Male Athlete of the Month - January

Full Name: Andy Nelson

When did you join: When the gym opened in May

Occupation:Software Engineer at Cerner

What is your spirit animal: Bear

Biggest Motivation: My biggest motivation at CrossFit is to get to major milestones relative to my body weight in Olympic lifts. Deadlift double my weight, squat double my weight, once muscle up, etc. My biggest motivation in life is to challenge myself to do better every day.

Favorite quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."

- Albert Einstein

Favorite Workout fuel: Peanut butter protein shake with almond milk

Favorite lift: Deadlift

Least favorite lift: Single arm dumbbell snatch

Favorite workout so far: Hotshots 19

Athlete of the month goals

Personal:

I’d like to get some projects done around the house, but I need to save up some money first. I just crossed off a goal which was to get my first new car. I want to repave the driveway, re-do the office, paint the bedrooms, and put in some ceiling fans. I play a lot of a PC game called League of Legends, and you’re ranked into tiers. My goal is to get to platinum this year, top 10% of all players. On that note, I need to finish some of the Xbox games I have, but I am a little addicted to competitive multiplayer so I get sidetracked on the single player games.

Professional:

I just became a team lead at work this year. My goal is to fix the things that I don’t like about the way our team does things. Engineering also doesn’t have a lot of trust built up with the people who make commitments to the clients. My goal is to make my small team the most reliable in our organization. After that, who knows?

Athletic:

Deadlift and squat double my body weight (315)

Snatch my body weight (157)

10 unbroken double unders

1 muscle up

Why do you choose MC CrossFit?

I used to be a huge CrossFit skeptic. “It costs so much money.” “Lifting that fast just leads to poor form.” My wife Meg started bugging me about trying CrossFit because she’s a workout-aholic and her IT-band syndrome was preventing her from training for her half marathons. MC opened and it is really close to my house, plus they were offering a free month trial. I had run out of excuses, so finally I gave in and said we could try together. She was going to go without me but what competitiveness I have wouldn’t let my wife lift more than me. I’d say it was in my top 5 life decisions to start doing CrossFit. What have kept me coming back are the results and the people. I get grief for skipping days, and it’s tough to stay in bed when my wife is getting up to work out without me. It’s nice to have people who expect you to be there. I’ve never been able to commit to a workout for more than a couple months at a time, but here I am 8 months later almost always 5 days a week. I’ve also gotten the most results when I had fun and stopped worrying about targeting specific muscles with exercises like tricep pull downs and such. I’ve seen improvements in muscles I didn’t even know I wasn’t hitting before. I’ve lowered my blood pressure several points, lowered my bad cholesterol, raised my good cholesterol, increased my deadlift by 50 pounds, and dropped my 5K time by 5 minutes, all while adding nothing else to my workout routine and not altering my diet. It’s safe to say I’m a CrossFit convert at this point. I even have the MC sticker on my work laptop.