by Michael Plank
I’m slowly starting to change my mind. Fourteen years ago, just about all I wanted to do was exercise.
And I remain a huge fan of daily movement. I talk about it all the time. I think you should move your body frequently and I work hard to be active and to help my kids do the same. For me, daily movement can be a lot of different things. Regulars on my list are rowing, walking, rucking, joint work, strength work, yard work, jiu-jitsu, CrossFit, hunting, climbing, carrying, and archery. We were built to move and doing what you were built for is, I think, one of the routes to health and happiness.
But there’s a little bit of a trap here.
A lot of times when people come to us, they haven’t been active in a long time. So they start with something like CrossFit and they come three times per week and it doesn’t take very long at all for them to start feeling better… great even… like, really great. Moving your body is better than not moving it. People get stronger, they’re leaner, they’re happier, they’re healthier, and they naturally think “well, if I’m feeling this much better after just three workouts per week, I’d probably feel even better than that with four workouts per week!” And so they take on 4 workouts and they feel better still. And then sometimes they’ll do 5 per week. And then, because we’re open Monday through Saturday, they’ll work out 6 days per week, and sometimes even go for a hard run on Sundays.
Once upon a time, I was right there. I was doing CrossFit five days each week and sometimes six. And it was great while it was great (when I was in my first two years of it and still not yet 30 years old). But here’s the trap: CrossFit is, by definition, high-intensity work. And high-intensity work yields amazing results. But you can overdo it. And when I say “move your body every day,” I now very intentionally don’t say “work out every day,” or “smash a WOD every day,” or “go hard every day.” Because I realize now that every day is too much. And I’ve seen people maintain 6 days a week of high-intensity workouts for months, maybe even a year or two, but then bad stuff starts to happen. Mostly that looks like soft tissue injury – a torn hamstring, a pulled back muscle, a tweaked ligament in a knee or ankle or shoulder – but it can also look like stalled progress and even regression in terms of strength and endurance. You can only run your body in the red for so long before the wheels fall off.
Even in the earliest days of CrossFit – the days when pictures of ripped and bloody hands and puke buckets in every gym were the cool thing to do – the recommendation was either 3 days on, 1 day off, or 5 days on, 2 days off. Because even then, people knew that coming out of that intensity was probably an important piece of the puzzle.
Move your body every day. And I know we run a CrossFit gym and make money from people working out at a high intensity. And I think high intensity work is great and yields amazing results. But watch out, because it can absolutely be addictive, and not in the good way.
Please don’t do high intensity workouts every single day.
Some high intensity is good. Great even. But more is not necessarily better here. Three to four days a week is just about perfect for most adults. Some need less: more like 2 days a week; Some need more: maybe 5. But I don’t know anyone who needs more than 5 days a week of high-intensity exercise, and even those who do 5 days would do well to balance it with a lot more low intensity work (like walking).
But what if going to the gym feeds not just your body, but your soul? What if it’s where you connect with friends, where you find belonging and meaning, the hour of the day that you most look forward to? What if taking a day off makes you feel like you will absolutely lose your momentum and then lose your progress?
In that case, go to the gym. BUT, don’t go for a 10 out of 10 effort. We use a great system at our gym called the Level Method that gives 6 variations of the workout each day. Let’s say I want to come 5 days each week, but only want to work out hard 3 days. Simple! Two days each week, drop down 2 levels from what you’d normally do. If normally I do the Blue workouts, maybe on Tuesdays and Thursdays I’ll do Yellow.
Another option at our gym would be to spend 3 days a week doing CrossFit and to spend 2 days doing Personal Training or Semi-Private Training on something like strength work or joint work or skill work – things that will absolutely improve your health and fitness but won’t leave you so beat up that you can’t remember your name.
If you go to a more conventional gym where it’s kind of a choose-your-own-adventure scenario, maybe spend 2 days each week on the elliptical or the spin bike, not doing intervals or sprints, just moving. Or spend 2 days each week doing some yoga instead of conditioning.
And look, I know it can be tremendously hard to get started with fitness at all. And once you are on the path, it can be tremendously hard to hold yourself back from going all in. But try easing back on the intensity for a month and see what happens. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that you won’t get less fit. And you might even get more fit.
And anyway, at least in my own fitness, the goal isn’t to be the best at fitness, it’s to be able to hike and play and run and jump and carry kids around when I’m in my 70s, 80s, and 90s. This is a long game. And that means playing it like you want to still be playing 30 years from now.