EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to the athlete journal of Allison Moyer. Allison is a nationally ranked NPC Figure Athlete, nationally and internationally published fitness model, an avid CrossFit athlete, BSN, C.P.T, C.S.N, C.N.W.C, and owner of Alli-Fitness Systems and Predator-Diet. Read all about Allison’s unique approach to training and diet every other week.
Life, done right, is a contact sport. Shit hurts. Shit happens – in CrossFit, in any sport, and in regular life, too. Who hasn’t tripped and fallen? Cut themselves? Walked into something? Torn up your hands with too many pull ups? Tweaked your shoulder on a snatch? Strained your hip or hammie sprinting?
It hurts and you don’t always come away with an understanding of “how” or “why” or what to do to avoid it in the future. Sometimes, you find yourself warming the bench for a while, trying to allow yourself time to heal and get stronger again.
Well, life hands us mental wounds as well – injuries, if you will, that leave us on the sidelines, wondering how, wondering why, and contemplating what we are supposed to do moving forward. I’m a firm believer in the power of the mind and its ability to control the body. When the mind gets injured, wounded, or when you feel yourself sliding into a mental slump, I think it’s important to take time to allow healing to take place between your ears. Sit the bench for your brain, if you will.
Where am I going with this?
Well, in the past, figure has injured me, mentally. Despite how passionate I am about competing in figure and how much I love the art of bodybuilding, the sport is not without its major flaws. By nature, it’s a sport of comparison, of aesthetic comparison no less – “Who looks better then who” according to a set of guidelines enforced by a judging panel. Pair that kind of mental pressure with the stress of a low calorie diet and a killer training routine and you have a recipe for injury – both mental and physical. Bodybuilers get chastised by the strength community for being “non functional” athletes- but in all reality, never in my lifetime of competitive sports have I run into anything like it. The sheer amount of discipline bodybuilders, figure competitors, and fitness athletes have is mind-numbing. Training intensely is hard enough. Try doing it on sub-adequate calories and single-digit body fat.
My point is, figure is hard, and most of the time hard things in life cause injury if we aren’t careful. You have to learn from your injury and take steps moving forward to prevent it from occurring again. You have to resolve to be stronger, in mind and in body. For me, that means remembering to keep balance in my life, to not let myself get so wrapped up in how I look that I allow myself to slide into the trap of undereating, overtraining, and being hyper critical of how I look. These are “injuries” figure has caused me mentally in the past, injuries I work to avoid moving forward because they caused me to need an entire year off from the sport – that time on the sidelines I have mentioned. I had to take time to heal, to breathe, and to figure out how to move forward without causing injury again.
For me that means finding ways to focus on performance goals as well as aesthetic goals- breaking PRS as well as building better medial deltoids. It means not doing back-to-back figure shows. It means being open to the judges’ criticisms without allowing their feedback to hurt my feelings or lower my self esteem.
I love figure. I intend to be on stage again. But I know myself well enough to know that it will never be in the conventional “figure prep” sense. I will never live off tilapia and broccoli, spend three hours on an elliptical, or wear two squeams to bed to try to cinch my waist. I like my heavy weights and my steak too much for all of that. I refuse to allow those injuries to happen again.
Fasted AM Training:
20x 3:30 C2
Olympic Weightlifting Training
Notes: Three times a week, I focus on Olympic lifting/CrossFit. I do not CrossFit in the sense that I don’t take classes in a box. I follow strategic programming. My focus the last three weeks has been technique (as always), but also working back up to heavier weight as my strength went down before North Americans.
- 5 Point banded shoulder work/PVC pipe dislocates
- 20:20 Jump Rope: 5 Rounds
- EMOM for 10 minutes: 10x Knees to Elbows on even minutes, 10x Barbell Hang Snatch (I just used the naked barbell) on odd minutes
- Complex: 1 Power Snatch + 2 Hang Snatch @ 55, every 30 seconds for 5 minutes.
- Work to Power Snatch at 85% of 1RM: My snatch 1RM is 90 even, so for me I was trying to get to 76.5. I need lots of warm up when it comes to snatches as my shoulders struggle in external rotation. So my progression was as follows: 60-65-70-75- 76.5- 76.5 -76.5-76.5
- Overhead Squat: 3×5, added weight as I could. My OH Squat is terrible, my goat for sure, so this is always about form and stability for me. Progression: 45-55-60
- 5 Rounds: 10x Sit Ups/21x Strict OH Press @ 35/20x Alternating Sledgehammer Strikes with a 10lb hammer (10 strikes each arm)
Capacity/Conditioning:
3 Rounds:
- 20 sec Airdyne/20 sec rest
- 5 Heavy Kettlebell (KB) Swings (I used 50lbs)/20 sec rest
- 20 sec C2/20 sec rest
- 5 Heavy KB Swings (I used 50lbs)/20 sec rest
- 20 sec spin bike sprint/20 sec rest
- 5 Heavy KB Swings (I used 50lbs)/20 sec rest
Today’s Thought: “Greatness is more than potential. It is the execution of that potential. Beyond having the raw talent. You need the appropriate training. You need the discipline, the commitment. You need the inspiration. You need the drive.” -Eric Burns
