Give it a Rest

At an intuitive level, most people assume that if doing something is good, doing even more of it must be better. But when it comes to human bodies, at least, that often doesn’t hold. Taking two Tylenol will cure a headache; taking the whole bottle will kill you. Similarly, doing more and more exercise doesn’t make you more and more fit; at some point, it overtrains you, and instead progressively drives you into the ground.

That’s often difficult for new CrossFitters to grasp, because the total amount of workout time in even a heavy CrossFit training week probably pales in comparison to the amount of hours of working out the same person did pre-CrossFit. Certainly, if you can get on the elliptical for an hour, six days a week, you should be able to do six short WODs, right?

Turns out, you can’t. The very high intensity level of CrossFit WODs necessitates much more recovery time than from more traditional workouts, and there really is a hard limit to how much most people can do each week while still making positive progress.

How much is right for you? Here’s the back-of-the-napkin calculation I use:

Start with 8 WODs a week, which appears to be the upper limit of training for Games-level CrossFit athletes. Then subtract HALF a WOD for each item if you:

– Don’t sleep 8-9 hours a night in perfect darkness.
– Don’t eat a 100% clean diet.
– Have had a drink in the last two weeks.
– Have taken off time in the last two years due to injury.
– Have any job stress.
– Have any personal stress.
– Have been training CrossFit (without a break) for less than three years.
– Don’t have a powerlifting and Olympic lifting background of at least five years pre-CrossFit.
– Are not on steroids.
– Are over 25.

By these calculations, I should be doing 4 WODs weekly. Which, in fact, is about the number I can sustain for months at a time while still making gains. Try the calculation yourself, and be guided accordingly.

And, as ever, let common sense be your guide. A few years back, a now member of our competition team had been pushing herself very hard for several months straight. One day, she took a bar off the rack, and put plates on the bar. And then she sat down next to it and started crying hysterically. You don’t want to reach that point. If you think you need to take a day – or a week – off, you’re almost certainly right.

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Five (Wrinkly) Finger Discount

At the dog run with Gemelli this morning, I caught the end of a story that a woman in her mid-80’s was telling the group.

She was at Home Depot recently, she explained, looking to buy a toilet. So she headed to the plumbing section, and waited for an employee to pass by to help. After ten minutes of waiting, she managed to flag someone down. Unfortunately, he worked in the paint department, and didn’t know much about toilets.

After a few minutes more of waiting, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She found a palette, rolled it back to the plumbing section, and started taking a boxed toilet down from the shelf herself. Another employee saw her, and came to her aid, helping her get the toilet down and onto the palette.

She thanked him, rolled the palette up front, and then rolled it right out the door. A cabbie helped her load the toilet into the back of his van. She got in. And then she told him to floor it.

So, wait, we said. You stole the toilet?

Yes. She stole the toilet. And then, a month or so later, she stole a sink pan. And a month after that, she stole a shower rod.

As in, she just walked out without paying?

Oh yes, she said.

We must have looked shocked, as she told us that, if we thought that was bad, we should meet her sister, who this fall traveled through Italy and France with an extra suitcase to carry all the fixtures she stole from her hotels’ furniture.

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Fare Enough

As Ben Franklin once observed, “human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.”

Which is why I’m so enthused by the [Way2Ride app](https://www.way2ride.com). It’s stupidly simple: if you’re in a Way2Ride-enabled Taxi, you can ‘check in’ to the ride on your phone; when you arrive at the end of your trip, the app instantly auto-pays (using your pre-selected card and tip amount), no tapping and swiping (or cash hand-offing) required.

While it doesn’t seem like much, dropping the flustered payment scramble at ride’s end turns out to make a huge experiential difference – enough so that I’m actually annoyed by cabs that haven’t yet taken up Way2Ride.

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