The big picture.

I stepped on the scale last night before bed, something I very rarely do. I was a bit taken aback by the number: 199.5lbs  (step on it again this morning post workout to confirm and it was 199.3#)

Definitely the most I have ever weighed in my life.

What does this mean.  Well nothing. It's just a number. It does indicate that I'm gaining mass.  And given I'm still comfortably wearing size 32 pants, I'm not gaining much fat.  (some for sure, but not 20lbs worth and not around the middle). In July 2012 I was 170#, June 2013 I was 182#.

Much of the weight is water retention.  Creatine supplements cause water to bind with muscle tissue, essentially filling your muscles with water, so just cutting creating, I'd likely lose 5 pounds within days.  It'll be interesting to see where things sit at the end of all this, in a couple of years.

So here is the big picture: attack my limiters, systematically and relentlessly.

After the first year and a half of Crossfit I realized I wasn't improving, not nearly as much as many others, not nearly as much as I wanted to.  It became clear I had many weaknesses, the most significant of which at the time was mobility.

I went to see a physio therapist with Crossfit expertise and we started chipping away at my limiters.  So on top of my weekly dose of Crossfit (4 or 5 times per week) I spent my lunch hours at the downtown YMCA gym doing mobility work: stretching, massaging, engaging and doing any physio homework I'd been assigned.

After a year and a half of that, I felt I was in place where my body position was no longer my biggest limiter, strength was.  So I shifted my focus. Still doing Crossfit daily, still doing mobility occasionally, my lunch hour is now devoted to strength development: squats, shoulder press, bench, dead lift, pull ups, all heavy for low reps.

I'm somewhere around the halfway point for my strength development phase of the big plan.  Sometime over the winter, once I'm happy with my level of strength (I have a couple of benchmarks I want to hit, but that may change as winter approaches), I'll transition to power development, so more Olympic lifting focused and metabolic conditioning, so more middle distance running and high intensity interval training.

Again, with daily Crossfit, I'll still get regular strength work, and mobility but my extra work will be power and HIIT focused.

Lay the bricks, the house will get built.