CrossFit Workouts: How to Get Your Goat for Good!

June 18, 2013 Annie 635 Comments

Crossfit Workout - Burpees — Crossfit Workout – Burpees

Whether you like it or not, we all have at least one “goat”! No matter if you do CrossFit Workouts like me (with a psychotic addiction), or you’re into some other form of physical exercise, there’s that one thing that you just can’t quite “get”. When I say that you can’t quite “get” it, what I really mean is that you hate it, it hates you, and you dread *trying* to do it.

There have been days when I walk in to the box, see what’s written up on the board for the WOD, and contemplate walking right back out! For me, this occurs when the word “BURPEES” is written up on the board. Yeah, I know…I know…everybody hates burpees, but I particularly hate them. Why? Because I’m not good at them. It’s as easy as that…I could say that I hate them because they’re hard, or because my knees get all bruised up when I do them, or even the fact that I almost have a wardrobe malfunction while doing burpees, but those are just excuses. There are plenty of things in CrossFit workouts that are hard, why don’t I hate those things? Because burpees are just really hard for me and I feel like a flailing fool while doing them!

When the 2013 CrossFit Open workout for week 1 was announced, I cringed and then laughed at myself saying “Hey silly girl, you’re not competing in the Open, so why are you already sweating???”. Crisis averted, right? NO WAY…come to find out we did each and every workout of the open at our box. Week 1 looked like this:

Proceed through the sequence below completing as many reps as possible in 17 minutes of:
40 Burpees
45 pound Snatch, 30 reps
30 Burpees
75 pound Snatch, 30 reps
20 Burpees
100 pound Snatch, 30 reps
10 burpees
120 pound Snatch, as many reps as possible

DO YOU SEE ALL THOSE BURPEES?!?!? I sure did…and I freaked out! Literally, I panicked. Then I realized this: I could either do my best, or I could walk out and feel like shit about it. Guess what??? I did it…well most of it. I didn’t make it all the way to the end, but I was really close and I did make it through the majority of the burpees and felt damn good about it!

So, what all this is leading up to is, you can beat your goat! It’s a change of perspective, a mindset shift! Me going from “I can’t do 40 burpees all at once” to “I can do burpees, and I’m going to do as many as I can!” completely changed my whole hate affair with burpees that day. It went from complete hate to a healthy love/hate these days. I love them because I know they’re terrific for my body and my mind, and I still hate them cuz they’re hard!

To top that off, I even requested that we do a burpee challenge for the month of May at my box – we did burpees everyday, starting with 1 the first day of May, then 2, etc until the last day of the month when we did 31. I’ll admit, I missed a couple of days in there, but I did a ton of burpees in the month of May and I no longer freak out when I see them in the workout! I have officially killed my burpee goat, and it was 99% mental for me! Sure, I have other goats…but none of them quite as traumatizing as the infamous burpee. I’ll keep working through those, but I’m feeling pretty good about this kill!

What is your goat? How are you going to kill it?

P.S. Thanks to BurpeesSuck.com for that awesome image up there! Just so happens it fits my little rant here…