Due to personal and professional commitments, I have decided not to compete until Fall 2018.  Because I am taking such a long off-season, Tucker and I will be working together to shift my focus towards more bodybuilding hypertrophy work, with a diligent focus on my diet.  I need a goal and my body needs some time away from the competition lifts.  I am still diligently focusing on my weak points, but this is a new challenge and so far I am having a lot of fun – which is important!

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Well, that is all she wrote for me and my CrossFit adventure.  If you read my log about why I decided to compete in the Crossfit Open, you know that I had zero expectations for my performance.  The 1 WOD a week fit into my goal of improved body composition and I wanted to have fun with the people I spend so much time with.  I do have to be honest that I had a lot of fun.  NONE of the workouts played to my strengths (because I have none lol), but they all were uniquely challenging.

18.1 – Long workout and I learned what it meant to pace a workout

18.2 – The worst 10 minutes of my life.  Burpees suck at 230lbs

18.3 – I scaled the whole thing, but even the scaled version was a lot of fun and made my calves explode

18.4 – This one sucked.  45 reps of 225 deadlifts in less than 3 minutes is a lot!

18.5 – The most fun one.  Quick and Dirty and I actually beat a lot of people on this one.

Unfortunately, while I was travelling I neglected to put in my score, so I ended up in like last place, so my standing is meaningless.  My goal was to complete the 5 workouts and I did just that, completing at least part of each workout as prescribed and scaling as needed after that.

Now, this may come with some butthurt, but it needs to be said: If you are so out of shape and unfit that a 10 minute conditioning workout 1x per week would completely destroy your training plan, then you have much bigger problems than being a competitive powerlifter – you just plain SUCK!

Through this whole process, I continued my training, continued to increase the benchmarks on my lifts, continued to lose bodyweight (as planned) and continued to make progress.  Now, I did approach my training in an intelligent manner, but seriously STFU about cardio killing your gains.  In the off-season, increasing your conditioning and general fitness will HELP you get stronger.  Would I advocate doing CrossFit during a meet prep? Absolutely not.  In the offseason? Why not!  Have some fun and throw some variety into your training.  The caveat would be to modify the movements to your capacities.  Don’t be a dummy.