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You may be aware that we haven’t sat on the fence when it comes to talking about CrossFit, for a long time we’ve openly talked about it’s positives and negatives from our point of view. The negatives mostly being more due to the competency of the coach and individual to avoid needless injuries.

For the past few years we’ve been looking for new ways to challenge ourselves and improve in many areas of fitness from strength to flexibility, this has led us down the path of gymnastics, calisthenics and fighting sports such as boxing and MMA for Leon and I respectively. In this time we learnt lot’s including some pretty cool party tricks all while improving our performance, movement, awareness, fitness & confidence.

However it’s not until we we’re put into a situation where we trained with top level athletes that the penny dropped.

While away in Marbella at Mikes gym we trained with some of the CrossFit athletes who are also part of the Awesome Supplements team. Doing three intelligently planned workouts a day with these guys taught us lots as well as taking us well out of our comfort zone! Despite the early starts and volume we loved every minute of it and the most valuable lesson we learnt is we are capable of SO MUCH MORE!

img_0456Being personal trainers we train the general public who for the most part are new or in their infancy when it comes to exercise, I think we fell into the trap of gauging our workouts and performance off the general publics standards when in fact we’ve trained 5-6x a week for multiple years.

One of the main reasons for joining CrossFit Spitfire was we could officially hand over the reigns and let someone else do the majority of our training programming. This means we face challenges and obstacles we have never faced before forcing us to improve. We still add in our own training often meaning we fit in two sessions a day while carefully listening to our bodies, we’re not afraid to be sore but we don’t want to burn out.

Another plus is we get to drop the weights where we couldn’t in our local gym due to the flooring being suspended, even for exercises such as deadlifts this is a bonus as I now don’t have to lower the bar slowly to protect the floor which used to result in performing a negative rep and subsequently earlier fatigue meaning I get less from my deadlifts in terms of intensity.

It’s also a shit load of fun to throw weights around and just sweat it out!

What I particularly like is the camaraderie and support from the other members, theirs no ego just encouragement and advice.

My knee that has suffered from patella tendonitis is also feeling great! I’ve managed to train legs 3 x this week with my last session allowing me to hit a 130kg 1 rep max back squat with more still in the tank, only to be followed by KAREN – 150 9kg wall ball squats at a 10 ft target. This is huge for me as I have not been able to squat effectively for multiple years! I have a strict routine I follow to correct imbalances and rehabilitate my patella tendon and currently it seems to be working well.

Final thoughts

If you want a challenge and to push yourself hard every single session as well as have fun then try CrossFit out and see if you like it. However be mindful of finding a good box which has friendly members and coaches that are competent and will put your health first. Coaches should teach you correct movement and correct you if they see you doing it wrong.

Join the discussion 2 Comments

  • Katie says:

    I love the format of the website. It’s super clean and easy to navigate. But for whatever reason half of the page is the top menu bar with your home, about us, subscribe buttons and it makes it hard to read the posts. Maybe there is a way to fix that so we can read better. I tried it in full screen on my browser and it didn’t do much. Let me know. You guys are great!

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