***Scheduling Note – Invictus will be closing at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 15 for the CrossFit Games in Carson, CA.  We will re-open at 6:00 a.m. on Monday, July 19.***

Workout of the Day:
Take 15-18 minutes to build to a 2-RM Snatch or Power Snatch;
and then,
Five sets for max reps of:
40 seconds of Power Snatch (115/75 lbs.)
20 seconds of Rest
40 seconds of Rowing (for Calories)
20 seconds of Rest
40 seconds of Double-Unders
2 minutes and 20 seconds of Rest

Pain: The Great Limiting Factor
Written by Shane Farmer

The single greatest limiting factor that I’ve found in all of sport is pain. It’s an accepted standard that we all deal with when we move our bodies. It serves important functions physiologically, telling us when to stop so we don’t injure ourselves and helping us understand when we’re healed or still repairing.

It’s this same pain that as a rower we were taught to tame and domesticate. In rowing, your pain is at the mercy of the other seven rowers and one coxswain that surround you. You give your all for 6 minutes, silencing the voice in your head that says you need to stop. You train your body 800 hours a year to develop a working relationship with pain. It’s unthinkable that you would ever succumb to pain because to do so means the failure of all nine. Socialism/teamwork at its best.

That experience was the foundation for making my transition into CrossFit once I graduated from college. Here again, pain seems to find its way into the very thread of our existence. We hurt on a daily basis, we base our workouts on how much pain we feel, and if something isn’t aching from day to day we question whether or not we worked hard enough the day before.

The concept of being in pain though is a different variable for everyone. It can take time to appreciate what pain really means and how to handle it. A good friend who has trained in Jiu Jitsu for most of his life once told me “The hardest thing for people to learn when it comes to fighting is how to take a hit and keep your senses about you.” In the same way, when someone takes up CrossFit one of the most difficult things to learn is that our movements and exercises often invoke pain that you wouldn’t haven’t experienced before. The pain you feel is actually a very calculated threshold your body has built up over a lifetime. It’s what has kept you relatively safe and has told you when to stop. The nature of CrossFit though is not to dance to the edge of pain and shyly back away. It is to find that threshold in each person and begin a very careful and calculated approach of how one breaks through that threshold to come out the other side a stronger and more developed person.

To play this game though takes a certain mental fortitude. It’s a state of mind we all possess but often have never had to tap into, therefore it takes time and practice to learn. As someone who has gone down that very path I want to encourage all of you to believe in yourselves and be confident in your ability to go to that place. It’s a place of discomfort but not despair, pain but not prohibition, and unwavering resolution. Just because something hurts doesn’t mean your body will fail. It’s an amazing machine capable of so much more than we realize, and while there are times when you just flat out exhaust your ability to function, more often than not you can keep going.

So to all of you new to CrossFit, or any other sport for that matter. Learn your boundaries, be stubborn, and push through pain because you’re all stronger than you realize. Remember, pain is not to be feared but welcomed with open arms and accepted as a challenge, for victory is nothing without having given full measure.

Tags: Motivation

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Workout Of The Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.