CrossFit is a funny combination of 1) Big Skills 2) Little Skills 3) Secret Sauce.  Take the handstand pushup.  The Big Skill is just pushing your body weight up while in a handstand.  But in order to do a handstand pushup you have to develop numerous Little Skills:

• Support the load on your bone structure by bunching your shoulders around your ears and locking your elbows
• Enforce mid-line stability by holding your breath and tensing your core
• Grip the ground with your fingers to maintain balance
• etc.

So far, so good.  So where does the “Secret Sauce” come in?  Well imagine doing 21 handstand pushups as fast as you can immediately after dead-lifting 1.5 x bodyweight 21 times.  That’s just the first part of “Diane“,  a benchmark CrossFit workout.

When you are under pressure the Big Skill of handstand pushups becomes nearly impossible unless you have a handle on the Little Skills.  And pressure is the Secret Sauce that makes CrossFit such an effective medium for skill acquisition.  When you can execute under pressure, then you truly “own” the skill.  In CrossFit we don’t want you to just understand a skill on an academic level.  We want you to own it.

He needs to work on Little Skills