. Come back to what's actually happening.

Then choose your next response.

Stop Giving Yourself a Verdict. Start Giving Yourself Coaching.

There's a huge difference between saying, “This is hard, I'm not going to finish,” and saying, “This is hard. Keep the bar close. Breathe. Two more reps.”

The first statement gives you a verdict.

The second gives you something to do.

That's why I don't think useful self-talk is standing underneath a heavy bar repeating positive affirmations and pretending everything feels wonderful.

You know you're tired.

The bar knows you're tired.

Everybody watching you breathe like Darth Vader knows you're tired.

You don't need to lie to yourself.

You need to coach yourself.

Research on athletic self-talk supports that idea. A randomized study found that participants who practiced motivational self-talk for two weeks improved how long they could sustain a difficult cycling effort. A larger meta-analysis of 32 studies also found a moderate positive effect from self-talk strategies on sports performance, with trained self-talk generally working better than simply being told to think positively.

I love that distinction.

Practiced.

Because this isn't some magic phrase you yell when the workout gets ugly. It's a skill you build.

For me, the useful thoughts tend to be coaching cues.

Tight core.

Keep the bar close.

Full range.

Two more reps.

Those thoughts keep me on the task instead of letting my mind negotiate with the entire workout.

I don't need to solve the next eight minutes.

I need to do this rep well.

Quieting Your Mind Doesn't Mean Making It Empty

When life gets chaotic, our minds get creative.

We start predicting. We replay what went wrong. We think about what might happen next. We think about what somebody else is probably thinking about us.

Then we react to the imaginary conversation happening inside our head.

Meanwhile, the actual moment is still sitting there waiting for us.

This is why I think quiet is something we have to practice.

We stay distracted constantly. Phones. Messages. Podcasts. Music. Work. Social media. Something is always willing to occupy the space.

Then we walk into a difficult situation and wonder why we can't keep our mind on one thing.

Attention needs practice too.

For me, that might be meditation. It might be walking without filling every second with noise. It might be prayer. Sometimes it's simply staying inside a hard workout instead of mentally running away from it.

The goal isn't zero thoughts.

The goal is learning that every thought doesn't need the steering wheel.

“What If I Cap?” What If You PR?

One of the things I notice coaching CrossFit classes in Oklahoma City is how naturally we give the negative possibility more credibility than the positive one.

“What if I cap?”

Okay.

What if you PR?

I'm not saying you're going to. Maybe you don't. Maybe today isn't that day. But why is failure considered realistic while success sounds delusional?

Give yourself some grace and some space to find out.

And if you need to scale, scale.

I hear this one constantly after workouts:

“Yeah, but I scaled.”

There's sometimes almost an apology attached to it.

There shouldn't be.

CrossFit uses scaling so athletes can train the intended challenge of a workout at their current ability. The goal isn't to copy somebody else's weight. The goal is to get the training effect the workout was designed to create while continuing to build mechanics, consistency, and eventually more intensity.

Scaling isn't something you need to hide from.

It's coaching.

Sometimes the smartest path forward is reducing the load, changing the movement, or adjusting the reps so you can actually train instead of spending half the workout staring at a bar that's wrong for you.

It's just a workout.

Your score doesn't define you.

Use the workout to learn something.

Your First Thought Doesn't Always Know Your Limit

I want to be careful here because toughness can get stupid fast.

If something feels unsafe, you're injured, technique is falling apart, or your coach sees something that needs to change, listen.

But normal training discomfort is different.

Your heart is pounding. Your legs are burning. Your hands are tired. You're breathing hard. And somewhere in there your mind says:

That's enough.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it isn't.

That's what I love about training. You get opportunities to learn the difference.

My mind told me that day that I couldn't lift the bar anymore and couldn't jump on that box.

It was wrong.

And every time you experience something like that, you collect a little piece of evidence.

Maybe you're more capable than the first story your mind tells you.

This Is Where Confidence Really Comes From

I think this practice is one of the cornerstones of confidence.

Not the confidence that says, “I'm going to win everything.”

That's fragile confidence because life will eventually prove it wrong.

I want the confidence that says:

I know what I do when things get hard.

I know how to settle down.

I know how to look at what's actually happening.

I know how to question the story instead of immediately becoming it.

And I know how to give myself the next useful instruction.

CrossFit gives us a controlled place to practice that.

You think you can't jump on the box.

Then you jump.

You think you can't pick the bar up one more time.

Then you brace, keep it close, and pick it up.

Your mind says you can't finish.

Then somehow you do.

Those experiences don't just change your fitness. They give you evidence about yourself.

That's why I've always believed the hour we spend training should improve the other 23 hours of our day.

We're not only practicing power cleans.

We're practicing ourselves under pressure.

The Coach in Your Head Goes Everywhere With You

That day with our coaches, the 135-pound bar never changed.

The box never changed.

The thing that changed was what I did with the voice in my head.

I stopped letting it tell me how the story ended and gave it a better job.

Keep the bar close.

Jump high.

Good rep.

Do another.

That's something I'm still practicing, because that voice doesn't only show up during CrossFit workouts.

It comes home with me.

It goes to work with me.

It shows up during hard conversations, frustrating days, mistakes, uncertainty, and all the other places where life gets loud.

So maybe the question isn't whether you're going to have negative thoughts.

You will.

The better question is:

When your head gets loud, have you practiced becoming your own coach?

If you're looking for a CrossFit gym in Oklahoma City, including Warr Acres or Bethany, where the goal is bigger than surviving a workout, start with a Free Jump Start at crossfitfiend.com.

We'll help you build the fitness, skills, and confidence to handle the workout in front of you and a little more of the life waiting outside the gym.

Confidence In Results.

Stay rad. I love you

Coach Richard