How Can I Stop Beating Myself Up After a Bad Workout?
Answering a listener's question.
Every Monday, we revisit one of the listener questions we answered in a previous episode. This episode has been edited for clarity and brevity, but if you want the full version, links to the full episode are below the text.
Patrick: This is a question in our Think bucket:
How can I stop making every workout a competition? I feel like I have to be number one in the workout, or I'm doing poorly. CrossFit is so fun for me when I'm doing well, but if I'm doing badly, even in a daily workout, I have a horrible experience.
I know the only competition is with yourself, but I really can't get out of my own way on a day-to-day basis.
Ben: I realize you put this in the Think category, but I think we can mechanistically work around it rather than reframing it in our heads. I've worked with this in a number of different situations, my wife being the closest.
The question is, if you're a super competitive athlete but you know that mentality is no longer serving you, how can you work out of that?
So the way you get out of this, again, mechanistically - and not the longer, slower road of working through how to shift from detrimental competitiveness to healthy competitiveness - tomorrow, when you walk into the gym, don't do the same workout as everybody else.
If everyone else is doing thrusters, you do overhead squats. If everyone else is using 95 pounds, you'll use 115. If everyone else is running 400 meters, you'll bike the conversation (which would be 1,000 meters).
You'll keep the same stimulus and the same workout structured throughout the week, so you can still enjoy all the upsides of accountability and fun with friends. But you won't get to score yourself against everybody else.
The aspect of "I'm here to beat you” needs to disappear.
The tendency to value yourself based on how you stack up today or this week is detrimental. You need to let that go.
Slightly changing the programming, you'll still feel the push and work hard, but you'll begin to eliminate all the things that can make a workout feel like a horrible experience.
You'll start to see the other athletes running while you're biking, and you'll still want to beat them, but pretty quickly, you'll realize that doesn't make any sense.
Do that long enough, and you'll break the habit.
Eventually, that feeling of needing to win, of needing to be the person who wins, will start to crumble.