Prolix tip: It’s not all about muscle
While I’ve been stepping up my attachment to Crossfit since Christmas, I’ve been bibbing the Kool-Aid thoroughly and picked up some new ideas of my own. Unfortunately, poor Daniel and Hannah have been subjected to my bouts of holding forth on fitness and nutrition, as I think things through and come up with my own, idiosyncratic take on things. By and large, I am enjoying Crossfit a lot and would reccommend it to absolutely anyone. I’ve finally taken the plunge this week of buying some kit by getting some weights and upgrading my PVC and rope to a set of proper rings.
This post has a purpose. All the material on the Crossfit site is very helpful and seems about right, so, far be it from me to suggest it needs supplementing, but there have been some things I wish I could have appreciated sooner. The first is that fitness is not all about muscle.
It might surprise some people, but I am actually sensible about taking things steadily, avoiding overtraining and burning out. I didn’t jump into Crossfit before making sure I could keep it up for a reasonable length of time, I’ve been getting back to doing piles of bodyweight excercises since Christmas with increasing regularity, and each time I try a new excercise, I am, by my own reckoning, sufficiently cautious with it. I thought I was doing OK when I did loads of ring dips a couple of weeks ago after getting my new toy. After a hiatus of a few years, I’d had chair dips back in my routine since about Easter, and it seemed a sensible step up.
The tip is not to overextend your muscles on new excercises. I was strong enough to do dips on the rings, after a couple of days getting used to them, but the range of motion is larger than chair dips, and I simply wasn’t flexible enough. I pulled my shoulder by dipping too low (it feels like it’s just between the delt and lat). It wasn’t fatigue, or muscular tiredness along the whole of the muscle, but the twinges at the end of a muscle from pushing my arms up with my whole bodyweight. It’s getting better, slowly, but it does serve as a lesson to me. Fitness is not all about muscle.