5 Lessons That CrossFitters Can Learn From Children

“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” ~Franklin P. Jones

• That failure is a step on the road to success – when you watch a child learn something new such as riding a bike or drawing a picture you’ll notice they often fail the first few times they try. The child may get upset or frustrated. Imagine then telling them ‘Oh dear, you’d better not ever do that again as you’ll obviously never get the hang of it’?  Unthinkable isn’t it?. Yet as we get older we seem to think that we should be faster at learning just because we’re older.  Take the child’s view instead and see that mistake as a lesson.
• To have fun – George Bernard Shaw had it right when he said “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”  And what better place to play than in a CrossFit gym? Have you seen how many toys we’ve got for you – I’ll race you to the monkey bars.
• Great form – Watch a little kid squat or pick something up from the floor – chances are they’ll do it with great form.  They’ve not been taught that, they’re just doing what comes naturally.  Much of what we do in the gym is re-teaching you to do what used to come as easily as breathing.
• They don’t know “can’t” – Children have masses of self-belief and doubt is an alien concept for them. As we grow up, we develop fixed ideas and conventions about what we can and can’t do. Children have no such inhibitions.  Let ‘can’t’ become a temporary indicator as opposed to a long term forecast.
• To live in the moment – Watch one child take a toy from another child – there’s likely to be tears for a few minutes but just as quickly they’ll spot something else to play with and be happily absorbed. So forget about the last workout where you didn’t do so well, forget about tomorrow’s workout. Just do the best you can in this one.

A naturally great squat

Today’s WOD

Run/Burgener Warm Up

Snatch technique

20m Tyre flips (lines drawn at 10m – tyre must cross the far line then turn round and flip to cross the first line) Done with Stan (the tall skinny tyre) and Ollie (the short fat tire)