Do you attack your weaknesses, or do your weaknesses attack you?
I once had a coach tell me, “Spend 70% of your time refining and perfecting your strengths, spend the other 30% improving weaknesses.” I completely agree, an athlete should stick to his/her guns and do what makes them effective at that specific sport or activity. But what about the rest of us who don’t have that specific set of demands or tasks? What about those of us that need to be ready for anything (for life)?
The great thing about CrossFit is that it will (sooner or later) find your weaknesses and (without doubt) attack them. If a person only did what they enjoyed or what they were good at, they would never grow or improve; they would become stagnant.
Remember the list of 10 general skills? :
endurance, stamina, strength, power, flexibility, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy…
Knowing that the goal is to become as able in all ten as possible, where are you weak? And, more importantly, what are you doing to fix that? Improving weaknesses not only makes you more well-rounded and prepared for everything, but could also help to improve your strengths as well…
Don’t talk about It, be about It,
Casey
cfsiouxfalls.com 
April 16, 2010 at 9:43 pm
Amen, brother! Great post!!
April 17, 2010 at 2:36 am
Great! My weakness- attitude; my strength- attitude. My weakness was in full strength when I walked in tonight. I decided mid-warm-up to bring my strength and just get it done. “Be about it.”
April 17, 2010 at 4:48 am
Great post! My weakness is strength. It’s hard to look around and see people whip up their weights with little effort when I have to struggle just to lift the same amount. Some days that leaves me feeling very defeated.
How do I try to overcome it?? I keep practicing and I listen to any feedback I’m given so I can get better and stronger, which -in turn- improves everything else (inside and outside of CFSF).
April 18, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Great post, Casey! My greatest weakness is believing in myself but if we’re talking actual exercises, I would have to say thrusters. I use to have issues with weights above my head but I’m proud to say that I believe I have somewhat overcome that through hard work at home and the trainers advice on how to overcome this. I no longer feel like that is my overall weakness.
So I attack my weaknesses by breaking them up into pieces and practicing them at home. Double Unders was my recent example and even though I’m not quite there, I can at least do them in a wod!
Thrusters are knocking at my door now…..
April 19, 2010 at 2:02 am
My weakness used to be running… but NOT anymore! In the past, had the whiteboard shown a run I knew my time on the wod would suck – but not this year!
I may not be the fastest runner in any given class but I’ve set goals on my running and have blown through everyone of them! Last year I was happy with a 2 minute 400 (really, why would I have ever settled??!!) NOT ANYMORE! After doing absolutely NO running through the winter, i have taken 30 seconds off of my 400m and now have a goal to shed at least 15 more seconds by September. Who would have thought that someone would ever refer to my 400m as a “sprint”… well when that happened it sparked something in my and now my running is not a weakness but just something more to add to my list of things that WILL NOT beat me!!!
April 20, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Overall Strength and Power!!! I know exactly what your talking about, especially when i’m for the most part creating my own programming…so easy to cater to the things that come easy to me. I’ve been putting 2 strength/power lifts in at least 3 of my WOD’s per week and in just a matter of a month have noticed some awesome progess in the right direction.
Thanks for the post my man!
April 23, 2010 at 9:59 pm
attack your weakness, one of the toughest things for me!!! what a great reminder!!!