DOING LESS IS PRODUCTIVE

More training is the answer, surely!

This is the story we still seem to tell ourselves, and to be fair, it's not wrong. It's also not completely true.

CrossFit isn't a sport you get to walk into fresh. You've joined a game other people have been playing for years. And, like most sports, you've got to figure out how to catch up.

Think of it like this… it's your first day of school. Only this time you've been thrown into a mixed class. A cluster of primary kids sit up near the front, still not sure what school is. A few intermediates have claimed the desks by the window. Some lanky high schoolers hang out the back, pretending to be interested, mostly concerned about the latest TikTok trends. And in the middle, two older kids sit, confident and unbothered, like they own the place. Like they've been here long enough to teach the class themselves.

This is exactly what you've walked into. Beginners and the elite, side by side, in the same room, on the same day.  This is all pretty cool, and also, extremely challenging. How do you become one of the kids in the middle? The ones winning the game?

The answer is to train. More sessions. Longer sessions. Doubles when you can manage them. How else are you supposed to absorb the learning, build the experience, and cover the sheer amount of ground the sport now demands? You can't skip the queue. Nobody gets handed the middle desk.

But there is a key limitation. 

You're human.

Not a robot. Not indestructible. A human, with a body that has limits.

Limits are different for everyone, and will change as you get fitter, older, stronger, and more educated.

Our bodies need fuel. Good food and hydration. They need sleep, and not the four hours you tell yourself is "enough for now," but real sleep. Our bodies need to stretch, to mobilise, to be looked after physically in ways that have nothing to do with how heavy the Barbell was today. 

Here's my math…

X hours in the gym = Y hours of sleep + T grams of food + P litres of water + a genuine amount of mobility and stretching.

One side of that equation cannot increase without the other. Add hours to X without adding to everything on the right, you become unbalanced. Eventually in the form of injury, plateau, or burnout.

Train hard. Train as much as you genuinely can, but only as much as you can match it with everything else.

And that's only the physical side of you.

You've also got thoughts, feelings and emotions. Your mind empties in the same way your energy does. It's not a luxury reserved for the days you feel like it. It's a necessity if you actually want to perform anywhere near your potential.

The challenge is…

There is a line. A very fine one. On one side of it, more training builds you. More capacity, more skill, more resilience, more of everything you're chasing. But cross that line and the exact same training starts working against you. Same hours. Same effort. With the opposite result.

Nobody can tell you where that line is either. You find it by getting it wrong, more than once, probably more times than you're comfortable with. You find it by pushing too far, watching your numbers dip instead of climb, feeling recovery take longer than you want, and seeing motivation quietly decay in a sport you used to love. And all of that is okay.

It can take a year, or a lifetime to figure it out. And once you've found it, it won't last. It'll move again and again for the rest of your life. The skill is to find it as often as possible and temper with it. In other words, to train with purpose.

Then it’s not about how much. It's about how well.

Here's the part that gets missed when we're busy counting sessions: two athletes can do the exact same number of hours in a week and get completely different results. Intensity and intention are another part of the equation.

Intensity isn't just "go hard." It's going hard on the things that actually matter that day. The lift you're building, the skill you're chasing, the effort the session actually calls for. A session done at 60% focus, on autopilot, watching the clock, teaches your body very little. The same session done with real intent, real effort, real presence, teaches you a lot. 

Intention is the piece before you even start. Why are you doing this session? What is it actually for? Training without intention is just presence. It's simply showing up, sweating, and then leaving. Training with intention means every rep has a job to do. You're not there to "get through it." You're there because this session, today, answers why.

This is why more isn't better or worse. Quality compounds. While quantity without quality just accumulates fatigue.

The real question isn't "how much did I train this week?" It's "how much of that training actually counted?"