Prepare to be humbled. At just 22 years old, Lauren Fisher has already:
- Played national level high school basketball,
- Become Best Female Lifter at the Junior National weightlifting championship in 2014,
- Qualified twice for the Crossfit Games.
She placed first at this year’s Californian Regionals, prevailing over much more experienced athletes. With such an impressive list of past achievements, we don’t feel there’s much this ambitious San Diegan (who’s also taking university classes) couldn’t do. We’ve compiled just five of the many Crossfit Lessons you can learn from her:
1. BUILD A CROSSFIT CREW
Lauren attributes a lot of her toughness and athleticism to growing up with three older brothers with whom she had to keep up. When they teased her and pushed her in the ivy, her mother told her to toughen up and get back out there. And toughen up she did: Fast forward a couple of years and you can see the determination and competitiveness in Lauren, who still loves a little friendly neck-and-neck race. It doesn’t matter whether it’s her boyfriend, her older brother Gareth, who is also going to the Games this year, or just a workout mate: she will challenge them to a WOD, a rope climb, or a game of basketball.
Don’t make the mistake of letting competitiveness alienate you
Training multiple times every day means that she doesn’t do the things other university students do (CJ Martin, her coach, makes sure the most competitive athletes had a 7AM training session on Saturday mornings), but it’s quite obvious that this is not a factor that makes her less of a fun and social person. Rather, she lets herself be inspired by the driven and ambitious people around her, matching them every step of the way. This is something you can implement in your life: The time at the box is just a lot better spent when you have someone to compare yourself to in a friendly (albeit passionately competitive!) way. So next time you’re at the box, give socializing a shot!
Lauren hanging out and training with friends
2. ANALYZE YOUR LIFTS
One of the main advantages Lauren holds over her strong competition is her impeccable barbell skills. They can partly be attributed to natural talent – she started specializing in Olympic Lifting just two years before representing the USA in junior meets worldwide- but also to her intense and close work with her head coach CJ Martin, who analyzes her lifts and helps her achieve the impressive numbers she boasts.
This is hard to recreate, of course, as we do not all enjoy the privilege of direct coaching from one of the best coaches in the world. But especially with OLY lifts, there may just be one typical flaw that keeps you from breaking PRs or mastering them perfectly, so it is advisable to take the time to videotape yourself and consult an experienced OLY-Coach. Is your timing on point? How about your bar-path? Once you know what to look out for, proceed to critically observe yourself in regard to your weaknesses.
3. GO HARD ON YOURSELF
If you want to achieve excellence, make sure never to take the easy way out.
“Difficult doesn’t mean impossible, it simply means that you have to work hard.”
Combat your weaknesses and make them new strengths
Lauren is a perfect example of great work ethics: With her natural abilities, she could easily focus solely on weightlifting and be done with endurance work and gymnastics, but she enjoys the challenge and continuously works on the skills she needs to improve. After 2015, where she had problems with a legless rope-climb, she was determined to master the skill in her training until the next games. In this year’s regional events, she got to prove her proficiency.
work until your weaknesses become your strengths
“Experiences are lessons to be learned”
Indeed, this is why Crossfit is the perfect sport for anyone who loves pushing themselves for improvement: you are never quite done. In your training regimen, even with skills you have seemingly mastered, you’d be surprised what a boost you can get from altering them slightly, going extra tough on yourself
Be Strict
Take, for instance, gymnastics: In competition, the aim is to be as efficient and fast as possible, using kipping techniques to do so. Yet in her training, Lauren does a lot of strict movements like strict handstand pushups (CJ Martin states openly that he doesn’t program kipping HSPUs because of the strain on the neck, and also because he thinks that athletes can profit a lot more from doing the strict version of gymnastics movements).
Even if you’re confident in your gymnastics abilities and manage to finish your WODs in record time, revisiting the slow and painful strain of strict movements will target different muscles and in turn support your kipping technique, making you a better overall athlete.
Try dead stop lifts
Here’s our recommendation for toughing up your strength work: try dead stop lifts. These will help you to work on your power and drive, and test your strength in a new way.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGIhgQazRN7/?taken-by=laurenfisher&hl=de
4. BE A GOAL ORIENTED FOODIE
Every impression we get from Lauren’s diet looks extremely delicious, proving that there is no contradiction between eating clean and being a foodie. While she admits to a massive sweet tooth and love for desserts, her regular diet is high quality primal with extra sources of carbohydrates. She works with a nutritionist and tracks her macros to ensure her body is fuelled for maximum performance. In a time where many young girls her age struggle with excessive dieting and restricting, she makes a point of putting health and performance first and eating to be happy.
Eat well, train hard
She is a great role model in that respect, inspiring half a million instagram users by aligning her nutrition with training and competing, the things that make her happy, but also keeping food as a separate factor of enjoyment. Give your body whole foods and try to eat in a mindful and healthy way, but don’t beat yourself up for straying from time to time and treating yourself to your favourite guilty pleasure.
5. WORK HARD, BUT HAVE FUN
When asked what her goals for the next years are, Lauren dreams big: she wants to win the CrossFit games “maybe one or two times” and compete at the Olympics for the USA in weightlifting. At the rate that she’s impressing us now time and time again, we have no doubt that she will achieve her goals and even exceed them.
Yet what she also manages to convey through all her ambitions is that you should never put so much pressure on yourself that you stop loving what you do. The optimistic and cheerful young woman posted a shout out to all the CrossFit Teen division competitors to enjoy their time in the competition rather than beating themselves up over results.
Perhaps that is Lauren’s most admirable trait: staying down to earth and positive in all of the pressure that comes with being a rising Crossfit star. Maybe that’s the way she manages to get everything done: seeing every part of her life as a component to being happy, working hard to excel in Crossfit, Weightlifting and University, but staying light and positive about them. She can devote herself to all of it at once because not one single passion of hers defines her as a person, so temporary setbacks only drive her to work harder.
