Longevity For the OGs

As your coaches, our first job is to make every CrossFit session the best hour of your day,

so you keep coming back because if you keep coming back, you’ll see results and when you see results, you don’t want to let that go and you’re well on your way to health, strength and fitness for life!

Many of our members have already built that longevity. Some have been with us 5+ years, some for 10+ years! Together with these members,, we have weathered two lockdowns, job redundancies and financial insecurity, new babies, new dogs, new careers, illnesses, operations, divorce, new spouses, new houses, new horses, mental health and neurodiversity diagnoses, bereavement, new friends, new grandchildren, new travels…

Over the years, we have hit myriad bumps and forks in the road - together.

And the consistent backdrop to these big events has been CrossFit, bubbling away in the background, giving us an hour a day away from the excitement, stresses and strains of the real world. An opportunity to work on something positive, healthy and tangibly valuable.

With this longevity however, comes a specific challenge: how to reframe CrossFit with these inevitable changing of the seasons.

I was 42 when I started CrossFit - I’m 54 now and everything looks very different. What I can do is different. What I want to do is different and what I need to do is different - not necessarily less, just different.

Here are some of my thoughts and conclusions on how to keep CrossFit for life without burnout.

CrossFit is: constantly varied, real-world movements carried out at relative high intensity.

The word that is often misinterpreted or ignored completely here is RELATIVE.

Relative to what? To whom? Well, relative to everything.

Relative to how you slept last night and for the last week, month, year. Relative to what you ate this morning, yesterday morning, all last week, last year, the last ten years. Relative to what you have on at work or with the family today, and yesterday, last week, last month, last year, your whole life! Relative to how and what you trained yesterday, to how your joints are feeling, to how your muscles are feeling. Relative to what you have achieved over the last few months and what you hope to achieve in the next few months or years.

Every different answer creates a different route through CrossFit and those answers can change on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis depending on what is going on in your life.

And all these things can affect how you feel mentally, emotionally and physically - meaning how you feel about and during training changes too.

Our job, as your coaches, is to help you to keep doing CrossFit despite these bumps or forks in the road because CrossFit will make those bumps and forks easier to navigate and it will make getting older easier and better in both physical and mental ways.

Relative intensity, by the way, does not mean maximal intensity. You can work hard without breaking yourself - in fact, working consistently hard for most of your workouts, with one a week where you go full send and one where you are just in to move will serve you very well indeed to see progress, recovery and longevity!

Aren’t we all hoping to still be doing this in some capacity until the day we die? Why would we stop? What else are we going to do?

When we started CrossFit, we were excited for the pullups, the toes to bar, the box jumps, the handstand pressups, the double unders - the fancy skills. We were excited for back squat, deadlift and bench press PBs. We were excited to learn Olympic Weightlifting and while we may not all have been excited to improve our cardiovascular capabilities, that happened anyway!

But as we keep going, we need to remember our joints get older, our elbows and knees have more mileage on the clock so, do you know what? It’s OK to use the masters’ rep ranges that are put up for each workout - you can still go hard, let’s just do a bit less volume.

It’s ok to decide butterfly pullups or pistol squats are a little too risky for our shoulders or knees and we’d rather live to train another day. Ir’s ok to decide that dumbbell push press are a perfectly great, challenging and intense alternative to kipping handstand pressups. It’s perfectly OK for a goal to be, I want to squat below parallel every single rep!

Our goals need to be dynamic.

we goals need to remain uninjured so we can keep training, to keep those joints and bones and muscles healthy and strong so we don’t end up old and sitting in a chair looking out of the window wishing we could participate in the world again.

Training with intention as well as with relative and appropriate intensity will ensure longevity in the game. It will ensure we can enjoy the fruits of our labour and revel in these fit, strong, healthy bodies we have spent time and care building.

But there’s a missing piece here..

If we’re doing all the managing our workouts, reducing the volume, controlling the appropriate, relative intensity but we are still feeling a little beat up, the only place left to look at our nutrition.

We are simply not tipping the balance as much as we think we are with exercise alone.

Sugar, processed carbs and alcohol are not our friends (they never were; we were just young enough to feel like we were getting away with it). We are going to have to realise that while doing CrossFit most definitely tips the balance in our favour by giving us stronger bones and more muscle and better cardiovascular capacity, it doesn’t tip the balance quite as much as we would like and as we age, that balance leans less in our favour.

Perhaps it’s time to say, cake, you and I, we had a lot of fun - I particularly loved you in that little bakery that time but I gotta cut you loose. Maybe it’s time to say, alcohol, you and I, we had some great times - at least I think we did; I can’t remember half of them but the photos looked epic - of course, some of them had to be deleted but hey, ho… Pasta, you have comforted me, in a way that my friends and family just couldn’t - hang on, that doesn’t seem quite right….Biscuits, you have given me the fake energy boost I needed, until I needed another biscuit coz that first one ran out -and then for some reason the biscuits ran out…Fruit, you made me feel I was making healthy choices when I was just feeding my sugar addiction - oh my GOD! Enough!

Need some help?

Time to change?

That is what we are here for!

We are qualified, experienced CrossFit coaches (and some of us are getting on a bit). CrossFit Uckfield is now not only a ten year CrossFit affiliate but also a MetFix affiliate (MetFix Element42) and Krish, Maggie and Nina are in the process of becoming MetFix coaches too - and along with Russ, we have already tested the nutrition recommendations on ourselves with some quite startling results!

From January, as members of CrossFit Uckfield and MetFix Element42, you will all have access to regular, science-based, cutting edge and in-depth nutrition information - the more you know, the more informed your decisions can be. And from the 18th October, we have our first 6 week Nutrition Revolution Reset course.

The reset is NOT A DIET.

It is about fixing your metabolism at a cellular level; you might not even realise it needs fixing but once you have made some changes, you will notice the differences in how you feel mentally, physically and emotionally, how you perform in workouts, your daily energy levels, your moods and concentration, your body composition, your sleep - and myriad other ways!

This first reset will be £150 for current gym members (£200 for non members) - from January 2026, the price for these 6 week resets will be £300 (£350 for non-members).

Each week, we will meet as a group and your coach will deliver some intense knowledge bombs that explain really clearly why it’s so beneficial to eat the way we recommend. Then we will make a plan for the coming week and adapt it for each of you according to where you are now, metabolically, where you want to go and how much time you have etc.

We have three paths, 1 - The Metabolic Fix Group - for folks with chaotic eating, a lot of weight to lose or type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes etc, The Wellness Group - for folks who want to focus on feeling great, performing better and just living a good life and The Performance Group - for folks who are interested in competing in CrossFit or other sports. It may be that you start in one of these groups and move into one of the other groups as you get to grips with your nutrition.

Within those three groups, the recommendations will vary depending on whether you are all-in with the low carb-high fat or if you are more focused on the paleo and primal way of eating (all will be explained and we will help you decide.)

We won’t make you do anything - we will give you the information so you can make more informed choices and we have all the support in place for however deep you want to go.

We will meet together each week and the recommendations will vary slightly depending on which group you are in.

At no point do we want you to feel like you are on a diet. You shouldn’t feel hungry; this is an abundant way of eating that is personalised to you so that you can make these changes for life without it feeling like you are using willpower to maintain it.

The MetFix recommendation is:

eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some starch, little fruit, no sugar, no seed oils.

If you aren’t interested in the nutrition info just yet but you’re feeling a little off with your training at the moment and want to meet me for a coffee to chat about how to make the training work better for you, hit me up and we’ll get together and talk tactics!

As your coaches, our first job is to make every session the best hour of your day, so you keep coming back. Because if you keep coming back, you’ll see results and when you see results, you don’t want to let that go and you’re well on your way to health and fitness with longevity!

Krish xxx