1) Raising Expectations = Raising Ability.
Our perception of ourselves becomes a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. It’s called the Pygmalion Effect, “…the phenomenon whereby higher expectations lead to an increase in performance” (Wikipedia). It’s damaging cousin is “…the golem effect, in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance” (Wikipedia). Research shows that belief in ability is directly related to actual ability. Believing we can do something goes a long way to actually doing it. Don’t pigeon hole your fitness. Don’t limit yourself. Raise your expectations of yourself and you’ll raise other people’s expectations of you. Once the expectations are raised, get really good at meeting them. ‘Attitude does indeed define altitude’.
2) You Might Accomplish Something You’ve Never Done Before
When was the last time you did something completely new? Something you’d never done before in your entire life. As a CrossFitter, it was probably more recent than if I asked than question of the general population. But still, virgin performances are rare. Our society is built around specialisation and repetition. We get very good at one thing, then we do it a lot. Secondary and tertiary education leads us down this path, then a career (almost by definition) hammers the final nail into our coffin of specialisation. Here’s an opportunity to turn that hammer around, remove the nails and do something completely new.
If your social media experience is anything like mine, your feed is littered with first muscle-ups/handstand push-ups/double-unders/pull-ups…. By choosing to ‘go Rx’, you’re removing the option to fail. If you remove the option to fail, you often don’t. Remove the safety net. I’ll promise you one thing, the only surefire way to guarantee you won’t get a muscle-up is not to attempt it.
3) ‘Failure’ Makes You Hungry
I can’t think of any CrossFitters who aren’t motivated by failure. It’s a hallmark of our unique sub-species of human. How many people do you know who had their arses kicked by their first CrossFit session? How many of these same people became hooked for life because of it? Just about every single one. There’s nothing wrong with an ego bruising beatdown. It plants the seeds of hunger and improvement. If you repeatedly fail a chest to bar pull-up, I’d hazard a guess (my opinion and observations, not research) that there’s a greater chance of you getting it next year than if you successfully complete 100 jumping chest to bar pull-ups. I could put in any one of hundreds of clichés here, and they all mean the same thing. Failure is only failure if you fail to learn from it. It’s hard to learn from failure if you never experience it. The other good thing about failure? It makes success all that much sweeter.
4) The Open is a Test
For most of the year, you exercise to become happier, healthier and fitter. You’re not ‘working out’ for the sake of ‘working out’, you’re training. We’re all training for different things. To set an example to our kids. To climb the stairs without puffing. To make it to The CrossFit Games. To kick the footy with our grandkids. To get a six-pack. To get off our insulin medication… Any one of a thousand other things. These are our ‘events’ – the things we’re training for. Training is great, but it doesn’t have to be what The Open is about. The Open is a chance to compete. For this tiny percentage of our annual bulk of exercise, we get to be competitors – real genuine athletes. Scaling The Open because we ‘want to get a good workout’ misses the point of the competition. Scaling this test is like scaling a maths test. Yes, maybe we’d get a better score, but would it be a better test? For this tiny fraction of the year, don’t study for the test, sit the test.
5) Because It’s Not Safe
I don’t mean physically safe (which will always be the priority), but psychologically safe. It’s so easy to make the safe decision. The reason it’s so easy is because we spend our entire lives making the safe decision – so we’re really good at it! It’s usually the least favourable decision that leads to the most favourable outcome. The decision people choose to make says a lot about their values. Do you value something enough to take the required steps to achieve it? Instant gratification and comfort versus long term positive change. Seldom can you have both. Seldom do people deviate from comfort. Making the hard decision results in cognitive and behavioural change – change that is seldom easy and even more seldom comfortable. Making the hard decision requires hard work. With this deviation from routine and normality comes much greater reward and a favourable return. Risk failing. The glory of success overshadows inconsequential failure.
6) You’ll Create a Culture of Success
Sports Psychology research tells us that the second greatest factor contributing to our self-confidence (second only to our own successful performance) is watching out peers successfully perform a task. This vicarious experience tells us that ‘if they can do it, we can do it’. By choosing to attempt The Open Rx, you’ll be setting an example to your peers, and you’ll change the very culture of where you train. You’ll benefit not just yourself, but them too. Take them along for the ride.
7) Your coach will treat you differently.
Let me qualify this before coaches throw up their hands at my accusations of elitism or favouritism. I don’t mean your coaches will give you any less attention or a lower level of service. Expectations of others play a massive role in how we treat them, subconsciously or otherwise. This isn’t my opinion – it’s evidence based, and it’s called the Rosenthal Effect. It’s worth visiting one of the most famous experiments on the topic.
A group of school children are administered a test. Unbeknown to the teachers, the test results are never looked at and are thrown away. The researchers randomly allocate the students into a ‘high potential’ group, or a ‘low potential’ group. The teachers are told that the test has indicated that the children in the ‘high potential’ group have a greater propensity to learn – but they are not instructed to teach the kids in this group any different to those in the ‘low potential’ group. At the end of the school year, the students are re-tested and (you guessed it) the kids in the ‘high potential’ group now fit the label they have been assigned. Consciously or not, the teachers have taught these kids more advanced material – based purely on the expectation that they can handle it. Handle it they did.
This effect becomes even stronger when we direct these expectations to ourselves. Remember, people get really good at meeting their own expectations. Tell your coach you want to get muscle-ups. You’ll up-scale both their perceptions and their treatment of you.
8) Because it’s really hard.
Humans are lazy. In fact, it’s a survival advantage. In our ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness’ (the time in our past where we did most of our evolving), being lazy and doing the absolute minimum required to survive made us live longer. Scaling isn’t just a decision, it’s built in to our genes! But guess what? After your Open Workout you’re a lot more likely to chase down a protein shake than a wooly mammoth. The modern environment we’ve created for ourselves removes the acceptability of laziness. Fight your genome. For the same reason humankind went to the moon – ‘Not because it is easy, but because it is hard’. We spend so much of our life chasing efficiency and comfort. For a few minutes of a few weeks of the year, abandon ‘easy’.
Now of course, I could just as easily write a blog entitled ‘8 Reasons EVERYONE Should Do The Open Scaled’. And you know what? I reckon I could compile an equally compelling argument. But I don’t need to, because without any help from me, tens of thousands of CrossFitters worldwide have already convinced themselves that scaling is best for them. Maybe this can convince a small fraction of these tens of thousands to raise their gaze and at least consider the benefits of ‘going Rx’.
