Life Lessons in Fitness: Facing the Bar

The Benefits of Missed Reps

We all fail and we all struggle, it’s a part of life. When I first began CrossFit in 2012 the most intimidating movement we had to do was olympic weightlifting.

Olympic weightlifting involves moving heavy weight off the ground and above your head. This can be very daunting, especially if the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted over your head is a basketball — that was the case for me.

I had a coach by my side to help me do it the right way, but lifting the bar was something I was afraid to do. Now, one would think that to become more comfortable with this movement you just need to get stronger right? Wrong. Sure it helps, but getting stronger was not how I got better with the movements. What I discovered is that the more times I would make a mistake and miss the rep, the less I worried about dropping the weight. The more times I would fail to push the weight over my head, the less fear I had of failing or hurting myself. Once I began to conquer this fear and grow in confidence, weightlifting became a lot easier. It became a lot simpler because I could focus on the lift and not the fear. Through experience I had conquered the fear.

Life is a lot like this, when we experience adversity and when we experience failure we grow immune to it. We can start to think, “What’s the worst that could happen?” If we fail more often, we can focus on what’s really important. Failure is a good thing, so embrace it… then start lifting heavy.

See James 1:1-8

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