PR

Although I’d been faithfully going to the gym for years before joining CFDC, I had never proactively tracked whatever progress, if any, I have ever made. Not being a serious athlete, tracking progress seemed kind of like a vanity pursuit.


I held onto this mindset for a long time, even after joining CFDC. For many months, I didn’t even post my stats on the CFDC blog – posting my embarrassing results for everyone to see just seemed like an extra helping of humiliation.

Then, one night Sam gave the 7PM class a lecture about goal setting. The lecture followed a WOD that I cannot remember other than it was particularly hellish and I had been unable to finish it. In my demoralized state, Sam’s words became hyper-motivating.

Basically, he told us how we needed to use the experience of each WOD as a building block for measuring our individual progress – regardless of the starting point.

Sam added that we needed to post our stats to the blog after every workout, and to know what our personal records (PRs) are for every lift and WOD. As a coach, he promised to help us achieve our goals, but that we needed to track that progress on our own…and, he asked, if we weren’t tracking our own progress or setting specific goals, what were we doing at CFDC? Good question.

After that, I started posting my results to the CFDC blog every day…no matter how unremarkable they were. I also started to use this blog as kind of a WOD diary.

There are some athletes at CFDC that seem to PR (PR’ing is a verb at CFDC) whenever they step into the box. They can’t help themselves from PR’ing.

I am not one of them.

But a few months ago, I attended an Olympic lifting seminar during a Sunday open gym session. Spencer had us work on overhead squats – which I had never done before. At first, just holding the bar over my head in the squat position was hard to do…but by the end of the session, I had become comfortable with the movement and had been able to add 20lbs to the bar. That was my PR that day. 65lbs.

Last night, we did overhead squats again.

Now, I don’t know why but whenever it comes to these lifts and WODs, I have a bad habit of focusing on bumper colors. Green (10lbs) and black (15lbs) are safe. Yellow (25lbs) might be OK. Blue (35lbs) and red (45lbs) are insane. Illogically, this goes for all exercises…no matter what I may have PR’ed in the past. It’s like I am totally discriminating against myself "on the basis of color".

So I decided to go for the yellow (“might be OK”) bumpers…which would be a 95lbs-overhead squat, and a big PR for me.

Unfortunately…or as it turned out, fortunately, I was sharing a bar with a great group of guys who were seemingly color blind.

We blasted through the green plates, and then the black ones. Next we started mixing up the bumpers with some metal 5lbs plates. Then came the yellow ones.

I achieved my goal with the yellow bumpers: 95lbs overhead squat. PR. Mission accomplished.

But while I was busy patting myself on the back, the guys had set two blue plates onto the bar. 115lbs.

The guys went through their sets while I started looking for my keys and a good reason to go home early.

When it was my turn at the bar, I was able to get the weight over my head, but I was really nervous about lowering into the squat. I lowered myself a few inches and started to freak out. I decided to return the bar to the rack to avoid having to dump it.

Just as I set the bar down, Neal suggested that I take the squat down as low as I could and then bail out if I got stuck.

This comment represents another mindset change from my previous gym life. It’s OK to bail on a lift? Just drop a loaded bar in the middle of the gym? No one does that at 24 Hour Fitness.

But this is CFDC. And Neal’s suggestion made a lot of sense…there was no reason to freak out about bailing out if I had to…

Without that cautionary hesitance to avoid dropping the bar at all costs, I tried again. And managed to do 3 not-at-all-perfect overhead squats with a 115lbs bar – each one progressively lower at that bottom of the squat. PR.