In the Crossfit world we throw around the concept of improving weaknesses quite a bit. Almost every day someone will ask me for an idea or advice on what to work on and my default answer has always been, “what do you suck at?” This is great for rounding us out as athletes and achieving overall fitness. But I think we focus on weaknesses a little too much, and we can easily neglect our strengths. For example: I am not a naturally strong person when it comes to weightlifting, pre-Crossfit I mainly did gymnastics style movements. I got a muscle up the first time I grabbed a set of rings, and my back squat max was an ugly 150lbs…. So needless to say I was very unbalanced and I work hard to this day to get my strength up. That is all fine and good but many times I have neglected gymnastics for extended periods and low and behold I would start to suck at that as well. I would end up being mediocre at both!! I dont want this to be one of those, “everyone is a special butterfly” pep talks, but I think we really should take a look at what makes us good as well as what we need to improve on. I am realistic, I will never be able lift weights like Matt Booth, but when Matt Booth (all 215 strapping pounds of him) can do more handstand pushups than me, I am doing something wrong and neglecting what I should be great at. I can still get strong all I want but I need to remember to throw in some extra box jump practice here and there so I dont get rusty. I think we should all take a step back and think about the things that make us great athletes and not forget to cultivate them while we work on weaknesses. We all have HUGE lists of what we suck at… well when was the last time you thought about what you kick ass at??
