Sunday Story…More Recovery

It’s been a solid 4 months since total knee replacement surgery. There have been many wins over the last month, but the biggest was snowboarding in Colorado two weeks ago.

If you don’t know snowboarding, you may not realize the mobility required to get in and out of the board, as well as up and down. There were some challenges along the way, but most of them were easily met. The worst part of the experience was the “yard sale” I pulled in the parking lot. If you aren’t familiar with that term, it means you fall, and all your stuff goes everywhere like a yard sale. It’s embarrassing, especially when it happens in the parking lot at the end of the day!

Other than that experience, the trip was a tremendous success. And the knee did well and did no additional damage. I continue to do my performance physical therapy exercises as prescribed by Dr. Amanda Anderson with Raise the Barbell physical therapy. This is the most important thing. No matter what happens to you, if physical therapy is prescribed, you Must do it. All of it, as prescribed, every day.

You see, when you have an injury, your brain shuts off certain pathways to protect the injury. The problem is your brain doesn’t know when the problem has been fixed to turn those pathways back on. Physical therapy is designed to do just that. It is particularly important if you have had an injury for a long time as most of us with knee problems have had. My brain and body figured out how to get things done in the most efficient, efficacious way possible. Now that everything is fixed, I need to rebuild the proper pathways. That takes dedicated, consistent work to get all the pieces working together again.

Too many people neglect their physical therapy exercises. Don’t be that person. If you want an outstanding result, you are going to have to do the work. Remember, there is no magic pill!

John Mariotti              

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com            

775-338-2412

 

 

 

Sunday Story…The Aftermath

It’s over. 3 weeks of tests have come and gone. You did well on some, but not so well on others. Or maybe you exceeded all your expectations. What matters, however, is that you showed up and gave it your full effort. Full effort is full victory.

Now, in the aftermath, the question becomes, what is next? What are you going to do with the knowledge you have attained about yourself, your fitness, and your motivation? Often in the aftermath, I hear about all the plans, all the skills, all the motivation to do better next year. And that’s great.

Here’s the sad truth, however. If you are like most people, you have the desire and motivation, but you don’t have a plan. At this point what you have is a vague sense of needing to work on certain things to get where you want to be.

If you are serious about improving your skills and/or strength, you will need to do three things. First, make a cohesive plan. Second, decide how to implement that plan. Third, go to work. It’s simple, but not easy.

Here’s my offer…if you want to sit down and discuss what your goals are for the coming year make an appointment with Ellie, Alex, or myself and we will sit down with you to help make that plan. Once you have your plan you can hire any one of us to train you and make sure the plan is working.

Here’s my other offer: Get four of your super friends, and we will create a small group class for you that can meet once, twice, or more often every month to work on improving everyone’s skills so that next year, some of those holes in your game will be less glaring.

Let’s do this!

 

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com    

775-338-2412

 

 

 Sunday Story…The Thrill of Victory

By now you may have done the first 2 CrossFit Open workouts. You may be pleasantly surprised or vastly disappointed, or both! This is one of the best things about testing yourself like this. You get to see both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

If you found yourself staring down a skill you didn’t have before, and went ahead and tried it and discovered you had it or almost had it, you should celebrate that. And decide now you are going to do what you need to do so next time that skill pops up you can own it. Maybe you will need some personal training lessons. Maybe you will need to dedicate 5 or 10 or 15 minutes of practice every day or week to dial in that skill.

Maybe you found out your conditioning was weak in one area or another. What’s your plan to improve that? Here’s an example from my own discovery. Yesterday, on 25.2, I discovered my conditioning while doing thrusters was weak (that’s being nice, it sucked). It’s not surprising, given the fact that I have kept my intensity exceptionally low over the last 3 months. If I want to improve, I am going to have to change what I am doing a little bit. I need to add some intensity around moving weight fast once or twice a week.

By the way, this is a life lesson. If you want something different, you need to do something different to get a different result. You can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.

So, look at your results and make a plan to do better in the future.

 

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com

775-338-2412

Sunday Story…Competing

How does competing fit in the path to health and longevity? After all, getting out on the edge, pushing your heart, lungs, and muscles past the point of comfort into suffering seems antithetical to health and fitness. In many ways it is. Yet competing is part of our human condition. For millennia we have competed for resources, land, and more. It is in our blood.

Yet going all out is in that territory where, on the old maps, “dragons be!” We don’t want to fall off the world's edge, yet like the explorers of old, we don’t want to just skirt the edges of the known world, we want to go beyond. And although we may risk mutiny, we don’t want to wreck our ship in pursuit of something that isn’t going to serve our long-term goals.

At this point in our journey, we recognize that going all out, sinking the ships may not be the best strategy. Leave that one for the 20 somethings. If they fall off the edge, the climb back isn’t so bad. For those of us longer in the tooth, the climb back may be impossible.

So, after all these years living in and using this body, I need to be able to regulate my effort. Take a breather, give yourself 5-10 seconds and restart. Have the discipline to maintain your rest time and get right back to work. In a sentence: work smarter, not harder. You can compete, you can go hard and harder, but you must be self-aware enough to know when and how to back off from the edge.

Like last week, I will leave you with this nugget:

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

John Mariotti

www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com

www.crossfitodyssey.com

775-338-2412