CrossFit Mentality: Starve The Ego, Feed The Soul

Enter a CrossFit gym, and you’ll be sure to step over a pile of unattended egos left at the door.

Nobody really wants to admit that they have one, especially not in CrossFit, where egos are particularly frowned upon. To be honest, it’s a topic that’s not really talked about enough when it comes to CrossFit mentality and mindset.

What image comes to mind when you think of someone with an ego? Here’s what I came across from a brief search online…

CrossFit Mentality: Put Your Ego Aside

Let’s be real… we all have an ego. It may not look like the images above, meaning that it’s much more unassuming. You try to shake it off at the door, as requested, but often the ego sneaks in with you and rears its ugly head at feeding time.

Here are a few telltale signs that I personally have let my own ego get in the way:

• Not finishing a WOD within the time-cap because I Rx’ed when in reality, I should have scaled (that RX badge of honor on Wodify is just too enticing)
• Grinding out a 5RM back squat with questionable form purely because it’s a weight I’ve hit in the past.
• Checking–and rechecking–Wodify to see if anyone else in the gym has beat my score.
• Doing way more snatches than my program states so that I have at least one ‘Instagrammable’ lift on video
• Not completing a particular WOD because ‘I didn’t have the right equipment’ (and therefore felt I couldn’t be competitive enough).

There’s a fine line between friendly competition and allowing our egos to lead the way. So what’s the difference?

A CrossFit Mentality Check-up

When you become obsessed with posting higher scores than someone else on the leaderboard, your focus is no longer on improving your own areas of weakness but on doing whatever it takes to get the best score. If the top spot means borderline reps and scrappy movements, you haven’t won at all.

How healthy the competition is can be measured in how much we let it affect us. Can you use it to keep your mental toughness going in a WOD, congratulate the other members of the class with sincerity afterwards and leave the gym feeling satisfied?

Or does it run a little bit deeper? Do jealousy and resentment start to manifest when other athletes improve at quicker rates? Do you leave the gym feeling deflated, and spend the rest of the day obsessing over how to beat your peers next time?

You can choose to resent your training partner for achieving their first pull-up before you; or you can choose to let it inspire you to do the same. Healthy competitors place little importance on the outcome of one particular workout, and can keep their eye on the bigger picture.

I think it’s perfectly acceptable to be competitive. Having grown up with four siblings – for me – life was one big competition. Who could run faster, climb higher, spell better… and don’t get me started on a family game of Monopoly!

I think CrossFit breeds this nature in all of us. The very fact that we have daily leaderboards encourages us to strive for higher placings than our fellow athletes. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s not at the expense of other, more important aspects of your training.

So, how can you get your CrossFit Ego in check?

I can’t sit here and lecture about not comparing yourself to others and expect you to agree with me. Or to not to sacrifice your form just to lift more than your training partner and expect you to listen. It’s taken me the best part of 3 years to come around to the idea, and even then, I’m not always that great at it.

But I have learned to set markers that aren’t solely based around how heavy, how fast, how much better than someone else…

And it takes extra helpings of humble pie to keep my mind focussed on these markers, and divert my attention away from what everyone else is doing in the gym.

Think about the following scenarios to help you decide whether you’d let your ego slow down your progress as an athlete:

• Would you be prepared to take a big chunk off your 1RM deadlift if your back started rounding at 70%? Or would you plow through regardless, just to better your own previous PR?
• Are you willing to repeat wall ball reps in which the ball doesn’t actually make it over the line? Or do you shrug it off because, well, everyone counts the dodgy ones, right?
• Would you scale the weight in a WOD to ensure you finished it within the recommended timecap? Or do you use the RX weights even though you know you don’t have a hope in hell of finishing?

Here’s the issue; the things we do to impress people, often impress no one. Who’s impressed by speedy-but-sketchy wall balls and ugly deadlifts? Not me.

The very same thing can be said when it comes to social media and getting your ego in check. Are you posting exclusively PR’s - and nothing else - for the sole purpose of getting ‘likes’ and comments from impressed scrollers?

I get it, the leaderboard (as well as social media) can become all-consuming. There’s so much importance placed on how heavy you can lift, how fast you can finish, how many reps you can do. It’s hard not to get sucked in; it takes a lot of mental toughness not to. There’s nothing wrong with leaderboards and PR’s per se, but using them as your only measure of success can be detrimental.

CrossFit Mentality and WOD’s

Consider this. How high on the leaderboard would you fare if your workouts were judged on quality?

Sure, perfection during a WOD is not the goal, there’s a time and a place to practice with the aim of perfect reps. That being said, they still need to count.

Pull-ups that don’t involve chin breaking the plane of the bar do not count.

Reps of double unders on which you trip do not count.

No one is going to ‘no rep’ you like they would in competition… but you still know. And your coach knows too.

Similarly, perfection is not generally expected when shooting for a new 1RM. But there has to be a cut off point at which you decide what’s more important; getting this bar from A to B by any means necessary, or making a lift that you can be sure is going to be beneficial to your training and transfer to other lifts.

CrossFit Mentality & Ego: Moving Forward

So here’s my challenge to you moving forward: focus on gains of quality, even if it means you temporarily have to take a step back. I guarantee you’ll soon be taking two steps forward as a result.

You can be just as proud of ‘technical PR’s’ as you are when adding weight to the bar - and what’s more, they are markers which aren’t directly comparable to anyone else.

We don’t have a leaderboard for quality, efficiency, flexibility, accountability or effort, so the only person you have to compare yourself to is you. You, yourself, as you are right now. Against the athlete you’ll be several weeks, months, years down the line. 

IF you’re interested more on the topic of ego, and competition, I highly recommend one of Coach Ben’s favorite books, Ego Is the Enemy. In it, Ryan Holiday talks about the unwarranted glory that we ascribe to successful people with egos. It’s a must-read for WODprep athletes.  

Comment below and let us know your thoughts, or what you might be struggling with when it comes to CrossFit mentality and ego. We’re here to help!