Don’t Rescue. Empower: How Over-Helping Adaptive Athletes Backfires

My friend Grant (not his real name) yells at people when they try to help him put weights away.

It’s jarring. Someone reaches in, well-intentioned and kind, and he snaps: “I got it.”

It’s not ego or ingratitude, it’s self-preservation. 

Grant’s snap isn't anger. It's the instinct to keep the challenge internal, and the fortitude to keep it that way. Instinctively, Grant knows about the difference between being passively challenged by circumstances (which triggers a tense, stressed-out threat mode) and actively choosing to grow through difficulty (which activates our sense of purpose). Over-helping forces the athlete into a passive position.

The problem is that helping feels good. It’s human. But sometimes that instinct carries an unintended message: you’re different… not capable… dependent… you need to be managed. Even subtle cues of pity can chip away at someone’s sense of control and confidence. You live with that stress long enough, and it’ll affect how you move through the world. You’ll develop a tense, tight, learned helplessness. 

Growth happens when challenge and autonomy are balanced. Too little control, and the challenge becomes stress. Too much assistance, and the system never adapts.

Failing at the outer edges of our experience.

At some point, we all learned to function in the world. Newly disabled people have to re-learn. Life is full of oddly-shaped objects — physically and mentally. We figure out how to carry groceries, navigate doors, learn to use tools, and solve problems. That cognitive load isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It’s how competence is built.

For adaptive athletes, that process is simply more visible.

We are constantly adapting: figuring out new grips, new positions, new ways to move through space. And that’s not something we’re trying to escape. It’s exactly what draws us in.

CrossFit, at its best, is a laboratory for this kind of growth. It offers structured difficulty with room for creativity. Adaptive athletes don’t show up to be protected from challenge — we show up because challenge makes us more capable, more independent, and, frankly, harder to kill. 

Life doesn’t often give us the chance to take the physical risks — “to fail at the outer edges of our experience” — we need to grow. But CrossFit does every day.

So when someone rushes in to help too quickly, it short-circuits that process. It removes the very thing we came for.

Coaches are collaborators, not rescuers.

It works because of the bond between athlete and coach. The athlete can tolerate the difficulty partly because they know the coach is present and invested. The bond doesn't remove the challenge; it makes the challenge safe enough to approach.

The practical shift for coaches is simple, but not always easy: resist the urge to rescue. 

Set the tone. Treat the disability as background noise, not the headline. Give the same standards, the same expectations, the same space to struggle. And if others step in too quickly, gently redirect: “Give him a second. He’s got it.”

That doesn’t mean ignoring real need. It means letting autonomy lead, and assistance follow. Adaptive athletes don’t need distance; they need partnership.

We want to know you care that you’re in it with us, not as a rescuer, but as a collaborator.

Be ready to say: “I don’t know exactly how we’ll do this, but we’ll figure it out together.”

That sentence both acknowledges the challenge and preserves autonomy. It takes balance.

Don’t treat me differently. Don’t take the bar out of my hands before I’ve had a chance to lift it. Let me wrestle with the problem, even if it’s messy.

Because that struggle? That’s not what stresses me out. Losing control is. Give us the chance to earn it. You’ll be giving me something far more valuable than help.