It’s a phrase thrown around a lot, ‘It’s not a good workout for me’. You hear it at CrossFit competitions, or from people every day at training.
Here’s the big problem with this phrase – it implies that your ability is fixed. It implies that you have no control over your performance. And it implies that it’s the workout that can change. The opposite is true. The workout is fixed, we cannot (or should not) adapt it to suit our abilities. What we can adapt is our own ability. We are the variable.
‘It’s not a good workout for me’ also shifts the blame outwards, which makes us feel better because it masks our own shortcomings or lack of commitment to eradicating our weaknesses and creating a body that is physically capable of achieving things we previously couldn’t. There is no fate. 95% of your successes or failures are on you. Accept it.
It’s also a form of self handicapping, where we provide a reason to ourselves for our expected future failure so if (when) that failure occurs, we’ve already justified it. Delusionally, it makes it ok. It’s not ok, raise your expectations of yourself.
Of course, the reverse is also true. ‘This is a good one for you’, where someone tells an athlete they expect them to do well in an event or training session. It implies that an athletes ability to succeed is determined by the whims of the gods, that it’s out of their hands. This is downright disrespectful, and throws thousands of hours of commitment, discipline and weakness eradication in their face. Their suitability for an event is no mistake or coincidence, it’s of their own creation. Not ‘This is a good one for you’, but ‘You’re good for this’.
So the dialogue shouldn’t be ‘It’s not a good workout for me’, but ‘I’m not good for this workout’. This rephrasing shows acceptance that we are in control of our performance and abilities. Once we have this acceptance and have climbed out of our self imposed pigeon-hole, we can get to work on addressing the only thing we CAN control, not the workout, but our ability to complete it.
