Max Conserva- Coach Profile

When did you first get involved in Crossfit, and what brought you to it?

I first got involved in Crossfit January 2012. My roommate had been a member of San Francisco CrossFit for years and it had always sounded interesting but due to the issues with my leg I thought it wasn’t for me. My roommate told me that his coach (Kelly) was a physical therapist and was interested in having a look at my case. Still I hesitated. Then my roommate bought me a one-on-one with Kelly for my birthday and finally I was left with no excuses.

What stood out during my meeting with Kelly was the concept of movement strategies. I had never heard anyone talk like this before. He floated the idea of trying different movement strategies to help solve some of my issues. Some of those strategies had nothing to do with my compromised knee or ankle.

We talked about different styles of squatting, pose walking/running, etc. I had walked in with a very high bar for CrossFit to jump over, specifically,  “How is this going to generate a direct positive result for my leg?” Kelly offered up a different threshold with, “If we optimize the movement of the rest of your body, we can give your injured leg the best chance to succeed”. This was a much lower bar. It sounded plausible so I signed up for the basics course that day.

What I prize most is consistency, learning and incorporating movement into my day as much as possible. If these criteria are met I almost don’t really care what the actual activity is for my specific “training”.

I concentrate on having a good physical practice (not my word). To me a good physical practice means: mobilizing for 15 mins when I wake up; commuting with my bike rather then my car; making sure I brake up sedentary portions of my day; giving myself time before training to warm up and be conscious about the skills I’ll be practicing; training at some point during the day; mobilizing 15 mins before I go to bed.

If I’ve nailed all these aspects then I know I am doing fitness well. Which training activity I do is almost an afterthought: Standard level 1, MetCon, Weightlifting, Gymnastics, Running, Cycling, Swiming, Tennis, Yoga. There is so much to learn in each discipline, I value it all.

In general I’m inspired when I have a chance to share my unique knowledge with others and in turn I am inspired when others share their unique knowledge with me. The subject almost doesn’t matter. Passion makes anything interesting.

What inspires me within CrossFit is learning novel ways to complete tasks. Learning that there are different movement patterns to get to the same end point. As someone with a physical impairment sometimes the most obvious movement strategy is blocked so I need to discover an alternate one: e.g. shift my hips a different direction, stagger my feet, use my arms as a counter weight, etc. It’s like I’m playing chess with a few pieces missing so I need to be more competent and more creative with the pieces that I do have.