Leveling Up
by Lee Koontz

When you first started Crossfit, you PR’d every time you walked in the gym. Your squat numbers skyrocketed from your first attempts and you may have put 50-60 pounds on your numbers in the six months since you started. Your WOD times are also way down; the workouts that seemed impossible to complete before are now just the daily routine. You may still be exhausted by the end, but it’s a manageable kind of exhausted, one that you’ve become good friends with. You’ve already plotted your steady improvement for the next 2 years on a spreadsheet entitled “The Road to the Crossfit Games” and you’ve hung a picture of Rich Froning on your bathroom mirror because you saw Rocky do the same thing when he beat Ivan Drago in Soviet Russia.

However, six months in, something strange has started to happen: your numbers have stagnated. Your strength numbers aren’t going anywhere anymore and your WOD scores have stayed the same. Your progress has gone way off of your Excel sheet and Froning silently laughs at you every morning when you wake up. What was once a tiny questioning voice in the back of your head has become a constant roar: “WHY AM I NOT IMPROVING ANYMORE???”

Does that sound familiar? Not to worry! Every single person who has been in the gym knows exactly what you’re going through. You’ve plateaued. I’m here today to tell you that that is OK. This is a natural part of your growth and adaptation as an athlete and human being, and you will get through it, if you keep working. That’s the important part though; you MUST keep working and MUST not get frustrated.

That’s not to say it won’t mess with your mind. The hardest thing to deal with during this period is your own thought process. The automatic logical conclusion that you reach is that A.) You aren’t working hard enough and it’s your fault or B.) You simply don’t have the physical capacity to get better anymore and you’ve reached your absolute physical limits. It’s almost never so simple as that. What you need to do is keep working at it at your steady pace, and eventually your body will adapt and your numbers will jump all at once, when you least expect it.*

Personally, as a giant nerd, I’ve found it easiest to describe this phenomenon in terms of video games. When you are a Level 1 Cross-Fighter first questing in the land of Glassmonia, you only need to beat one little WODling to reach Level 2. However, to reach Level 3, you need to beat 2 little WODlings. To reach Level 4, you have to beat 4. And so on and so on. Eventually, you get to Level 9 and you need 256 dead WODlings to reach that incredible 10th Level where you get to receive the ExcaliBar-bell from the Fran of the Lake and slay the Fight That Doth Go Bad! Forsooth!**

…Getting back on track, the point here is that you need to put the work in, and eventually your body will respond. It may not seem like you are improving on a day-to-day basis, but everyday your body is adapting to the work just a little bit more. The worst thing that you could do to yourself at this point is to get frustrated, quit and lose your progress along with any hope of improvement in the future. What you must do is keep your head down, put the work in and know that every workout is another step forward in your journey toward being a more incredible human being.

*This is NOT saying that you need to start doing two-a-days or three-a-days. If you never want to make gains ever again, this is a good way to go about it. This will be the subject of later blog post.
**I could literally go on like this for hours.