By Daniel Jackiw
28th February 2023
Here’s how CrossFit and Exercise Can Help You
Hey I’m Dan, Adelaide’s newest CrossFit Affiliate owner. I also teach the next wave of up and coming PTs in Adelaide and have had many conversations with people about the true definition of fitness, and how it can be applied to the gym and in life.
I’m passionate about Mental Health and in preaching about the benefits of how CrossFit can improve our minds.
Life is full of it and we cannot avoid it – it’s called stress and it can be good or bad, depending on our response and level of mental toughness.
Mental toughness is our ability to continue according to plan in a way that is in line with our values even though negative thoughts and emotions are pulling us in another direction. In other words, it’s our capacity to stay present and move forward in a stressful situation.
In the traditional world of mental health, patients are taught to eliminate the stressor (source of our stress) by identifying their problems, isolating them, then removing them from their environment. Sounds good in theory right, but it is ineffective as stress will always exist and we cannot get rid of every person, problem or situation that we find ourselves in that we don’t enjoy.
Instead, we need to learn to embrace stress. This means we must acknowledge negative thoughts and emotions as being normal outworkings of our stress, separate ourselves from them and push through towards our goals (this is known as cognitive defusion). If we can act from the outside in, not from the inside out and not buy into these negative thoughts and feelings, we can make progress. Feelings of stress, anxiety and wanting to give-up are normal and will never ever go away. The key is how we handle them to ensure we continue on the path that is toward our goals.
During a CrossFit workout which involves high intensity, levels of fear and anxiety increase as we increase our energy demands and release key hormones including cortisol (the stress hormone). We intentionally bring about stress and discomfort. This in turn causes a negative affective response which impacts our thoughts, whereby we start to say “I want to stop, do less reps etc.” However, we push on and get the work done. Once we complete the workout and our bodies return to its pre-exercise state, we’ve taught ourselves that we can in fact push through and continue on toward our goals in the face of these negative thoughts and emotions, with a never-quit spirit.
Summary
Constantly overcoming stressful situations in the gym, gives us more confidence to overcome tough situations in real life. When we train our minds to recognise that negative thoughts and feelings are perfectly normal – but they are not part of who we are – we are in no-way obligated to take action on them if it means that the action is not in line with our goals.
We look at these negative thoughts and behaviours from the perspective that whilst they are normal, we do not need to buy into them with poor choices. Thoughts are just thoughts!
Want to learn a little more about CrossFit? Check out this cool video put out by our buddies at CrossFit HQ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YuzxKnlv3M
If you’re keen to find out more about Adelaide’s newest CrossFit Affiliate, there are 3 ways to get started:
1 – Book in a 30 min No Sweat Consult
2 – Drop us a line via DM, email or phone us
3 – Start a Free Trial
Click here to connect with us via one of these 3 options. We’d love to chat more about how we can help you hit your goals
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