Latest posts
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Kayla Bonkowski | Why Rest Days Are Part of the Practice
Kayla Bonkowski is not naturally good at rest days. She has spent years developing a better relationship with them, and she would not describe that relationship as fully resolved. Rest days still feel, on some level, like something she is giving up. The progress she is making on training days, she is not making on…
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Difference Between Training for Performance and Appearance
Kayla Bonkowski made a shift in her training orientation at some point after she started CrossFit, and she has been trying to describe it accurately ever since. It was not a single decision. It happened gradually, and she only recognized it in retrospect. She stopped thinking primarily about what her body looked like and started…
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Mental Side of Weight Loss Nobody Talks About
Kayla Bonkowski has had conversations about weight loss with people who were frustrated and surprised at the same time — frustrated because the physical changes were not happening fast enough, and surprised because they had not expected the mental part to be this hard. They had prepared for the diet. They had not prepared for…
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Kayla Bonkowski | Why Functional Fitness Outlasts Every Other Approach
Kayla Bonkowski has watched enough fitness cycles play out over the last several years to have a clear opinion on what lasts and what doesn’t. The approaches that stick are the ones built around movement that has a purpose. The ones that fade are the ones built around aesthetics, novelty, or the particular kind of…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What CrossFit Competition Actually Teaches You
Kayla Bonkowski has been competing in CrossFit since 2021, and the list of things competition has taught her is longer and stranger than she expected when she started. Some of it is tactical — pacing, heat management, event sequencing. Most of it is not. Most of what competition teaches has to do with who you…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Competitive CrossFit Looks Like from the Inside
Most of what gets posted about CrossFit competitions online is highlights. The lift that went well. The crowd noise. The finish line. Kayla Bonkowski has been on the floor at competitions in Michigan and what she remembers is not any of that — it is the ten minutes before an event starts, standing in the…
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Kayla Bonkowski | How Community Changes a Fitness Practice
Before she found CrossFit, Kayla Bonkowski trained mostly alone. She had a gym membership, she followed programs she found online, and she put in the work. What she did not have was anyone else in the room who cared whether she showed up. That changed in 2021. Training alongside other people — people who were…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What a Barbell Does That a Treadmill Cannot
The treadmill is a fine machine. Kayla Bonkowski has used one. It raises the heart rate, burns calories, and requires nothing of you except that you keep moving. That is also, more or less, its limitation. A barbell asks more. Not just physically — though that part is obvious — but in the way it…