CrossFit’s description of “world class fitness in 100 words” finishes with the prescription to “regularly learn and play new sports.” This is perhaps one of the most frequently forgotten elements of our physical practice, and unfortunately so. I would expand the prescription to include physical endeavors that may not traditionally be included under the umbrella of sport (dance or hiking, for example), and say that this is perhaps as pivotal to your physical development as training with intensity or employing variety in your exercise. Learning and participating in new sports and physical endeavors is our one-way ticket to expanding our understanding of what it means to be a mover, and how we can be a better one.

Imagine if your exposure to the world outside of your hometown was limited to a single source -- a single TV channel, for example. Imagine that you never traveled, never left a five mile radius from your home, and never read, watched, or heard of anything that didn’t come from your single media source. Your scope would be limited and your view would be inherently biased. A total lack of exposure creates a heavy bias, and to assume that you could have a healthy depth or breadth of understanding of how the world worked with your limited exposure is absurd.

A physical practice that does not endeavor into new sports and activities is equally as biased and absurd. The individual who never ventures to act as a physical being outside of the walls of the gym is, as much as their in-gym practice may reflect, resemble, or prepare them for other activities, still operating from a place of heavy bias. I’m not saying that you need to be capable of summiting Everest and driving a ball 300yds down the fairway and open water swimming across the English channel, but let’s not mince words here: the athlete who can quickly cycle pull-ups and deadlifts all day in the gym, but who falls apart on a short hike up a steep incline, is a physically illiterate and deficient athlete. And this isn't an uncommon phenomenon, either.

You can only grow to the boundaries of your experience, and to constrict those boundaries to strictly in-gym activities, or strictly running, or strictly barbell conditioning, or strictly weightlifting, or anything else is an exercise in willful limitation. Perhaps your biggest opportunity to expose (and subsequently improve) holes in your game is to challenge yourself with new sports and physical experiences. There is no amount of barbell or body weight training that can alone prepare you for and teach you the lessons of a Jiu-Jitsu match or a long mountain run.

Don't be that person who only watches one channel.

- PS

9/21/17

• Strict press - 3,3,3,3

Then...

• 5 rounds for time:

• 15 double KB thruster (70/52)

• 15 push-ups

• 15 sit-ups