How to be better at everything!

Whatever it is you want to be better at, you need to start with the basic fundamentals of life.  Even without looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we know if we don't have the basics of food and water, we will die.

If you are in a desperate situation, a war-torn country, a city under siege, a famine zone or you live below the bread line, then what you eat is of less importance than how often you eat.

The paragraph above is pertinent.  There are people in the world who do not have enough to eat.  There are people in this country who do not have enough to eat.  There are children going to school each day without breakfast and parents skipping meals so their kids can eat - in the UK, in the 21st century!

Knowing this, why would you abuse food just because you are in the privileged position to do so?

Let's assume you have enough to eat.  Let's assume you want to respect that fact and nourish your body well.  Let's assume also that you are lucky enough to be somewhere above level one in Maslow's hiereachy of needs and are working towards self actualization, with a gym membership and let's also assume that you are trying to improve your performance in the gym.

Already, this goal seems a little shallow after the paragraph in blue....but let's keep on.

The single most important weapon in your performance arsenal is your nutrition.  Have a look at the CrossFit pyramid - the basis of everything is nutrition.  My previous blogpost on being a sugar zombie will explain partially why this is so important.

Your body is a tool for fitness!  It is the only place you have to live!  You'd better look after it!

If you are carrying extra kilos, ALL bodyweight exercises will be harder - you only need to put on a 5kg weight vest to see an immediate reduction in the number of pullups, ring dips and pressups you can do.  Now imagine wearing a 5kg weight vest, 10kg, 20kg... for everything you do!

If you are surviving on sugar hits, with subsequent insulin crashes, how do you think that is going to affect your ability to sustain intensity in a wod? 

If you are not eating enough protein, you cannot build muscle and literally all the hard work you put in the gym is effectively wasted. 

Nutrition is key to how you feel mentally as well, so difficult wods are going to feel insurmountable.  If you feel anxious before a wod, miserable during a wod and defeated after a wod, you definitely need to look at what your are eating!

If you already perform pretty brilliantly in the gym but you know your nutrition is not great, imagine the possibilities if you were to dial it in! To be able to effortlessly deliver the required fuel to your muscles during a workout, to be able to recover more quickly after a workout - those things are going to make a huge difference to your performance and progress in the gym!

So if you are lucky enough to live in a safe area, with enough food to eat and enough spare time to devote to self-improvement, for f***'s sake, respect that gift and nourish your body!

If you are looking to lose weight, I suggest you get proper help to work out macros and calories - we can help you with that at CrossFit Uckfield. If you are looking to eat better for enhanced performance (side effect will be that you lean up) this is a rule of thumb:

palm sized amount of protein (meat, fish, eggs)
2 fingers of healthy fat (coconut oil, olive oil, nuts, avocado, coconut cream, etc.)
the rest of your plate piled with vegetables with a little fruit 

If you feel sluggish on this, have a bit extra starchy carbs the meal before a workout (sweet potato, white rice, white potatoes, banana etc).

The 2018 CrossFit Open

games.crossfit.com

The 2018 Open is nearly upon us. 

I started writing a long blogpost on how to approach the Open, mentally and physically and then figured I could just distill it down to one point.

Relax.

If you are not going to Regionals (trust me - if you had a shot in hell, you would know you had a shot not imaginatively suspect you deserve it) stop taking it so seriously, relax and enjoy it, hoping like crazy that your gym's programming has prepped you for the unknown and unknowable because I suspect Castro is going to be even more of a nightmare this year than he was last year.

If you have been getting comfortable with nice predictable workouts, with safe movements you 'know' are coming up in the Open, perhaps focusing on one thing you consider a weakness and accidentally ignoring all the others, you might be in for a bit if a shock.

CrossFit is about General Physical Preparedness.  That means working a balance of the 10 components of fitness.


Your CrossFit gym's programming will ensure you get a thoughtful mix of all of these components, that builds strengths without ignoring weaknesses, making you a balanced athlete without burning you out or injuring you in the process.




The CrossFit Open tests this.

If you have spent the last year making sure you are equally as flexible as you are strong, equally skilled as you are fast, equally agile as you are coordinated, mentally strong without the ego, then in theory, you are read for anything Castro throws at you!

So relax and enjoy testing your abilities. =)

#youagainstyou

You are a sugar zombie and your addicted body has taken over your mind.

You are a sugar zombie and your addicted body has taken over your mind.  Quite literally, if you consume sugar in any quantity, your body has actually taken control of your mind.

If you eat sugar, your mind is not your own.  If you eat sugar, your physical needs for this drug outweigh ALL mental requirements.  So if you know you need to go to the gym and you need to eat clean and you need to avoid certain foods and you need to 'think more positively', until sugar is completely out of your system, your body will not allow your mind to succeed. 

When I started my CrossFit journey, I was eating strict paleo.  I'm not talking 80%/20%, I mean strict 100% all the time.  I ate meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, seeds and nuts.  No sugar.  No dairy.  No grains (no rice, wheat, pasta, cakes, pastry or bread). No legumes (pulses, beans.lentils etc.). I didn't drink alcohol.

I felt amazing.  All the time.  Genuinely.  I didn't ever feel like I was depriving myself.  I was full of energy, I didn't have that 2pm slump, I felt well, alert, clear-minded and happy.  Genuinely felt great all the time.

After 2 years of eating like this, I slipped into adding sugar back into my diet.  It was a gradual decline over 2 years.

I have some perspective now on those two years.  I was way more tired.  Workouts in the gym felt hard - I was sluggish, I felt heavy.  My cardio suffered.  I struggled to think clearly about things.  I genuinely couldn't think straight.  My mind felt foggy and I found it difficult to make good decisions, especially when it came to food choices but also as far as emotional responses to situations.  Things that I could have handled before then became insurmountably hard.  I wasn't depressed but I was frustrated and angry and incredibly negative a lot of the time.

I know it sounds extreme to suggest food was responsible for my state of mind but going on the evidence I have, it's the only variable that changed.

Just before Christmas 2017, I started feeling exhausted, especially after I ate something heavy on starchy carbs or sugar.  It got to the point where, if I ate some chocolate (and I'm not talking your 95% single origin Ecuadorian stuff, I'm talking cheap nasty, vegelate with double the sugar required) I would be asleep inside 10 minutes.

So, having made myself reactively hypoglycemic, 2 weeks before Christmas, I decided enough was enough.  Gave up sugar again, cold turkey, gave up most starchy carbs.  Back on the paleo.

What have I noticed?

Everything is better!  I am more alert, less foggy-minded, less tired, no more crashing on the sofa after meals.  While my performance in the gym does reflect the fact that I am 46 years old and a bit lazy, I feel so much stronger, my cardio has improved massively in that I don't feel half as out of breath mid-workout as I used to and bodyweight movements like pullups and burpees feel way, way easier. But more than that, I feel positive!

I feel mentally more cheerful about everything!

What has changed since Christmas?  My job is the same, my family is the same, the weather is the same, my nutrition is different.

Sugar is to blame for how you feel mentally.  
Sugar is to blame for how you feel physically.

You think you don't eat much sugar because you don't add spoonfulls of table sugar to your tea or cereal?  You're wrong. Starchy carbs (like cereal and bread) are converted to sugar and anyway, most cereals have added sugar!

If you eat a lot of rice, pasta, bread, pastry, beans, processed food - albeit savoury - you are addicted to sugar.

Addicts lack the ability to think clearly because their bodies are on a constant mission to stay normal (homeostasis) by getting more of what they crave, be that heroin or sugar.  

If your body has a purpose higher than yours (homeostasis) it will take control of your mind to force you onto its own path so it can get what it needs.  
Sugar makes your brain into a zombie controlled by your body.

For example - while my diet was bad, I would drive to the gym to train (my mental pathway that was good for me) and on the way stop at a petrol station to get something to eat - it was a compulsion (my body controlling my zombified mind).  I couldn't not stop at the petrol station.  It genuinely was as if I had no control over my actions and when I got to the petrol station, they didn't sell paleo things there and as my brain was literally sabotaging my efforts in order to satisfy it's physical requirement for sugar, I would get a sandwich and a sugary snack.  
I literally could not stop myself.  I could not think straight.

Now that the sugar is out of my system (it literally only takes a few days) I am quite happy to have breakfast, go and coach then drive to where I train without eating again.  It just isn't an issue.  I have control over my brain again.

Try quitting sugar for 30 days and keep a record of how you feel and what you notice.  You need to stop eating processed foods and take-aways, you need to read all the ingredients on every label (although non-processed food has no ingredients list!) and you need to eat a lot of vegetables - like triple what you think.

If you cannot do this for just 30 days but still complain about feeling down, tired, stressed, out of control etc, then you need to seriously rethink your life!


Free your mind and the rest will follow!

If you have kids, you should be making them do CrossFit!

My kids - 1BC (one year before CrossFit)

I have three children, aged 16, 14 and 12 and while the other kids who come to Teens' CrossFit enjoy it, I have to force mine to do it twice a week. I imagine this is partly due to the fact that their mum runs the class and also to do with in intrinsic streak of laziness that (honestly) comes from me.

In this series of blog posts (starting with the previous one about why feminists should do CrossFit) I want to explain how different types of people benefit from CrossFit.


Firstly, you need to understand a little about my children; they are unique, of course, just like everyone else, but I'm hoping you might see similarities in yourself or your own kids.

My eldest son is, at his own admission, a bit of a nerd.  He really likes computer games and science.  He relates strongly to the characters in The Big Bang Theory and he doesn't go out much. He has recently discovered the joys of Dungeons and Dragons... He likes routine and he isn't hugely adventurous though I wouldn't say he was a nervous kid.  He suffered a little from anxiety in his transition from junior school to secondary school but more of that later.




My daughter is the middle child and, on the whole, delightful.  She is very competitive and though not vocal about it, very feminist. She flip-flops between worrying terribly about what others think of her and not caring in the slightest.  While, like a lot of teenage girls, she likes makeup and clothes, she has a very positive body image and once weighed herself, which had me recoiling in horror until I realised it was to discover what percentage of her body weight her deadlift was.  (It was 1.5x bw!) #proudmummoment




My youngest son is a free spirit.  He has been left to drag himself up a bit so knows his own mind, has strong opinions and at the same time is the least competitive and least adventurous of the three.  He is not a fussy eater and will eat almost anything just very, very little of it.  He seems never to be hungry so is pretty thin and when he lifts weights, you worry he might snap.  He has struggled in the past to back squat 6kg...

Each of my kids gets something different from their experiences at CrossFit. 


This video of my youngest, sums up one of the reasons I make him do CrossFit.  He did not believe he could do even one rep at this weight, he put it on his shoulders and said it felt heavy.  I repeated what my coach says to me when I say exactly that: 'Yes, it feels heavy but that doesn't mean you can't do it!' and he did 3.  Even though his knees are wider than his thighs when he squats, he has got stronger - he couldn't squat 6 kg a year ago and now he can squat 22.5kg for 3 reps.  This allows him to see the big picture.  It shows him that even though he might not see the results immediately, consistent behaviour yields results further down the line.





Jake is learning that it all takes effort and commitment and showing up and doing the work.  And in an age where everything is available to our kids via a screen in their pocket, 24/7/365, this is a powerful tool to give them some perspective on their lives.




My eldest son struggled a little with anxiety for a while and CrossFit helped him control it.  Mid way through a workout, you feel hot, sweaty and out of breath.  If you aren't used to this feeling, it can be a bit scary at first.  If these feelings mimic anxiety attacks, they can be even more scary.  So initially, we had to give Zack the get-out clause that he didn't have to do the hard fast bit of the workout but he had to do some strength work instead.  Gradually over time, he became less uncomfortable with being uncomfortable and in finding ways to manage how he felt in a workout, he was able to use these strategies when he felt anxious outside of the gym.  He no longer gets anxiety attacks.



My daughter (and my boys) are growing up in a dynamic time for feminism.  There is a lot of talk in the media about what is and isn't acceptable for women to expect.  Hopefully this generation of women will have a much more equal footing in the world but it is still set amongst a backdrop of institutionalised sexism and old-fashioned ideals.  I talked about implicit bias in the previous blogpost so I won't go into it again but CrossFit goes some way to mitigating residual inequalities.

My daughter gets to be regularly surrounded by men and women whose expectations of equality are very high.  The women she spends time with are strong, competent and confident and the men treat the women with respect.  There are no mirrors in our gym.  We never talk about diets or weight loss or body image.  We talk about what your body is capable of doing.  We talk about a positive mindset, commitment and hard work.

In an age where our children have it easy, where a lot of their aspirations end at 'being famous' or 'being rich' I think that forcing my kids to do something twice a week that gives them a sense of pride in their achievements, that makes them work hard to reach a goal, that is difficult and sometimes mentally and physically painful to do, that encourages them to be supportive and work as a team, that makes them have to dig deep to get through it is an incredibly valuable thing.

This is why I force my kids to do CrossFit twice a week.