Thursday, March 14, 2013

Free your mind and your WOD will follow




Last year, I told you all about the inspirational tales in Allison Belger's book, The Power of Community -- CrossFit and the Force of Human Connection.

One of the reasons that book works *so* well is that its author is a psychologist *and* a CrossFit gym owner *and* a CrossFit Masters athlete. When she waxes poetic about the "agony coupled with laughter" that brings people together in a CrossFit gym, Dr. Belger speaks from experience. So I kind of made a mental note at the time. It went something like: "Allison Belger... really smart person worth paying attention to."

Which brings us to her next act: PsychologyWOD.com.

Let's see... sounds like psychology and CrossFit (for you non-CFers, WOD means "workout of the day"). Once again, the doc is working right in her wheelhouse.

The inspiration for the site came in part from Kelly Starrett's successful exercise/mobility site called MobilityWOD.com. There, Starrett gets deeper into issues of stretching, mobility and general athletic preparedness than you may have ever thought possible.

And maybe it's not as obvious as issues of mobility, but just like you can't fix bad nutrition or stress or a lack of mobility simply by piling on the exercise, if your head isn't in the right place, your exercise routine -- whether that's just a regular appearance at the local CrossFit box, a legitimate shot at qualifying for the CrossFit Games or something in between -- isn't going to get you your intended results.

Enter psychologyWOD.com to get you through all that.

See, the big secret is that we *all* have that inner voice of negativity. Yours may be triggered by a particular metcon or movement or lift, or maybe the whole damn CF experience has you beating yourself up mentally. The goal of psycholgyWOD.com is to address all the angles of those issues, in the kind of detail that Kelly Starrett does when he talks about mobility.

The site is really new, so there are only a few posts up so far, but they are great. The first few, predictably I guess, address specific competition- and training-related issues of how you handle mid-workout stress, whether you regard competition as a stressor or a challenge and, yes, even that "inner voice" and how you can change it. But then the latest one goes for a broader theme: fixing your head in all aspects of your life that challenge you. Yeah, it's ostensibly about a box jump, but by the end your starting to think the good doc has a chance at adding "Zen master" to her resume.

And if you know about my natural affinity for that sort of thing, you'll know that this means I'll be stopping by PsychologyWOD a lot.




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