The Unspoken Danger of Going Back to the Gym

Bottom line: people are going to get hurt when restrictions are lifted and everyone is allowed to return to the gym.
You don't have to be one of them. Train smart.

Think back to your first CrossFit workout. You probably didn't know how to work through the discomfort yet. You had no idea how hard you could push yourself. And even now, do you remember how sore you were? Don’t you miss being sore? I like to call it progressive soreness.

But now, pushing through the discomfort is the easy part. Pulling you away from it is hard. You're probably tired of push ups, lunges, and are ready to get back to the gym and toss around heavy weights and start breathing heavy again. We get it.

And that's the problem.
When you first started, you had built-in brakes. You had self-regulation in the form of signals that told you to slow down when things got really difficult. Now, you're going back to the gym without the brakes, and whether you realize it or not, without the capacity.

You may be able to do the work -- that's not the question...but can you recover from it? What have you been doing at home? You have to be honest with yourself. “Help me, help you!”

The likelihood of you having the capacity to hurt yourself in training without the wherewithal to slow down is dangerously high. Even if you ease back in, that may not be enough. You need to be careful not to give yourself tendinitis, tendinosis, or just general joint pain.

So how do you do this?

At CrossFit Zachary we will do this through analyzing acute workload and chronic workload. To simplify, acute workload is the amount of work done in the last week, while chronic workload is the average amount of work done in the last 4 weeks.

Our initial intensity (acute workload) is going to be much lower than you might expect (probably around 40-50%). Over the course of 7 weeks we'll gradually increase the overall workload (in 30-40% increments) until we build back up to 100% (chronic workload). So don’t expect to hit a one rep max anytime soon!

This is the most intentional way of easing back into things -- and not doing things "haphazardly".

You've waited this long. Do things the right way so that you won't lose any more time due to doing too much, too soon.