101819 Lessons from elite athletes

MetCon//

Check out games.crossfit.com to see 20.2— This WOD presents some logistical challenges! We only have 3 sets each of 50 and 35lb dumbbells. We can run 2 heats per class, but it’s likely that the second heat will not leave on time, and we’ll put people in heats on first come first serve. Also, if you want to go in the first heat of a class, we will start that heat at 15:00 into the class, no exceptions. That’s not much time to warm up, so get in and get moving immediately. No dilly dallying! (whatever that is!) Saturday will be a much more relaxed pace! If you’re not signed up for the Open and come to a busy class, I promise you’ll get a great workout, it just may not be exactly 20.2!

How often do you look at the habits of elite CrossFitters or Olympians and think to yourself, “wow, what a crazy lifestyle!” It is really easy to examine their habits and practices and just write them off as too hard and then to justify it by conceding that you’re not personally trying to be elite. We admire their discipline and celebrate their accomplishments, look at their habits, then connect those things as if a disciplined lifestyle leads to elite status and give ourselves a free pass on discipline. This thinking is chock full of misconceptions and is pretty intellectually dishonest.

The difference between yourself and elite competitive athletes has less to do with discipline and almost everything to do with talent and blessings. The top 50 CrossFit athletes all eat pretty precise diets. If all of them ate like you do though, they’d still make it to the games. That’s not to diminish the importance of nutrition, it just illuminates how elite they are and still could be despite their nutrition. If you take something like eating a healthy or precise diet 99% of the time only with elite fitness, it’s easy to write it off as, “not for me.” Their goal and capability is competing at the CrossFit games. Your goal is to loose weight, get off your meds, live a really long time, run a half-marathon without stopping etc. Disciplined habits should be the same. If these habits help them stretch the limits of human capabilities, they’ll certainly help you lose the 40lbs you’re looking to shed.

Elite athletes sleep. A lot. They’re all shooting for 9 hours a night, most get 8, and very few perform well with less than 7. They make it a priority and they protect that time and make it happen. This isn’t a blog about how to sleep better, and you should do some searching on your own. Some general tips for better sleep that elite athletes use are to: stop looking at screens 30 minutes to an hour before bed; sleep in a cool, dark, and quiet room, stop eating 1-2 hours before bed, stop drinking water 1-2 hours before bed, and waking up at the same time each morning.

Elite athletes do boring stuff that they aren’t good at. CrossFit is great at exposing your weaknesses and good athletes drown themselves in their weaknesses. They wouldn’t dream of skipping a workout that looked un-fun because of a movement. Cherry picking workouts really slows your personal progress towards your goal, and it’s true of any goal. If you’re trying to lose weight, you must come on conditioning days AND heavy days. Cardio is only one piece of weight loss, lifting heavy is also super effective for fat loss. If you’re trying to get bigger and stronger, the opposite is the same, your cardio base is very important in building strength. Gotta be in shape to get in shape!

Elite athletes eat the same stuff all the time. Maybe the meat changes, switch up the veg from time to time, maybe potatoes instead of rice this time. But it’s the same. They aren’t asking their friends for new recipes or trying to fit in some fake “healthy” version of a treat. But we say “eating healthy is hard because it’s boring.” The best advertising for diet plans, other than results (which should be the real draw), is the promise of weight loss while still eating and conveniently your favorite foods. The logic just takes advantage of your unhealthy relationship to food. The reason we’re overweight is a deadly combination of hyper-palatable convenient and unhealthy food. Lets say you remove the unhealthy piece, great! But you’re left with hyper-palatable and convenient, which are responsible for our over-eating, still causing obesity. Say lets get rid of the convenience alone. Inconveniently eating unhealthy foods makes you fat too. The food network and your grandma who loves trying out new muffin recipes have taught us to believe that we need variety to be successful. it’s dishonest logic. “I didn’t want to cook, so I just ate out.” You eating out and not wanting to cook are unrelated to each other as well as disconnected from your goal. You not wanting to cook is one thing that was true and you gave it as your reason for eating out. But you ate out. The truth that you ate out would be the same despite your reasoning and eating out probably doesn’t fit with your goals as far as weight loss at all. You should eat out once in a long while. Truly healthy people eat out, but it’s special, a celebration or special occasion. Eating out regularly is unhealthy, AND diminishes your satisfaction of eating out when you do for a special occasion.

Eating the same thing is a powerful weight loss tool. You find something you like that is also nutritious and filling, aligning with your goals. After a time, you’ll experience what’s known as palate fatigue. The same food becomes less and less palatable, yet more satiating (filling). It takes less of that same meal to fill you up and one of the main mechanisms of weight loss is eating fewer calories. Knowing that I follow a ketogenic diet, someone recently asked me, “how do you get enough fat into your diet? Its really hard to hit the recommended macros.” If you’re trying to lose weight, that’s a good thing. Eating to be satiated and fueled is much more important than being intrigued or emotionally satisfied. For the elite athlete the reasoning is, “I want to compete well, so I eat these things, if it’s not on my plan, I won’t compete as well.” it’s no different for you, “I have this goal, so I eat these things.” If you’ve spent your whole life eating for emotional satisfaction, if you don’t change that, you honestly can’t expect to change your body. I would argue that palate fatigue and an non-hyper-palatable diet would benefit you even more than the elite athlete who often has to force feed themselves to keep up on calories.

Finally, in all of these things, elite athletes are very personally honest. There’s no “have your cake and eat it too mentality.” When they don’t perform well, they look to their adherence to the habits above rather than to their excuses. You’ll never hear them say after a bad performance, “I didn’t perform well because healthy food is too inconvenient and boring.” The cool thing for you, is that you likely don’t have these obvious things dialed as much as they do. Rich Froning’s performance might be suffering from like a slight magnesium deficiency, which would be pretty hard to pin-point. We can look at our habits and be like, “oh yah, I’ve drank every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for the past 6 months…” Easy fix. “I eat 6 fun-sized snickers throughout the day from the candy dish at work…” easy fix. “I lay in bed until 11:30 looking at instagram on my phone….” Easy fix.

No matter our fitness level or health, we have a lot to glean from the habits of successful people.