You! Yes, you!
Every CrossFit Open teaches us, your coaches, lessons - sometimes painful, often humbling but always valuable. Lessons about ourselves but also about you. Yes, you! And these lessons help us to help you get even more from your next year of training and the 2026 Open is no exception. Whether or not the Open is for you, we still want to help you stay motivated, get the results you’re looking for and enjoy your training.
This year, we are bubbling with new ideas and initiatives for each and every one of you. Some of you train in our Third Age classes, some are over 40 and looking for our programming to support joints that are accumulating more mileage. Some of you need some reassurance that you still have some control over your rapidly changing pregnant bodies. Some of you are enjoying competing. Some simply want to train regularly and consistently and maintain their strength and fitness. Whoever you are (and this will fluctuate and change over time) 2026 at CrossFit Uckfield has something specifically for you!
Our mission statement talks about looking after your psychological safety in the gym. This is one of the most valuable things we do at CrossFit Uckfield and I think the Open highlights the need for our continued support of your mental approach to training.
Everyone’s relationship with CrossFit (and therefore also with the Open) is unique. Just like human relationships, it is complex, multi-faceted, and nuanced and how we feel about it changes with the seasons and life outside the gym.
CrossFit is an emotional journey for a lot of people and it doesn’t always feel logical. Here are my top 3 tips for coping with the mental anguish that can come with CrossFit.
1 - Remove the word ‘should’ from all your self-talk in the gym!
It really isn’t helpful to worry about how we should be feeling or how we should be behaving or responding or where we should be getting to an any particular workout. That word ‘should’ takes all the joy out of our training and delivers anxiety and stress instead.
Instead of focusing on the outcome of a workout, focus on your intention in the workout. Rather than saying, “I should be able to do 20 unbroken wallballs because Sally or Bob can…” instead create an intention like, “Today, I’m going to see how far saying ‘just one more rep’ gets me.“ or “I’m going to make sure every single squat I do is below parallel and if they are, that’s my win!”
2 - Stop wishing for outcomes!
Some of us go into workouts, saying things like, ‘I hope I get a muscleup,’ or ‘I’d really like to get to the chest to bar pullups,’ or ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if I got just 1 heavy thruster?’ These are wishes and not always grounded in reality nor a true reflection of our physical capabilities or mental state and unfulfilled wishes can leave us feeling disappointed, frustrated and demotivated.
Now hope is a really good thing; it’s true that delusional people often achieve great things and I do not want to put limits on any of you - I don’t want you to lower your expectations, I want you to manage them.
Instead of focusing on an abstract outcome, again, focus on your specific intention. In order to get to the movement you really want to do, what specifically do you have to achieve prior to that? Instead of hoping for the magic of the Open to randomly deliver you a pullup, or wishing you could do a pullup but not actively doing anything about it, focus on making every workout you do in the year leading up to the Open intentional. You’re there doing the workout anyway, you might as well do it to the best of your ability. Keep your goals in mind and focus on the strength and skills you need to achieve them.
3 - Reframe everything!
Training consistently and regularly at CrossFit Uckfield is not normal.
20% of people in the world are physically incapable of training.
30% of people in the world do not have a safe place to live, let alone train.
50% do not have the mental capacity to get themselves to the gym.
50% do not have enough free time to improve their fitness and health.
And 80% do not have the money to invest in themselves.
That means you are in the 50% of world who actually possess the mental, physical and financial capabilities to train. Once you remove those not motivated to train, that number drops to 12%!*
You are in the 12% of people in the world who are able to train regularly and consistently.
*Chat GPT stats so may be wildly inaccurate but you get the point….
That is not the norm.
Don’t waste that abnormal gift worrying about who got 2 reps more than you.
Instead, marvel at the incredible things your body is able to do. Enjoy the ability to showcase how hard you’ve worked or be thankful for the lesson that suggests you could have worked harder!
A lot of the disappointment or frustration coming out of a workout stems from that mismatch of where our ego believes or wishes we were juxtaposed, often brutally, with the glaring, unadulterated evidence of where we actually are.
There is a sweet spot of ten minutes post-workout where suddenly, rather like childbirth, we forget how hard it actually was and start berating ourselves for resting so much or not going heavier or faster. As aforementioned, simply wishing we hadn’t rested or hoping we could have lifted heavier doesn’t get us any more actual reps or kg on the bar. So what can we do about that?
Here are my top 3 tips to getting more reps, lifting that heavier barbell and making your workouts work better for you.
1 - Get fitter.
It’s tempting to believe being stronger will help and up to a point, that is true but in order to build strength, you need a cardiovascular system that can deliver the required oxygenated blood to the muscles so that you are able to push harder in order to get stronger. The fitter you are, the more able you are to build strength. The beauty of CrossFit is strength and fitness go hand-in hand but if you prioritise strength over fitness, you are leaving a lot of gains on the table!
So for absolutely everyone, Third Age CrossFitters, masters athletes, pregnant athletes, competitors and those who simply want to be fit and healthy in an enjoyable and sustainable way - improve your VO2 max! That means go harder than you want to on the cardio. Move faster than you want to in the workout, rest less…and most importantly, pick loads that challenge you but don’t slow you down!
You want to do better in the Open next year? You want every workout you do to get you more bang for your buck? Move faster!
2 - Work on the neurological components of fitness.
Those are: balance, coordination, accuracy, agility and flexibility - ie gymnastics. Knowing where your body is in time and space and the ability to control positions will help you build genuinely functional strength. Muscle builds faster than connective tissue and so it’s easy to build strength without the joint stability and tendon strength to back it up, which can lead reduced performance and injury. So without good gymnastics skills you are leaving a load of strength untapped. Gymnastics builds strong connective tissue and a body that can control external loads efficiently and safely.
You want all your workouts to feel better, including strength sessions? Create solid gymnastic positions!
3 - get strong!
Lift heavy loads but remember that heavy is relative to your own body weight!
The more you weigh, the more weight you are able to shift - but because we do CrossFit and we want to be well-rounded athletes, we know that too much body weight can limit our cardio capabilities and our gymnastics abilities - which in turn limits our strength.
If you want heavier loads to feel easier, get used to training with them more often - push yourself but keep in mind lifting really heavy but then also moving really slowly will just train you to move really slowly.
Finally, let’s address the three remaining elephants in the room.
Sleep
Nutrition
Alcohol
1 - sleep
You simply cannot recover sufficiently without adequate sleep. It’s also really hard to make well thought-out decisions on too little sleep and your body’s ability to metabolise food and regulate hormones becomes disordered. What enough sleep looks like varies from person to person and sometimes it is out of your control (babies and small children, menopause, snoring partners…) but these can be mitigated.
Practise good sleep hygiene and see your performance soar!
2 - Nutrition
You simply cannot function optimally, both mentally and physically, in daily life let alone your workouts without great nutrition. Fact. The difference great nutrition makes to your mental approach to life and workouts and your physical capabilities in all workouts and your ability to recover is astonishing! Mind-blowing! Life-changing! I do not exaggerate.
Eat like your life depended on it; not like a psychopathic 6 year-old.
3 - Alcohol
Alcohol messes with both of these. If you are drinking to improve your mood, being sober will be twice as miserable. If you are drinking to get to sleep, you are passing out not resting. If you are drinking to relax, you are just creating more stress. Many of our members don’t drink alcohol. Not one of them can list a negative to this.
CrossFit Uckfield serves as a constant backdrop to your dynamic lives. We are here to support you through all the changes life throws your way and we have things in place to support you.
We can help with nutrition and sleep with our 12-month MetFix support group. (Our next cohort will start in April, more info to come).
We can help your training with our general and specific programming (a new masters’ track is out soon, aimed at folks 40+ who have been here a number of years now, which focuses primarily on a little more strength and CV and a little less volume - ask Krish and Russ for more details).
We have members in the gym who are really happy to talk with you about quitting alcohol. Please contact Krish if you’d like her to put you in touch with them.
We know how important the community aspect of this gym is and so we have our monthly Chip’s Ruck Club walks for men - a walking talking group born from the devastating loss of one of our members, Chip, and the difficulty a lot of our members, particularly his male friends, are having processing this. This is open to anyone who wants to meet up, have a tramp about the farm and chat.
This summer should see our new Chip’s Ruck Club meeting place built at the front of the gym for all folks, not just men, to sit and chat - a place for calm reflection and communal coming together.