So You Want To work on skills You Suck At
BLACK IRON RADIO EP. 384: So You Want To Work On Skills You Suck At
There's a certain grace we give kids while they're learning that we completely stop giving ourselves as adults.
Morgan, Brooke, and Jess Gordon get into why being bad at something is worth leaning into, not avoiding. As adults we tend to stay parked in the areas where we're already competent, so choosing to be a beginner at something you might fail at over and over is its own kind of brave. They talk about the ego hit of sucking at something in a season of life where you feel like you shouldn't be a beginner at anything, why "I suck at this" is usually just "I haven't learned this yet," and the programming side of actually getting better instead of spinning your wheels.
Plus why you never know how many hours went into the thing that looks effortless on someone else, how to talk to yourself when you're failing a skill on repeat, and the difference between the people who fail with grace and the people who quit.
Every gym has that guy. At coach Morgan's box, there's one member who spends open gym relentlessly attempting the same clean, missing it, resetting, and trying again. Fail, fail, fail, fail. Every coach on staff has taken their turn pulling him aside to explain why grinding the same failed rep over and over isn't making him better. He hasn't listened to a single one of them. Nobody knows how that's going for him.
He's the extreme version of a mistake almost everyone makes with a skill they're bad at: mistaking repetition for progress. In this episode, Morgan sits down with coaches Brooke and Jess Gordon to break down what it takes to get better at something you suck at, from the psychology of choosing to be a beginner again to the technical difference between practicing a skill and just testing it.
Choosing To Suck At Something Is Its Own Kind Of Brave
Most adult life is built around staying in your lane. You went to school for your job, you're good at it, you've got routines that work. Then you walk into a gym and realize you have no idea how to walk on your hands. As Brooke put it, that's a strange position to willingly put yourself in at a point in life when you're not supposed to be a beginner at anything.
That's exactly why it matters. Every time you show up and fail at something on purpose, you build evidence that you can figure out hard things at any age, whether you're 20 or 70. Jess made the same point from the coaching side: watching people fail tells you a lot about who they are, because there are people who fail with grace and people who fail and quit, and you don't find out which one you are until you're in it. Even elite performers aren't exempt. Morgan pointed to watching Olympic weightlifting hopeful Morgan King bomb out on the national stage, miss every lift, and still walk away with her career intact. Nobody's exempt from a bad day. What separates people is whether a bad day gets to be the whole story.
Your Ego Is The Real Opponent
Here's the uncomfortable part: most resistance to working on a weak skill isn't physical, it's ego. Brooke described the internal negotiation that kicks in the moment you're bad at something in an area of life where you've built an identity around competence. "I'm good at most things, so why am I not good at this?" turns into "maybe this just isn't for me," which is ego talking you out of the exact discomfort that would help you grow.
It gets worse when you start comparing yourself to other people instead of tracking your own progress. Brooke's example: someone walks in who can already do the skill, and suddenly it's not about your own development anymore, it's jealousy dressed up as motivation. That comparison trap will derail a beginner faster than the skill itself ever could.
Reframe What "Suck" Means
Jess's reframe here is the one worth writing down: you don't suck at handstand walking. You've just never walked on your hands before. Those are two different sentences, and only one of them is true. When you watch someone else make a skill look effortless, you're not watching a shortcut, you're watching someone who already built the brain-body connection you haven't built yet, sometimes over years you didn't see. You don't know her background. You don't know how many hours she put in. Comparing your day one to someone else's year five isn't information, it's just a worse story to tell yourself.
How To Pick What To Work On
CrossFit alone gives you a hundred different things you could suck at: engine, gymnastics, Olympic lifting, strength, mobility, rowing, handstands, double unders. You can't chase all of them at once, so Brooke's approach is to start with what's going to move the needle. Test yourself honestly (the CrossFit Open is built for exactly this), figure out where you fall apart, and then work backward from your real goal. Training for a competition demands a different priority list than just getting comfortable with the foundational movements as a beginner.
The payoff test matters more than people think. Brooke's own example: she's a genuinely bad runner, which is exactly why she's never signed up for a HYROX race. Spending her limited training time chasing a slightly better snatch instead of fixing her running would be optimizing the wrong variable entirely. If running is going to eat more of your race than any single station, that's where your time goes, not toward polishing something you're already fine at.
Jess added the other half of the equation: pick something you genuinely enjoy, because whatever you're bad at, you're going to be spending a lot of time with it. And that time isn't wasted even when the specific skill doesn't transfer. Working on pull-ups doesn't just build pull-ups, it builds the general skill of failing and trying again, which you carry into your power cleans, your handstand walk, whatever comes next.
Practice vs. Testing: The Difference That Matters
This is the core mechanism of the whole episode, and it's the answer to why the guy grinding failed cleans never improves. Brooke drew a hard line between practicing a skill and testing whether you have it yet. Jumping at a muscle-up, missing, resting, and jumping again isn't practice. It's testing the same failed attempt fifteen times and calling it work. If you're getting the same result attempt after attempt, you've already got your answer. Repeating it past that point isn't dedication, it's the textbook definition of insanity, and it's actively teaching your nervous system to be good at failing.
Actual practice means breaking the skill apart and finding your specific limiting factor. Is it strength? Coordination? Mobility? For a lot of women learning ring muscle-ups, the real issue is pulling capacity, not the transition itself, so the fix isn't more failed muscle-up attempts, it's feet-inverted ring rows to build the missing strength first. Two national weightlifting teams Morgan competed on ran on this exact principle: one capped attempts at three misses, the other at one. The logic was the same on both teams. Every rep cements something, good or bad, so you don't get to keep cementing the wrong pattern in the name of "getting more reps in." Jess backed this up from the gymnastics side: once your brain builds a pathway to do a movement poorly, unlearning it later is a much harder fight than learning it correctly the first time would have been.
How Much Practice Is Enough
More isn't automatically better here. Jess's number: ten to fifteen focused minutes, a few times a week, not thirty minutes of double unders before class every single day until your calves are one rep from a charley horse. Skill work is dosed for quality, not volume, partly because bad reps reinforce bad patterns and partly because high-skill movements carry real injury risk when you're grinding them fatigued and unconfident in a new range of motion.
Timing matters too. Practice a new skill when you're fresh, ideally before class, so you're able to receive feedback instead of white-knuckling through frustration. Once you've got the skill down in isolation, that's when you start testing it under fatigue, stringing it together after a workout, seeing if it holds up when you're tired. That progression from fresh practice to fatigued application is basically graduation. And if you genuinely can't tell what your body is doing, film it. Watching video back is one of the fastest ways to catch the gap between what you think you're doing and what's really happening.
When You've Been Stuck For Months
If you've drilled something for six months with nothing to show for it, the answer isn't to quit, and it isn't to keep hammering the same drill either. Go back to the same diagnostic question: is it strength, technique, or timing? Once you answer that, the fix is rarely the flashy version of the skill. It's the boring foundational work nobody wants to do, low ring transitions, beat swings, pressing strength, the stuff that doesn't look like progress in the moment but is the real bottleneck.
The payoff, when it comes, doesn't always look like the thing you were chasing. Maybe you don't get the muscle-up this year, but your pull-ups and chest-to-bar got noticeably better along the way. Maybe a coach notices how consistently you show up to work on something hard and offers you an assistant coaching spot. None of that happens for the people who quietly assume mastery should have come easier, or faster, than it did for anyone else.
The Takeaway
Sucking at something isn't a phase you push through on the way to being good, it's the entire process. The difference between people who get better and people who stay stuck almost never comes down to talent. It comes down to whether they're practicing (breaking the skill down, isolating the real limiter, capping their failed reps) or just testing the same failed attempt over and over and calling it effort. Dose your skill work in short, focused sessions, check your ego before you compare your day one to someone else's fifth year, and trust that the payoff will show up, even if it's not shaped exactly like you expected.
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