Ep 6- The Million Dollar Mistake: Why You Could Be Stronger Than You Think

Learn about the "broken measuring stick" of fitness and why many athletes are unknowingly sitting on a box of gold. 

We discuss how easy it is to undervalue your health when you only compare yourself to the athletes inside the gym instead of the average person on the street. We dive deep into the biological "use it or lose it" reality of aging, explain why training for speed, power, and full range of motion is your best defense against the loss of independence. 

Whether you are currently hitting plateaus or just getting started, this episode will reframe your perspective on "beginner gains" and help you understand that every heavy lift today is a deposit into your physical bank account for your 80-year-old self.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is this old couple. They're they were in their mid-50s, approaching 60 years old, and they decided that it was finally time to time to downsize their home. So they had uh they had a few kids and it's grown up and grown-ups now, and they had grandkids and doing the thing, and they lived in the same house for several decades, and finally they said it's time. Sick of walking up and down the stairs and taking care of the lawn, and they want to go out in the country and find themselves a nice small ranch house. So they pull up the uh call up the dumpster, throw the dumpster in the front yard, and they just start digging through boxes after box, attics and closets and basements, just clearing out junk and throwing up, throwing away as much as they possibly could to downsize. And the guy starts going through boxes in the closet. He gets this one binder out that's just all covered in dust, and he wipes it off, he clears it off, starts flipping through the pages, and he realizes that the box or the binder is full of old trading cards from when he was a kid collecting baseball cards. And he reminisced a little bit and thought back to when he was a younger boy and collecting all these different things, thought it was really cool, and he kind of just shrugged it off and threw it in the garbage can and moved on with clearing out the attic and basement. They get the U-Haul, pack it all up and sell their home. Now they're living in a small ranch house out in the country, just enjoying life. And him and his wife, he and his wife are watching a collector's show antique show one evening after dinner, and up on the screen pops a trading card, a baseball card that he remembers seeing in that binder that he threw away just a few months ago, and it was now valued at over three million dollars. I guess and he takes a breath and he realizes he realizes that he didn't know what he had. And you know, we see this a lot too in the CrossFit gym. You know, this guy was sitting on a box of gold. And when we think about older people, quote unquote, older people inside the gym, or people that's been in the gym for years and years and years, they don't know what they have. What I mean by that is if you're inside a CrossFit gym, you're by default comparing yourself to everybody else inside the CrossFit gym. You're comparing yourself to CrossFit athletes, CrossFit members, people that work out five, six days a week, people that really care about their health, they're eating really clean, they care about managing their stress and going to bed on time. And these are some of the healthiest and fittest people in the world. So these people that's been in the gym for decades and decades, that's who they're comparing themselves against, and it's a broken measuring stick. Instead of, if you imagine if you go out to the middle of America, just the average rural town, you go into the local supermarket, Kmart, Walmart, grocery store, and you grab the average 60-year-old man, and then you bring him back and you drop him in the middle of a CrossFit affiliate. Now all of a sudden we can see wow, just how healthy and just how fit I really am compared to the average Joe walking through the street.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Yeah, I think this is super important. So that's gonna kick us off today with um episode six of uh our CrossFit 184 podcast Built for Life. And we are gonna talk about and dig into um what we have before it's gone too soon. So uh we really wanna focus on uh these athletes, these athletes that have been here a long time and that are aging with class and wise words. Um, and we are, we're comparing ourselves to different people, which isn't always a bad thing. Um, like we just talked about with the CrossFit open. There's a time and a place, um, but it doesn't have to happen every single day. So um what happens as we get older too? Or let's let's dig into a little bit of the athletes that have been here a long time. Because when you first join CrossFit, it you get hooked because you're like PRing every other day. You're like, oh my gosh, my my weight's going up, my snatch is better.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Um, what happens as we You get the beginner gains and it's addicting, it's exciting. And whether you're a a teenage athlete that's newer to the gym, you get those PRs over and over and over again, or in the other end of the spectrum, maybe you're an older athlete that you have had a uh a sedentary life for the last 10, 15 years, and you come back into the gym, both these two populations are seeing growth and PRs almost on a weekly basis. And then they get they start expecting that. Like I want to PR more, I want to progress more, I want to gain to the next thing, I want to lift even heavier and run even faster. And eventually you're going to plateau. You know, the there's a mindset shift that that we get to transition into and out of. Instead of always progressing, always lifting heavier, always running faster, eventually we're we're making it to the top of the mountain. So compare our health and wellness or health and fitness to climbing a mountain. Over time, when I start working out, when I start taking my health seriously and eating clean and sleeping better, I'm working my way up a mountain. And my goal in life is to climb this mountain as high as I can until I reach my plateau. The higher I get on top of this mountain, the goal is to look down, and what you see underneath you is how much fitness and health you have built up and put in the bank over time. And then eventually, human biology, we're going to age and we're going to start coming down the mountain on the other side.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Which really happens sooner than than you'd like to say. All right. Right around age 30. All right. Everybody starts. Whoa. You didn't know you were old when you were 30. Um, no, right around age 30. Um, this is all in all the books and all the things. Um, things can start to decrease. All right, your muscle mass will start to decrease, you get slower, things start to slow down a little bit. And that's not a bad thing. It's something that we want to be aware of and are ready to find across the gym, get outside your comfort zone and um start working on those things.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Yeah, so let's talk about like when your gains may slow down or when your gains may stop coming every single week. And you know, when when we're working out and when we're training, we want to talk about our max potential as a human being. You know, we all have a max potential that we're working towards. And if I'm a college athlete, I've been in the gym since I was a young teenager and I'm working out four or five days a week for the vast majority of my life. I've gotten closer and closer and closer to that max potential. Now, if I am somebody that was sedentary and was not did not grow up in sports or athletics and did not work out over and over again for years upon years, I have a lot more space before I reach my max potential. And that population of people still has a lot of potential inside them and they have a lot of gains they can make and they can make more PRs than the person that's been training for years and years.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yeah, I mean, and we go through those different periods of times all throughout our life. And like you said, you know, if you've been in the gym or you've been in the sport world, you're going to realize, especially like I know for myself, um, growing up, being an athlete, always trying to push myself to be at that max potential. And then you become a mom, you know, and your life changes and your body went through all these changes. And now you're trying to find, all right, what's my max potential as a mom? What's my max potential at this age, this stage, this season of life? Um, and so there are definitely different opportunities that you can start picking out in your own life, even if it's not age. I mean, I always have to do with age, but just in your different seasons.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

And then it transitions into how long can I maintain this? And how much can I, how long can I maintain this level of fitness? You know, what we've talked about before is if I'm a college athlete and I'm 25 years old and I'm deadlifting to 25, that's not necessarily considered like an elite strength at that age. But then fast forward, and if I'm 80 years old and I'm deadlifting to 25, that's pretty dang good.

unknown 8:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

And that's really what we talk about when we reach the top of that mountain and we start our decline of aging, it's gonna be a lot longer process, a lot slower process of aging if we have a lot more fitness buildup over time.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Yeah, absolutely. So um some of the things that you start losing and things we want you to be ready to take on or have and continue to improve would be um your control. So control over your body, uh, maybe your reactive time. Think about, you know, when you fall and you have to catch yourself. That reaction time, it's a few seconds. You know, am I gonna stick my arm out and is it gonna snap? Am I gonna stick my arm out? Do I know how to roll out of it? If I fall, do I know how to get up? Am I gonna burpee up or am I gonna have to like hit my life alert? Yep, hit my life alert and have somebody come help me. Um, so how are we training those things in the CrossFit gym that will level us up?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah, you know, all those things tie back to balance and coordination and speed and absolute strength. You know, speed and the power in the power lifts or the Olympic lifting, like when you're doing power cleans, you're doing dumbbell snatches or even kettlebell swings, that's all training speed. And speed is one of the first things to go as you age over time because the body is is very, very efficient. So whatever muscle fibers you're not using, the body is going to get rid of and they're gonna lay dormant for a long time until you start to train them with intention inside the gym.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Yeah, so with intention, am I hitting these reps like really slow? Am I doing them fast?

SPEAKER_00 10:17

If you train slow, you're teaching your body how to move slow. You know, there's a time and a and a place for hypertrophy or tempo work where we're going down really slow, we're watching form and technique, we're watching where things break down and build. And and also there's a time for speed and strength and to move things heavy and to move things fast.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah. Um, I when we have discussed this before, I feel like one of the main workouts, like, how does this work out in a CrossFit class? Like, I almost go to the day of when we do Fran, we test Fran. Um for those that don't know, it's 21 15 nine of thrusters and pull-ups. You know, you're taking a light barbell, you're squatting, pressing it above your head, and you're doing those as fast as you can. But what's the rest of the class filled with? It's filled with slower reps. It's working on an empty barbell. We may even like take some time, and we've done like a heavy thruster, all right. You're doing like one or two reps. Um, you're not getting that speed in, but we're progressing up to it. And then you still end the class with a 10 minute or less speed drill, and you're getting that, those fast twitch muscle fibers in. You're working the same engine.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, and you're you're you're working your VO2 max, your anaerobic capacity. These are all things that you start to lose very, very early as you age. And what we see happen is the opposite. As we get older and older, people say their training and their workout is taking the three-mile walk every day, which is an aerobic workout. And what they're doing is they're training the thing that is last to go. You know, that your aerobic fitness is the last thing you're gonna be losing as you get older and older. So, what we need to do is shift our focus to the other side of the spectrum and train heavy and train fast and train balance and train coordination.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

Yeah. Um, one of the other things I think about as well is just that um you can do the crossfit class. I or I think one of the greatest things is you can do all this in the one hour a day. You know, you don't have to go um walk three miles. What does that take? 30 minutes at least, um, maybe a little bit more. And then if you want to do any strength work, what you'll probably be hitting some sets and reps for another additional time. So just this time is building and building, but you know, you're coming to a crossfit class five times a week, those athletes are able to get all of that work in in an hour.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Right, right. That's why I call it GPP, general physical preparedness. You know, inside a week of the crossfit gym, you're gonna lift heavy, and heavy is relative, and heavy is needed whether you're 70 years old or you're 17 years old. Because if you're not lifting 80% or your more of your Mac, you're not lifting heavy, you're only recruiting a small portion of your muscle fibers. The other ones are not being recruited, not being used, and that's when you lose the strength, that's when you start to lose the bone density. So, yes, you're gonna lift heavy every single week inside across the gym, about 80% more of your max. And then during that week, we're also gonna mix in the balance and the coordination, whether it's inside the MECCon, cooldown, warm-up, or our favorite is to is to put it in with the intervals.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Yeah, yeah. Um, and like you said, like if we're not using it, we're losing it, which makes us incapable. So, one of the best things that CrossFit can help us with is being capable. Um and it's those sprint domains, like I was just referencing with Fran, or that we do throughout the week. Um, a lot of our workouts are not 30 to 45 minutes long of just movement. We might hit one of those here and there, or we like to do them a little bit more on Saturdays because it's a great way to end the week. You can kind of pace out your own thing. Um, but one of the other great things um that it helps with too, as we're aging, is just your overall metabolism. So another thing that continues to slow, as especially women are hitting menopause, you know, that metabolism is slowing naturally. It's one way to continue to boost your body to produce that and help you out in that well, in that way.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Yeah, I think metabolism and also resiliency too. Like you come into crossfin, you're gonna do hard things. You know, why do most people start to veer off and start going more into endurance or aerobic training only as they age? It's because it's hard. It's hard to train at max capacity or near max capacity. It's hard to train your VO2 max, it's hard to lift heavy. It's much more comfortable to go slow, long and slow and take your time with things.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Yeah. So you're we're we've been talking about kind of going on walks or long jogs. And I just think back to track season. Um, I don't know if any you didn't run track, did you?

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Not me. I'm not a runner.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Did you have any friends that that ran?

SPEAKER_00 15:15

I don't have I didn't have many friends.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Have many friends? Um, okay. Well, I did have I did have some friends at least, and they had asked me all of high school. They're like, please come run track. I ran my eighth grade year, and then um, once I got to high school, I was like, man, the anxiety of like getting out on the track just I didn't want to do it. It was too hard for me. Um, I wanted to perform my best. I wanted to hit that um capacity. But my senior year, I decided to sign up for track my soccer season. I was like, I'm not gonna play in college. So that spring season is a joke anyway. And um, I was a distance runner, so I love the endurance. Like I'm a natural born, let's just go slow, semi-slow, kind of fast. Um, but I'll run for miles. That's what I grew up doing, playing soccer. Um but in my senior season, I was the long distance person. So think 800 meters was my sprint. Um, or there's the mile. I know it can be if you train it right. Um, your 800 meters, your mile um days. But during track practice, you know, you would have like your hard days and then you'd have your recovery days. And I just remember getting thrown under the bus so many times. I would do my hard workouts, we'd even have a meet, and then they're like, nope, Aaron, sorry, you're gonna go run with the sprinters today. And it was their sprint day. I didn't know a 400 meter was a sprint until I joined Drac. And I was like, what are we doing? Um, but they were so hard. But the reason they were doing that is because they were trying to level up my pace for the longer runs. You know, they were trying to help me find some speed. Find some speed because I was not a natural-born sprinter at all. Um, but it was one of those things, it's really hard. I would not wish 400 meter repeats on anybody unless you really enjoy them. But um, that was one time in my life that I really saw it switch over, you know, doing those 400 meter repeats did help me with the aerobic runs, my my longer runs. Um, and so I think that's a good thing for people to know. Like, even though the short sprint workouts we do stink, like that is why, and they're hard. That's why we do them because they are going to greatly turn over into your aerobic times. Yeah, building up those lungs.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

It reminds me of how we explain like interval workouts to people and how to train your aerobic system very, very efficiently. You can train your aerobic endurance system by going out and running for 30, 40, 50 minutes plus, or you can do high-intensity interval training. You know, when you have a three-minute, five-minute interval and you're going very, very hard, your body is producing lactic acid in your body. And that for that first 90 seconds or so, you're purely anaerobic. And then when we say pause and rest for three minutes, that three minute rest is three minutes of training your aerobic system because your aerobic system kicks on, it comes and consumes and rids the body of all the lactic acid that your anaerobic system produced. By the time it clears it, then we say three, two, one, go, we go again and again and again. And those style workouts were training both areas of fitness, aerobic and aerobic.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Well, I know. So now we've talked about how we go fast, we're lifting 80% of you know our capability. Um, how how do you how would you describe to somebody who might not know, you know, how are those workouts also building our strength? Um, how are we able to combine those two? Because I know for some it might seem like I just have to go in and hit singles of the heaviest weight I can do, and that's gonna build my strength. So why does it work to to either bring it down a little bit and hit some volume or go up a little bit, but we're still gonna hammer out it in a shortened amount of time.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

You know, there's a there's an optimal optimal effective dose. The optimal effective dose is where we want to train. What that means is if we're trying to increase strength, if we're gonna do a five by three back squat, for example, and I can get the same amount of strength gains lifting 82%, the same amount of strength gains that I can lifting 90, 90% with the same reps, why would I choose to lift 90% instead of 82%?

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Ego.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Right, right, right, leader leaderboard, yeah, and this this all goes back to the science of building muscle. And you know, we want to do the minimum effective dose and not have to do more than we have to. You know, if I can come inside a CrossFit gym for an hour five days a week and hit my class and I'm training aerobic, anaerobic, strength, coordination, balance, all these different things, why would I choose instead to go and train for hours upon hours upon hours in this session being strength, this session being anaerobic, this session being aerobic? It's it's very, very inefficient. You know, it's not to say that doing individual training or focuses on one thing at a time is not effective because it is. It's just not nearly as efficient as inside a CrossFit gym. And I don't know about you, but for me, being married, having a business, having three kids, I don't have the time to train six, seven, eight hours a week.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

No, yeah. I don't know what time. There'd be no time. Um but why what would you I mean for some they might be like, man, I feel like I'm too late to the game. But they're not. And the reason for that, the reason you're not too late to the game is because you can get started whenever you're ready, and you're still going to be ahead of some of your younger population who aren't started yet.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

You know, like if Corey here was here, he'd go all into some DNS stuff, the neurological stuff, you know, and that's such a good point to tell people and to remind people as you're getting older and as you age, if you're not using those muscle fibers, those drills, those exercises that require a lot of strength, those muscle fibers are starting to become dormant, not necessarily completely die off and be gone. Sometimes what can happen, and it's really cool when you can experience this, is if you have somebody that's been inactive for a few years, you bring them inside the CrossFit gym, and they might be lifting, say, 65 pounds. After they start moving more and they connect their brain with their body, we call it dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, telling your brain, telling your body what to do. All of a sudden you start to wake up those muff muscle fibers and recruit them, and all of a sudden you have these strength games that seem like unreal.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah. At any age, which is the biggest point here. Um, or I even think back, I mean, this goes for anybody, this goes for the mom that maybe wasn't an athlete growing up. And, you know, now they have had one, two, however many kids, and they're like, I just want to I want to be better than I was. Like, I want to be strong for my kids and I want to show them what a healthy life looks like, it's still capable for them as well. And um, if anything, you have one of the greatest capacities right now to get into it.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Right. You know, I want I want to make sure we hammer home too. Like, how does the training inside the crossway gym translate to outside life? You know, because it's it's it's hard for some people to connect the two, especially if if you're older and and you're starting to age, it's like I don't want to lift heavy, I don't care to be super strong. You know, the saying is people don't die from getting old, people die from falling down because you fall down, you hurt something, you break something, all of a sudden you're no longer independent, and then you have to have somebody taking care of you, and then it starts going downhill fast. So when we talk about speed, it it's just like you were talking about before. Like when you're doing those power cleans, you're activating those fast switch muscle fibers and you're exploding up. Like when's the last time when you're 60 years old you did a 10-second all-out sprint? Probably never.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

You know, but if you're doing that stuff inside the gym, then when you fall, it's easy to catch yourself, it's easy to recover.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Well, you also say, like, oh, you're 60 years old, when have you done a full-out sprint? I mean, if you have a dog, like this is a great opportunity. What happens when your dog goes and chases a squirrel? Like, we've seen it happen before. Um, you might fall and like hurt yourself, or you can't keep up with your dog, and you're like, oh, you know, see you later. But that's like a perfect opportunity. Like, if you're going to want to have that dog or want to have um different things in your life that you want to be independent with and be able to keep up with, it doesn't have to be a child. I mean, for a lot of people, it's grandkids.

SPEAKER_00 24:15

They want to have quality, independent life.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

Yeah. But that's just that's something that you take outside of the gym, you know. Like, where would you see that?

SPEAKER_00 24:24

That that in the same thread too, we talk about full range of motion. You know, we get on people all the time. Let's squat all the way down, let's use full range of motion on all our different lifts. It's not necessarily to yell at you when you're above parallel or say, nope, that lift doesn't count because you weren't down all the way. That's not necessarily what we care about. What we care about is when you are 70 or 80 years old, you're able to sit down on the on the toilet.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

That's an important part of life.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

And you're able to get down in a chair and sit on a sofa and get back up again.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Or sit in your car or get out of your car.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

Like exactly. You're able to move and just live life. That's why it's so important to keep full range of motion.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Yeah. Um, well, and that's yeah, that's just a great, a great point with our strength development and continuing to bring it from the gym outside. Um, I know one thing too is just how great people feel. So your overall grogginess, your, your state of mind. A lot of times um you can get stuck in just feeling like flat and bled. Or um, you know, if we've gone on those really long walks or just moved all day, you kind of feel flat. Um obviously you wouldn't have done this either. I grew up in a house with a lot of girls. It's my mom and my sister. We'd go on long shopping days, and like it's amazing how exhausted you feel just from walking your. Mentally, physically, emotionally, your pocket is also uh feeling it. But no, you feel so tired after like walking around Easton or Polaris all day long and just looking at stuff. Um, but that's one thing that's really exciting about those short intense workouts is it raises up the dopamine. You get those different responses, and that's why you start to have that alive feeling. You know, you do something hard in the middle of it, you're like, why am I here? What am I doing? You know, Abby kind of mentioned it in um her workout. She's like, I am like lost, you know. You're and then you leave and you're like, wow, I feel so good right now. I think this is also what a lot of our like 5 a.m. athletes feel. You know, they get up and do it in the morning. I wouldn't know either. Well, I did in high school. That's uh that was my time slap before school. Um, but I know somebody was just saying it um the other day. They're like, Yep, I come in. Oh, it's Edgar. Um, you know, he was telling his friend, like he gets up and does it in the morning because it's so hard. But then at the throughout the day, anything that comes his way, he's like, it's not hard at all because I just did this workout.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

So I've already done the hardest thing in my day. So what else could there be?

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Yes. And also just fleeing off those natural endorf dwarphins that are taking you on for the rest of the day.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Well, we we talked about like why it's important to do all these things and to have that quality of life, and that should be a goal, but also there's nothing wrong with wanting to be an older person and lift heavy weight. There's nothing wrong with saying I'm a I'm gonna deadlift 315 at seven years old just because I can. And I'm gonna PR fran, I'm gonna do an RX at 80 years old because I can freaking do it. And that's pretty sweet too. So don't overlook, it doesn't always have to be tied back to a quality of life. Sometimes it's just like I want to show off and I want to love myself, I want to have the confidence I can do this thing, so I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Um, so we'll close it out there.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Um I have one question to ask.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Oh no, okay.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

If you are this aging athlete in the gym, a question you can reflect on is look at your fitness right now, your strength and your speed, your health and your wellness. If you had that same amount of fitness when you are 80 or 90 years old that you do right now, would it be enough? And if you'd be excited to have that same amount of fitness and wellness when you're 80 or 90 as you do right now, then that is motivation, encouragement to keep on going. If you feel like you've plateaued or you feel like you've you've hit your peak, maintain as long as you can because that's what matters is when you're 80 years old.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

Love it. Yeah, power is is capability here. So keep on going and we'll see you next time.

unknown 28:43

Bye.