A real conversation worth having — with yourself, and with your coach.
Recently, I was talking with one of our athletes after class. She mentioned something that stuck with me: on the days we lift, she sometimes finishes the strength piece and just… doesn’t want to do the workout. She wasn’t complaining. She was genuinely curious — and a little frustrated with herself.
So we talked. Really talked. And the more we dug in, the clearer it became that what she was experiencing wasn’t a motivation problem or a mental weakness. It was information. Her body and her life were sending her a message, and it was worth listening to.
That conversation is the reason I’m writing this. Because I’d bet she’s not alone.
First: Why Do We Lift AND Do a Workout on the Same Day?
Three days a week at CrossFit Lincoln, our programming is structured intentionally: a strength piece followed by a workout. This isn’t random. It’s not us trying to make you tired. There’s a very deliberate physiological and performance-based reason behind it.
When you lift heavy first, your central nervous system is primed and your muscles are warm and activated. You’ve recruited motor units, practiced movement patterns under load, and built up a training stimulus that targets maximal strength. The strength piece is the main event — it’s where we’re asking your body to express and build raw force.
The workout that follows serves a completely different but complementary purpose. It trains your body’s energy systems — your aerobic capacity, your ability to sustain effort over time, your conditioning. Together, these two pieces create a training effect that neither could produce alone. Strength without conditioning leaves gaps. Conditioning without strength leaves gaps. Done together, done consistently, they build the kind of fitness that is both functional and lasting.
The combination also creates what coaches call “concurrent training” — developing multiple physical qualities in the same session. Research supports this approach for general fitness athletes: you can get stronger and more conditioned at the same time when the programming is designed thoughtfully. Ours is.
But Here’s What We Don’t Talk About Enough: Recovery Is a Variable
When I dug a little deeper with this athlete, here’s what I found out: she hadn’t been sleeping well. Her nutrition had been off — busy schedule, skipped meals, not enough protein. Her energy had been low for weeks. Her motivation, which is usually sky-high, was running on fumes.
And then she was wondering why, after squatting heavy, she didn’t want to do a workout.
Here’s the truth: your capacity to perform is not fixed. It changes day to day, week to week, month to month — based on sleep, nutrition, stress, life load, emotional weight, hormonal cycles, and about a hundred other factors. The athlete who crushes every piece of programming with energy to spare on a normal week might genuinely need to scale back during a harder one. That’s not weakness. That’s physiology.
One of the most underrated skills in fitness is the ability to honestly assess where you are right now — not where you were last month, not where you want to be next month. Where you are today. This week. In this season of your life.
If sleep has been poor, nutrition has been lacking, and stress has been high, your recovery is compromised. Your nervous system is already working overtime just keeping up with daily life. Asking it to perform at 100% in the gym on top of that is sometimes just not realistic — and pushing through without acknowledging that can set you back further than scaling back ever would.
Check In With Your Goals — They Should Shape How You Train
Here’s where it gets really practical, and really personal: your goals matter when it comes to how you approach the structure of our programming.
Ask yourself honestly: what am I here for right now?
If your primary goal is strength, give everything you have to the strength piece. Treat it like the main event it is — focused, intentional, progressive. And then? Treat the workout that follows as an active cool-down. Move well, breathe, keep intensity moderate. Let your nervous system come down from the heavy effort. You’re not “skipping” the workout — you’re using it the way it’s meant to be used when strength is your priority. Light metabolic work after lifting actually helps clear byproducts of exertion and supports recovery. You don’t have to go to war with the workout to get value from it.
If your goal is overall fitness — strength AND conditioning — then the sweet spot is what coaches call the 70-80% effort zone on both pieces. Not maxing out on the strength, not redlining on the workout. Working at 70-80% intensity allows you to accumulate high-quality training volume without completely taxing your recovery between sessions. It’s sustainable. It compounds. And it actually produces better long-term adaptations than constantly going all-out on everything.
Progressive Overload: The Secret Engine of Getting Both Strong and Fit
If you’re working at that 70-80% sweet spot, here’s how you keep making progress: progressive overload.
Progressive overload simply means gradually increasing the demand placed on your body over time so that it continues to adapt. It doesn’t always mean adding weight. It can mean adding reps, reducing rest time, improving movement quality, or increasing the pace of a workout. The key is that over weeks and months, the stimulus grows — and so does your capacity.
Think about it this way: if you do the same workout at the same weight with the same rest every week, your body adapts to that stimulus in about 4-6 weeks and stops changing. But if week over week you’re adding just a little more — a few more pounds on the bar, a slightly faster pace, one less second of rest — your body never fully catches up. It keeps adapting. You keep getting fitter and stronger at the same time.
Our programming at CrossFit Lincoln is built around this principle. The cycles are designed so that over time, the loads and demands increase in a way your body can handle. Your job is to show up consistently, work at an intensity that’s challenging but sustainable, and trust the process. The results come — not from any single heroic effort, but from the accumulation of smart, consistent work.
The Bottom Line: Listen More, Judge Less
If you finish a strength piece and your body is telling you it’s done, that’s worth paying attention to. Ask yourself: Is this laziness, or is this information? Have I been sleeping? Eating enough? Managing stress? Am I in a particularly demanding season of life right now?
If the honest answer is that life has been hard and recovery has suffered, scale back. Do the workout at an easy pace. Move your body, breathe, and give yourself credit for being there at all. That is not giving up — that is training intelligently.
And if you’re well-rested, well-fueled, and feeling good? Then understand your goals, work at the intensity that serves them, and let the programming do what it was designed to do.
Either way, talk to your coach. That conversation I had with our athlete? It was one of the most valuable five minutes of her training week — not because I gave her permission to skip anything, but because understanding the why changed how she approached everything.
We’re here for that conversation, whenever you need it.
— Emily Brede | Owner & Head Coach, CrossFit Lincoln