7 Mostly worthless comments about sucking at crossfit as a beginner

I've been doing crossfit for about a month and a half at the suggestion of my girlfriend.  I was pretty bored with my normal gym routine, was pretty stagnant so I should..sure, babe, I'll humor you and try this for 6 months.  Below are some of the points worth mentioning.

1. It might be better training for what you're really trying to do

I'll get this one out of the way first because it probably applies to the fewest people that would read this.  My "primary" hobby is sportbike racing.  I'm pretty awful at it for one major reason: take me and any other racer, give us the exact same amount of practice time, and because I can't stay on the bike long enough...he'll get 2x the amount of practice and be faster in short order.  For YEARS I kept trying to build leg strength by doing high weight squats and deadlifts.  It didn't work, I STILL can't survive a 6 lap race at 100% of my best pace.

Then I tried crossfit.  Turns out: moving somewhat heavy weights doing lots of squats and deadlifts while simultaneously sucking wind far more closely resembles the types of muscular and cardiovascular load I'm placing on my body during a sprint race.  I haven't yet confirmed this because it's the off season, but I'm convinced I'll finally be able to maintain focus and peak performance for the entire duration of a race.  Wish I had figured this out a long time ago.

2. There's a difference between strong and fit

Look, my sets of 6 at things like squat and deadlift aren't anything to laugh at.  When I got to crossfit, I didn't struggle there.  I was outlifting guys that had been training crossfit for much longer.................and then we'd get to the "cardio" portion of crossfit (the portion of the workout people traditionally associate with crossfit) and those same guys were blowing me the fuck out because I'm so out of breath.  I might be stronk, but I ain't fit.

3. You suck and you probably look like it

Whether it's just, like in my case, really bad cardiovascular fitness or you just can't get the hang of a particular movement (I'm looking at you, double unders) there's something in crossfit that you're screwing up, and you do in fact look like it.  HOWEVER...nobody notices.  Why?  Because they're too busy focusing on their form, sucking wind, and wanting trying to gut through it too.  That's you, the other beginners, and even the freak in the corner who looks like he's ready go pro.  Everyone is so equally busy trying not to die that they don't have the spare capacity to notice your mistakes.  Which brings me to my next point

4. Crossfit never gets easy...

unless you're doing it wrong.  The moment one workout gets easier, you should be scaling less.  Fran took you 10 minutes last time doing ring rows and with a 45# bar?  This time it took you only 8?  Time to do it with assisted pullups and 65#s!

5. Scaling isn't something you just have to do, it's something you HAVE to do

This is something I had to research on my own as it wasn't exhaustively covered in my box's (Crossfit Fidelis in Katy, TX) onboarding/onramp/fundamentals (everybody calls it something different) classes.  Which is fine.  I'm not faulting my box for that.  We spent most of our time talking about the different barbell movements which, because they're dangerous if you fuck them up (both in terms of lower back pain and dropping a heavy ass bar on your head), was time well spent.

Each WOD has a "cardiovascular wheelhouse" in which it's designed to live.  Some WODs are designed to test your endurance (think hero WODs), and some are designed to test your lung capacity and concentration.  If you don't scale your WODs properly, while you might be doing good for your body because you're doing work, you're not getting the most out of that workout because you're mising one point of it.  I'll give an example to try to explain what I'm saying.

Let's say you have a workout that's 

3 rounds for time

12 deadlifts (155/115)

12 power cleans (155/115)

12 wall ball shots.  (16/14)

Your average "Rxer" in the gym can do this workout in 10 minutes.  You say "hey, I can lift that weight!  I'm going to Rx this workout!"  It takes you 20 minutes. BAM you Rx'ed a workout!  Dude, that's fucking awesome, I certainly can't do it!  However, this workout prrrooobbabbblllyyy should have been a 10 minute, super intense, workout, and because you decided to Rx it, you missed the benefit of it being a 10 minute, super intense, workout!  Next time think about an assumed completion time and/or an assumed rep count (in the case of an AMRAP workout), and scale your weights so you're in the ballpark of those numbers.  If you have to, ask.

6. You're probably going to get your scaling wrong especially at the beginning...

even if you think you know how to do it.  Why?  Because it's probably different for each workout.  Just because you did a 16# ball last week when there was only 12 wall ball shots in the whole workout, doesn't mean that's the right weight for today when there's 100 shots.  Gauging what you can do will take a short while, but you'll get the hang of it.  To that end, especially with barbell stuff, at the beginning stack weights on your bar so if it gets too much, you can knock them off and keep going.  What I mean by that is: if you think you can do 135# on the bar for a particular workout, don't go put 45# plates on the  bar.  Do a 25# and 2 10#ers.  That way if your "eyes are bigger than your stomach" you can quickly knock 10#s off and keep going.  And then if even THAT is too much...you can do it again.

On some workouts you'll be lucky enough that they'll specifically tell you "use 60% of your one rep max"  that will help guide your scaling, but more often than not, you won't.  In order to be able to make the best use of these queues when you do actually get them and/or keep track of when you had to knock weights off the bar...

7. Log All The Things!

No, seriously.  My box uses a software package called wodify so at the end of the workout I enter in my scores (whatever it happens to be: weight used, reps, rounds, time).  I can't comment on how that software stacks up against other packages, but just the concept is great.  If your box doesn't do something like that, bring a small notebook.  But also, don't JUST log the key indicators for the workout, log everything.  I log every single scaling technique I had to use (lighter weight, assistance bands, exercise modifications, whatever), but just as importantly, I log issues.  Was my form shit on a particular movement?  Did something hurt?  Make note.  The latter happened a lot with my lower back early on, and it was important to know when I came back around to that workout to re-focus on my form.

I hope that helps someone.  If not, at least the word-vomit helped me.