Why Everyone in our Gym is an Athlete

Words matter, especially the words we use to describe ourselves. What we call ourselves, and what others call us, shapes our self-perception.  That’s why we call everyone who trains in our gym an “athlete.”

I recently had a friend challenge the notion that everyone who does CrossFit should be described as an athlete. He believed the term athlete should be reserved for those who compete on a field, track, or court. “Athletes play sports,” he said, “CrossFitters work out.”

I responded by telling him that according to the dictionary an athlete is “a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring strength, agility, or stamina.” He decided not to argue with either Merriam or Webster and conceded that CrossFitters can be considered athletes, in the broadest possible sense.

Sometimes it’s our own athletes who resist the label. They believe that because they never played a sport they don’t measure up to the definition. No matter how much they protest, we refuse to budge and keep emphasizing with our carefully chosen language that we have nothing but athletes training in our gym.

Even if participating in a sport were to be required to wear the label, CrossFit is the sport of fitness. The gym is our playing field and we’re competing every time we write our results on the white board. Sometimes the competition is against others and sometimes its against ourselves. It doesn’t really matter. CrossFit is an athletic endeavor.

An amazing thing happens when you repeatedly refer to people as athletes: they start to believe it. Before you know it, they’re thinking, acting, eating, and training like athletes.

It may be that convincing our clients that they really are athletes is more important than convincing them to cut their carbs or push past the pain in a tough workout. Their self-perception is more powerful than all the advice we can give them about leaning out and getting stronger.

Yes, we can teach just about everyone how to squat, increase their protein intake, and run more efficiently. More important than all of these skills and techniques is training people to think like an athlete. Once that happens, all kinds of self-motivated behavioral changes start falling into place. So we stubbornly call everyone who walks into our gym an athlete until they start to believe it.

That moment when they finally accept their new identity is more powerful than magic on steroids.

We had one athlete complete a grueling pull-up workout that ripped the callouses off her hands. When she started CrossFit she was an out of shape soccer mom who wouldn’t dream of doing anything that would leave her hands bloody and sore. Now she walked across the gym holding them up like a badge of honor. (We’d prefer she take care of her hands properly so her callouses wouldn’t rip, but that ain’t the point of this story.) When she walked into the gym office, one of our coaches, who was on the phone at the time, quickly hung up to help her clean and treat her injured hands. This is how she described that moment on her Facebook status later on that day:

“Brutal CrossFit workout tonight, but what a good feeling it gave me when I overheard my coach saying, “Gotta get off the phone, I have an athlete here with ripped hands.” AN ATHLETE – yea, that’s me!!!”

Here’s how another one of our athletes puts it in her success story:

“I’ve learned that athletes come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and abilities. I’ve learned that even though I was always picked last during recess and have never played on a single sports team, I can call myself an athlete too.”

That’s the stuff that long-term life change is made of.

This goes deeper than the short-term results of fad diets and quick-fix gimmicks. They may work for awhile, but the tips and tricks of external behavior modification eventually wear thin and most of us revert back to our old selves. There is no transformative power in temporary behavior modification.

The lasting life-change many CrossFitters enjoy flows from a new identity—a transformed self-perception.

That’s why everyone in our gym is an athlete, whether they believe it or not.

Preach.