This is What Happens When Fit People Don’t Move Well

Let me bury the lead: they lose. 

Generally, I don’t find competitive fitness helpful for most people. That said, there’s plenty of pulling power for the top tier of physical fitness. For a small percentage of the population, the CrossFit Games, powerlifting meets, strongman shows, and Hyrox races can inspire and give people a meaningful North Star in their fitness journey. No one’s mad at that! 

The downsides of competitive fitness are endless, though, too. People lose the plot and punish themselves for externalized reasons (i.e validation, influence, etc) and it can really backfire. Plus, from a macro sense there’s the risk that a scarcity mindset can be reinforced by living in a perspective that people need to lose for you to win, but that’s an esoteric rabbit hole for another time. 

We’re going to shoehorn skill into this conversation. 

Sometimes folks place skill acquisition and quality movement at odds with performance and doing what it takes to win. Whether you’re a true blue movement quality-over-quantity evangelist or you’re reading this sentence because you thought I was going to give you the secrets to winning your next Hyrox event, I’ve got the same message for you. Listen up!

All movement is a skill.

And, if you want to win, you’ll need to respect skill acquisition the same way you respect winning and putting up numbers. 

I’ll give you an example. In a past life, I competed in Strongman. Two things were true:

• I was never the strongest person in my weight-class (ever), and

• I’d win events often.

It blew me away at how many guys with way more capacity than me would lose simply because they didn’t move well. Now, of course, the best of both worlds is to have incredible capacity and remarkable skill. 

I find that in the competitive world few focus on the latter. I don’t think competitive fitness is for most people, but I do think skill acquisition is for everyone (including the ones who are in this to compete for a podium somewhere).