Have you ever heard someone say that at times it can be a mental game when it comes to testing 1 rep maxes in lifts or even in the metcons? When it comes to testing max effort days in CrossFit, a lot of the time we actually have no idea how hard something is without someone being by our side to give us feedback. I am sure that a lot of people have experienced warming up for a max day and all their warm up lifts feel heavier than they want them to. There may be times where you may have just stood up a lifetime PR for your back squat and you would have sworn it was the most difficult thing ever but then your rack partner or coach tells you that it looked easy and you should go heavier. On the other side of the coin, you may be someone that has a lot of brute strength and can muscle through a weight but the coach is standing near by and may not look very happy. Having a coach’s eye on you is one of the best things to have when you are lifting and one of the best ways to get better!
Typically when we have high percentage work days or max out days, the weights in the 75-85% range can be very misleading. This is because we are well outside of the warm up range but we also aren’t in the max effort stage yet. What this means is that we don’t need to hit the turbo button just yet to make the lift happen, but if we don’t lift with some real aggression then the bar will feel much heavier than it should. I can recall lots of days where I have missed a lift in that range when I thought I was having a good day, then I realized I wasn’t fully engaged like I should. Once I treated those percentages more like a max effort the lifts were made and with much more eaze. Learning how to strategize and find those different gears for your lifts can become immensely helpful when testing max efforts in lifts and in the workouts. For example, if you have a workout with high reps of deadlifts or squats standing up or pulling as hard as possible for every rep will be very taxing and hard to sustain for the entire workout. However, standing the weight up with a slightly toned back amount of effort will probably be more sustainable. Let’s say your max Clean is 185 pounds and the metcon calls for 95 pound cleans, you should realize you don’t need to pull or jump nearly as hard for the 95 pound clean as you would the 185 pound clean. Knowing this can help you conserve energy on this part of the metcon and help you pick up a little extra speed in other parts of the metcon.
Another phenomenon that we see in the 75-85% range is that someone will stand up the required reps and say how difficult the weight was to complete. Lots of times this range calls for people to require more focus and to control their breathing and push harder. From their perspective the set feels incredibly heavier and very difficult. When the coach is asked how it looked, the coach may say that it was easy and to continue adding weight. The lifter recalls the lift differently because they are the person that had the weight trying to smash them. This makes their brain interpret the experience of the set under a kind of flight or fight awareness. When our bodies are under that kind of stress the mind records and perceives things differently. The coach from the side doesn’t have that feeling of weight being on them so they see it differently. This is why you will see lots of lifters who don’t have coaches by their side use video to determine how hard a lift actually was. At times a playback of a lift can provide the proof and assurance that the weight actually wasn’t as hard as it felt. Luckily for all of the lovely people of Outlier, there is always a coach around to let you know how difficult a lift actually appeared.
While lots of us need to rely on learning technique to move weight, there are some people that I am going to just call gorilla strong…or farmer strong…or stupid strong. These are the people that can clean or move weight far beyond what their technique would make you think. Lots of times as a coach you have to get these athletes to take weight off to help them learn proper technique. You have to teach the athlete that just because the weight got from point A to point B it doesn’t necessarily mean it was a success. As a coach you want them to know that if they learned the proper technique and spent the time with lighter weights and drilling the technique, their numbers would get that much better and they would be even stronger!
What’s the moral of the story you ask? The moral of the story is that the coaches are here to help you and help guide you through the lifts and metcons. We are here to help keep you from getting in your head and letting your mind tell you that you can’t! We are here to challenge you to get better and your goal should be to show up to do your best. Working hard and listening to the coaches that you see when you are at Outlier will help you get the most out of every visit and all of the time you put into your fitness!
Coach P