"You've seen the weight gazers on the floor. They're the ones in the middle of a kickass Fran or a raging FGB who feel the need to pause and assess the apparatus they've just spent hard won reps lifting, pulling, or slamming. Why? Because they have fallen into the mental trap of weight gazing. Most commonly they're just coming off a metabolically demanding exercise, and they spend valuable moments pausing before engaging a strength component. In our Fran example, the gazer comes off the pull up bar and stops for 10-30 seconds before starting to negotiate the Thruster. Instead, our intrepid Crossfitter should grasp the bar immediately and crank out as many reps as possible, even if it's only one or two, to break the psychological pause of moving from one exercise to another. Once that positive feedback cycle of exercise / progress / exercise has resumed the athlete can start to accurately assess his or her rest needs. The trap of weight gazing is almost exclusively mental - of course we're tired, but we make negligible metabolic recovery by abstaining from that first rep.
'Rest Smart' - take three to five deep breaths and fire it up again. Utilize this technique and see valuable seconds recovered, intensity retained, and inevitable improvement achieved."
-Ray Kaplan, CrossFit Challenge
*Welcome Daniel, Elisif and all the ABC candidates! And big props going to Jake, Dan, David and Daniel for taking time after Monday's track WOD to come back to the Lab for an extra hour of skills practice. Rockin' the Turkish Get-up!!!