The Biggest Lesson I’ve Learned From a Year Doing High Intensity Bootcamp Classes

A year ago today, I signed up for a “Burn” class at a local CrossFit gym. It was a move that was way beyond my comfort zone.

I was afraid of taking a fast-paced, high intensity class. In those types of classes I always fear that I won’t be able to keep up.

The Roots of My Fear

When people hear that I exercise daily, that I’ve been doing flying trapeze and trampoline for 20 years, that I teach yoga, love to swim and like to stay active, they often picture someone highly athletic.

The truth is that I have always struggled with movement and coordination. This is actually a lesser-known symptom of ADHD — part of the impact on mind-body control that can create impulsiveness.

It takes my body and mind longer to communicate. New physical activities don’t come easy to me, and I don’t move with much speed, agility, or explosiveness.

In my astrology chart, my natal sun sits at 15 degrees of Taurus, smack in the middle of the Bull’s sign, and I embody the slow and methodical approach.

When I feel rushed, my nervous system goes into sympathetic overload. This causes my body to freeze, leading me into compensation patterns that can cause injury.

For this reason, I have always stayed away from high intensity or fast-paced classes that involve a lot of different movements, like barre classes or Barry’s Bootcamp.

I like to go at my own pace.

But I was in a rut, and I finally reached a breaking point.

For years I had been consistent with a morning routine that started with getting out the door to the gym as quickly as possible. After two years of “home” workouts during the pandemic, I was dragging. Often sleeping late, starting slowly, and struggling to get momentum in my day.

I wasn’t living in alignment with the rules I had set for myself when I started my Fitness First ritual.

More important, I was spending precious energy trying to motivate myself to get started every morning. When I would spend energy to plan a workout, it left me without the energy I needed to do the workouts. This planning also depleted my precious of executive function capacity, limiting the executive function resources available to me for the rest of the day.

The Breaking Point

My journal from this day last year reminds me that I had been up since 6:30 am, but by 8 am I still hadn’t moved my body much.

I had been tired. I did a yoga nidra meditation. I journaled extensively, mostly my negative thoughts and judgements about how I was living out of integrity with my highest values.

Midway through my first warm-up exercise, I hit a breaking point.

I put down my resistance band and signed up for the class about 15 minutes before it started. Then I jumped into the car to drive over to this non-descript box gym in an area far removed from my normal path.

In my rush to arrive on time, I didn’t have bandwidth to focus on my fear of keeping up or getting injured.

“The Class Kicked My Butt.”

In my journal, I wrote this synopsis after the class:

The class kicked my butt and showed me where I need work. It moved fast, and that’s what I needed.

Although I had feared the fast pace, I managed to keep up for the most part.

It helped that the entire sequence for the class was written on a white board, and the coach reviewed and demonstrated all the movements before we started.

The coach also gave me modifications for many of the movements, and I used light weights.

The coaches met me where I was and gave me a supportive, structured environment in which to push my edge.

And it was definitely a push.

The class pushed me in a way that I don’t usually like to be pushed.

By the end of that class, I was dripping with sweat and breathing hard.

I also felt alive for the first time in years.

I started showing up regularly, eventually switching to the 5:45 am class. By the end of 2022, I started doing CrossFit classes too.

The Lesson: What I Didn’t Want Was Exactly What I Needed

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that after a year of doing Burn and several months of CrossFit, I no longer fear high-intensity, fast-pace classes.

The truth is that often I am still apprehensive. I still struggle with movement patterns, and in workouts where we are scoring “for time,” I’m almost always the last one finished.

I still prefer to go at my own pace.

But I also have come to see that what I want is often opposite from what I need.

I have found value in the freedom of having someone else hold the space, tell me what to do, and the constraint of needing to finish within a certain time frame.

And this is why I keep showing up: because these classes give me what I need.