Hey! Prime here. Today’s guest post is from one of the more graceful skaters I’ve ever played with (must be all the ballet), Nympho Swank. Enjoy!
Cross training. It’s a phrase my younger self never even knew existed because I had no time for it. I thought it was something you did during the off season or when you were injured. Growing up in dance there was never technically an “off-season.” Even in the summer there were intensives and camps to go to.
The way I cross trained was through sports. There was always something to do: basketball, soccer, volleyball, track, softball and gymnastics. I thought that was enough. I really didn’t know that people exercised just for the sake of being healthy or for bettering themselves at whatever current activity they were participating in.
I would often leave directly from a sports practice to go straight to dance class. I was that kid who didn’t go to birthday parties and who didn’t know what Saturday morning cartoons were because I was at dance class.
One might think because I was so active and in shape for the majority of my life that my self-confidence and body image was through the roof, but mentally it was quite a different story. It’s important to know that for a long time I couldn’t separate my identity as a dancer from who I was as a person. My self-worth was defined by who I was at ballet class. I stared in a mirror for 2-3 hours a day telling myself and being told by others what to fix so I could be “better.” From a young age I was being taught, intentionally or not, that my self-worth came from the ability of my body to perform.
My body was my tool, my art or whatever. It was really quite simple. If you didn’t get the part you wanted it was because you weren’t perfect, which in turn meant that you weren’t good enough as a person since by those standards my worthiness as a person directly correlated to my body’s capabilities.
When I finally stopped my formal dance training I had no clue what to do for exercise. Nothing felt as good as dance. I took up yoga and other classes at the gym, anything I could get my hands on to fill up spare time so I didn’t have to confront how my body was actually feeling, which was like shit.
I thought more was better.
A cycle began to form that would continue for several years. I would make these grandiose fitness regimens to get my body back to its former glory. Only then would I be good enough in my eyes.
And how do you think those worked out?
They didn’t. Ever. I would be following five or six different programs at any one time and would generally never make it past the first couple of weeks. If I took an unplanned rest day that was the end of it. And I took a lot of unplanned rest days because my fitness plans were never forgiving of life getting in the way.
Like I said, this carried on for some time. In the back of my head however there was always this thought of roller derby. At the time I heard about a local league I wasn’t exercising whatsoever. I decided rather suddenly to join their fresh meat program and was terrified. I completed the program and joined the team and began to realize more and more that in order to even keep up at practice I needed to be doing something outside of rink time.
Of course I immediately fell into that same old pattern I had followed before.
I saw a definite improvement in my endurance when I first started working out again and then eventually I came to this point where I hit a plateau in my cross training and I realized I no longer knew what to do. Around this same time we were getting ready to enter our off season. I was concerned that I was about to lose what I had spent the last six months working for. Through some teammates, I heard about their training programs they were planning to start with another teammate of ours, Prime. I became curious and knew if the best players on my team were training with her I needed to do so as well.
After my consult and getting everything set up I was amazed at how relieved I felt to have someone else planning everything for me and calling the shots.
Fast forward a month or so and we started our new season. Although I was no longer following a plan formulated by Prime I began to hone in on my weaknesses using exercises that I was doing when training with her. I saw rapid improvement in my power and stability in general and was stoked that I had broken through my little plateau.
I could sit here and tell you all the things that changed for me physically when I started training with Prime and how great they were, but I won’t because you’ll figure that out when you start training with her. What I will tell you about however is the massive shift that started to happen to me mentally the more I began reading this very blog here and the Intelligent Cross Training book.
Yet again, I felt this huge relief that I didn’t have to train the way I was anymore and I could also apply many of the same principals to my life in general. The purposeful minimum mentality she talks about intrigued me and felt blasphemous at the same time to my perfectionist self.
All of this to say that I no longer felt I had to be perfect at every single damn thing I did anymore.
I realized I didn’t have to be the best while doing it all. I would never expect someone else with my experience in derby to be at the level of someone who had been playing for years, so why on earth did I expect that of myself? Remember? I had to be perfect. Well, not anymore.
I didn’t all of a sudden become this person who loved mediocrity and slacking off. No. I concerned myself with being MY best and I found so much freedom in it. Nowadays I have found that the purposeful minimum has infiltrated many aspects of my life and it’s really refreshing. I still have some days that get me worked up over nothing. I’m human after all.
But at the end of those days when I’m trying to calm myself down I ask myself, “Did I do MY best?” If the answer is yes, then that’s all that fucking matters.
Want more?
If you’re interested in learning the basics of Intelligent Cross Training for yourself, sign up for the 7 Day Intelligent Cross Training Crash Course. The course will only be open for 2 more days!!
It will take you through some of the big rocks of #intelligentcrosstraining and teach you how to schedule your practices and cross training commitments so that you get the most out of it.
I can’t wait to share it with you! Sign up ==> HERE <== and get the scoop.
