Articles

Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

Your Worst Days Are Out to Get You. Here's How to Beat Them at Their Own Game.

Your Worst Days Are Out to Get You. Here's How to Beat Them at Their Own Game.

Why consistency collapses in midlife, and the three-part fix for the days you've got nothing left.

The issue was never whether exercise and good food work. We know they work. The issue is doing them on a Tuesday that's actively trying to ruin you."

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

The Elimination Diet: Less Witch Hunt, More Science Project

The Elimination Diet: Less Witch Hunt, More Science Project

You’ve been bloated for six months. Your skin looks like a topographical map of a country nobody wants to visit. You’re tired in a way that coffee no longer touches. Naturally, you did what any rational adult would do: you typed your symptoms into a search bar at 11 PM and concluded you’re either intolerant to gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, nightshades, FODMAPs, oxalates, lectins, histamines, or possibly oxygen.

Welcome to the moment most people discover elimination diets.

Here’s the honest version of what they are, what they do, and what they absolutely will not do, no matter how many influencers tell you otherwise.

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

The CrossFit Mic Drop Problem: When “Just Kidding” Stops Being Funny

The CrossFit Mic Drop Problem: When “Just Kidding” Stops Being Funny

An honest look at whether the loudest voices in CrossFit podcasting are covering the community, or dividing it.

Is it possible the divisiveness people keep complaining about in the CrossFit community is not coming from CrossFit at all? Is it possible it is coming from the podcasts?

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

The Pyramid Everyone Forgot

The Pyramid Everyone Forgot

Is the CrossFit Journal Still the Smartest Thing in Fitness?

There’s a distinction the Journal drew that I think has been almost entirely lost in modern CrossFit culture, and it’s this: methodology is not the same thing as programming.

Programming is what goes on the whiteboard. Methodology is why it goes on the whiteboard.

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

Punch In The Face

Punch In The Face

Perimenopause is rewriting women’s bodies, minds, and identities — and most of them have no idea it’s happening.

One survivor of domestic abuse, turned health coach, is done watching women apologize for the bruise.

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

Too Many Roads To The CrossFit Games?

How CrossFit’s Semifinal Expansion Is Diluting the Sport’s Most Critical Stage

An opinion on the evolution of CrossFit’s qualification system — and what it costs when everyone gets a second (and third, and fourth) chance.

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

Your Body Is Not a Before Photo

Why the Fitness Industry's Obsession with Aesthetics Is Failing Us

We've all been there. You're scrolling through your feed at 6 a.m., coffee in hand, maybe feeling pretty good about yourself — and then it hits. A perfectly lit, perfectly angled, perfectly edited physique staring back at you with a caption that reads something like, "No excuses. Rise and grind." Suddenly, the body you woke up comfortable in doesn't feel like enough.

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

Why Absolutes Are Killing Honest Conversation

The Tyranny of “Always” and “Never”: Why Absolutes Are Killing Honest Conversation

There’s a rhetorical trick so common we barely notice it anymore. It slips into podcasts, press conferences, social media threads, and dinner table arguments with the quiet confidence of someone who has never once been wrong. It sounds like this:

“He’s always only cared about the CrossFit Games.”

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

The Voice In Your Head Is a Bad Coach

The Coach In You Head SUCKS…

here is a conversation you have more often than any other. It isn’t with your partner, your boss, your best friend, or your therapist. It’s with yourself. It runs from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, and it shapes virtually everything you do in between — what you attempt, what you avoid, how hard you push, and how quickly you quit.

And for most people, that conversation is terrible.

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Vickie Duncan Vickie Duncan

The Standard Is The Standard: That’s The Point

Why CrossFit's obsession with hard things is the antidote to a culture that's gone soft.

Nobody forced you to walk in here.

Nobody made you sign the waiver, chalk your hands, and stare down a barbell that doesn't care about your feelings. You chose this. And that single decision — the decision to voluntarily do something hard when the entire world is engineering ways to make everything easier — is the most countercultural act you'll commit all day.

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