CrossFit
Here's a quick summary:
- CrossFit has popularized hard training using barbells.
- CrossFit is a nice exercise but it is not a "workout". The undoubtedly impressive CrossFit Games competitors do not use CrossFit training to prepare for these games.
- There are good and bad CrossFit coaches, but the certification farm that CrossFit has become often produces more bad than good.
I was associated with CrossFit for 3 years starting in 2006, offering weekend seminars and instructional videos demonstrating technique on five basic barbell exercises. I ended my formal association with the organization in 2009 due to ideological and personal differences.
During this time, I became quite familiar with the system and the people who developed it, and I have watched it change significantly over the years. In the course of this development, I have formed my own opinions, which I would like to share with you here.
The good
CrossFit is without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to barbell training. Since the development of the barbell over a hundred years ago, nothing has put more barbells in the hands of exercisers than CrossFit. This motivated me to get involved in this trend in 2006 - I saw huge potential for the promotion and further development of strength training. It has to be said that the P90X infomercials were groundbreaking as they were the first of their kind to show people getting results from a workout that was really hard. Before that, the main criteria for advertising exercise equipment on TV was that the DynoIsoThighMaster2000 was foldable and could be stored under the bed. Training was supposed to be fun and only require 5 minutes of time per week. And then P90X came along and said that you needed to get sweaty and tired if you wanted to get stronger and lose body fat, and that it would help if you also followed their diet. After a period of development that began in 2002, they aired millions of commercials in 2004 and after a few years, every person in the world was familiar with the idea that hard equals productive and that muscles need to be "messed up" - an idea that had first been popularized by the Weider organization in the seventies. By familiarizing the general public with the ideas of "hard training" and "random/muscle confusion", the ground was prepared for the rise of CrossFit.
CrossFit started to become popular. It was referred to as "P90X with barbells - it confuses the muscles by exposing them to a randomized selection of exercises and equipment that P90X doesn't use, and it's very hard. CrossFit has an appeal that has led to CrossFit becoming the fastest growing business idea for gym owners in the history of the industry. Each of these gyms has barbells, weight plates, racks of all types and the space necessary to perform the basic exercises that make up effective strength training. And each of these gyms also provides a place to perform the WOD that every CrossFitter in the world is doing that day. But if allowed, each of these gyms is also a place where you can do a very productive strength workout. CrossFit represents nothing less than a total revolution in the potential for the development of Olympic weightlifting in the Western world, something so far beyond the wildest dreams of Bob Hoffman that the English language lacks the words to describe its vital importance.
In 2004, for example, there was exactly one place to train snatch and clean and jerk in the entire Dallas Ft. Worth area: Tom Witherspoon's Garage. A place for 6 million people. 10 years later, there are no less than 40 CrossFit locations - probably 41 as I've been typing this article for a while. Olympic weightlifting would just have to capitalize on this unique opportunity, which unfortunately, for reasons beyond the focus of this article, it has not. Nevertheless, this unique opportunity still exists. Regardless of what disparaging statements I or others may make about CrossFit, the sport has given more people access to barbells and the motivation to train with them than any other single factor over the last hundred years. Our company (Aasgaard), Rogue Fitness, York Barbell, Lululemon, Robb Wolf, ten or more companies that make shoes, chalk and bandages, several Olympic weightlifting coaches, hundreds of grass-fed beef producers and countless other entrepreneurs have all benefited from the existence and phenomenal expansion of CrossFit. We will all be forever grateful for this work.
The bad
CrossFit - the program on the website and the methods taught by their certified coaches - is exercise, but it is not a workout. Exercise is physical activity for its own sake - a training session performed for the effect it produces today - during the training session and after you've completed it. Training is physical activity performed with a long-term goal in mind - these are workouts specifically designed to achieve goals. Exercise today is fun. Well, maybe not necessarily fun, but you have convinced yourself to do it because you feel that the effects you are producing today will be beneficial to you today. You have completed this training session...today. Just like the kids on the dumbbell rack at the gym chasing a pump in their arms - a workout that is about how you feel today after that workout - good or bad. In contrast, training is about the process that will help you achieve a specific result later - perhaps even much later. In this context, training sessions are merely the components of this process. Training can even involve a light day, which you might consider a waste of time if you only look at the here and now.
CrossFit exposes your body to a more or less randomized sequence of different exercises at different intensities, most of which are timed, meaning that you either perform as many repetitions as possible within a given period of time or perform a given number of repetitions as quickly as possible. As such, it is a sporting activity and not training, as it is a randomly thrown together sequence of exercises and training requires a plan for what we are going to do to prepare for a specific task. Different physical tasks require different physical adaptations. Running a marathon is obviously a different task than doing squats with 300 kilos and these two efforts require completely different physical adaptations. If a program of physical activity is not designed to make you stronger or faster, or to improve your fitness by producing a specific load to which your body responds with a specific desired adaptation, then you can't call it training. It is merely physical activity. For most people, physical activity is perfectly adequate - it's certainly better than just sitting around being lazy. For people who perceive themselves as just housewives, employees or business people, and for most clients of personal trainers and pretty much anyone who can afford a CrossFit membership, physical activity is perfectly fine. CrossFit sells itself by emphasizing the random part: random isn't boring and people who aren't bored come back. Coming back while also watching your diet will help you get visible abs. And CrossFit is all about visible abs. CrossFit also revolves around the concept of "community" - reinforcing behavior through peer pressure. I understand this quite well, as I've met some of the best people I've ever known through CrossFit - and most of them are still friends with me, even though I'm no longer formally involved with CrossFit. An above-average group of people who like you and help you be better is a powerful motivator for improvement, and "CrossFit: The Community" provides plenty of this.
These two very powerful motivating factors - no boredom and a group dynamic - work together to promote adherence to your workouts more than anything else the fitness industry has ever produced. In fact, in this regard, CrossFit represents the complete opposite of the "sell it to them and then leave them to it" paradigm so prevalent in this industry. But this active retention of members who actually use the gym generates a unique problem for CrossFit gyms that no one else in the standard fitness industry faces: the somewhat advanced exerciser. As I'm sure you know, a beginner is someone who is able to fully recover from each training session within a short period of time - 48 hours or so. This is because untrained people have not yet adapted to a workout, and for untrained people, anything harder than what they have been doing causes adaptation.
This is why CrossFit works so well for the vast majority of people who start it: for the first time in their lives, they experience rapid improvements from an exercise program...at least initially. And then the problem with CrossFit becomes obvious. CrossFit is not a workout. It is exercise. And exercise, even if it's poorly planned workouts, will produce progress...at least for a while. For the novice, CrossFit mimics the effects of a workout because it's hard and because stress induces adaptations. But then progress slows down because you can't ignore the laws of physiology. The more you adapt to physical stress, the stronger and fitter you become. And the stronger and fitter you get, the harder it is to get fitter because the easy part of the process has already taken place. This is called the principle of diminishing returns and runs throughout nature and - if you've been paying attention - your own experience. Once the low-hanging fruit has been picked, you'll need to get a ladder and then you may even need a helicopter - and any increase in complexity will give you less additional fruit - dammit.
And this is exactly the point where "CrossFit: The Methodology" starts to fall apart. Once a person has adapted to the stresses that come from randomized stress under time constraints, progress will stall. And increasing the intensity of the random stresses will not work either - you will only injure yourself as you have not gotten stronger and your heart and lungs can only work at a maximum of about 200 beats and about 50 breaths per minute. Further progress must be based on an analysis of the adaptations you want to generate and a training program designed to elicit these adaptations must be planned and followed correctly. At a certain point, random physical stress will no longer produce desirable adaptations.
CrossFit appeals to many people because it claims to do everything well and nothing perfectly. People can't be perfect at everything, which becomes obvious when comparing the individual performances of decathletes to the performances of athletes in the individual disciplines of the decathlon. But at a certain point, even people who don't strive to be perfect at anything in particular will realize that they don't really improve at anything. People who are motivated enough to get this far are motivated to keep improving, and even if you just want to be pretty good at everything, there has to be a way to keep improving that general competence. However, mainstream CrossFit cannot push these improvements beyond a certain point. This is the reason that advanced athletes who place well at the CrossFit Games do not use the CrossFit website programs to reach the advanced level of strength and conditioning necessary for the performances they need to achieve. None of these athletes do. This is common knowledge and openly admitted by anyone not associated with the company. All advanced athletes need to train intelligently to progress and "CrossFit: The Methodology" cannot provide this.
Strength is an excellent example of a physical attribute that drives improvement in other athletic parameters. More strength means more speed, more endurance, better conditioning, etc. This is the reason that, all other things being equal, the stronger athlete will be the better athlete.
You can get stronger for a while by doing random exercises, but anyone who has tried this knows that at some point you have to increase the weight on the bar and move that weight regularly as part of a program that obeys the rules of adaptive physiology and logic. You have to plan to get stronger by doing things that make it necessary for you to be stronger, while avoiding things that interfere with that process. Arbitrarily and randomly put together CrossFit WODs will not accomplish this - or even allow it to happen.
So the program that is very good at keeping people focused is also very good at getting people to the point where that same randomly put together intense physical stress no longer works and needs to become a non-random stress to cause further progress. For many CrossFitters, exercise will always be enough. But for many others, CrossFit will get to the point where CrossFit is no longer good enough. For them, exercise leads to training and CrossFit is just physical activity. In other words, CrossFit has an inherent problem that it can't solve.
The Ugly
Why can't "CossFit: the business model" solve the problem? Because it doesn't want to at all. Heck it doesn't have to do so; with eight to ten fully booked Level I certifications per weekend, each involving 50 participants at $1000 per participant, it would be very hard to convince any right-thinking person that CrossFit has any problems. Here's one aspect of the problem: how many of those 500 or so people are failing? How many certified CF Level I "coaches" are actually qualified to coach CrossFit or anything else? How many have the expertise to understand and correct the bad - the limitations of the WOD program? Any organization that grows this fast is going to have problems. Among the more serious problems CrossFit has are injuries. Shoulders, hamstrings, rhabdomyolysis, and all the other things that are the potential result of overtraining an athlete who can't adapt to the randomized and sometimes very intense physical stress. These are potentially life-altering, unnecessary traumas that could be prevented by not letting people who don't know any better perform some stupid crap.
NFL players get injured and the same is true for almost all professional athletes. In fact, every competitive athlete risks injury because that's the price you pay when you shift your focus from just doing something to winning. The risk/benefit ratio must be calculated and consciously accepted. However, CrossFitters get injured while simply exercising in the gym. Most get upset when this happens, but some also see these injuries as status symbols - as if the injury itself represents an elite level of athletic achievement on a set of pull-ups. It could be a pulled muscle or a torn tendon - any injury represents a setback in the current training program, whereas it could be seen by a CrossFitter as proof that they have achieved something wonderful.
People who work very hard at high-intensity, high-volume physical tasks are going to get injured - regardless of why they are doing the work. One of the reasons that training results in long-term improvements is that it assesses the athlete's current status and logical plans for improvement in a way that is realistic and safe - and therefore productive - for the specific goal. Random and varying levels of volume, intensity, technical complexity and force release cannot be sustainable, safe, specific and productive.
Are you familiar with the Hamill study that assessed the risk of injury in different sporting activities and was published in JSCR? The study that concluded that training with weights is one of the safest activities on the spectrum? CrossFit has the potential to change that.
The ugly part is that some newly certified CrossFit coaches recognize this training/athletic activity problem, even if they can't articulate its cause, and try to address it by simply increasing the intensity. Increasing the weight on already previously exhausting ballistic movements is dangerous and you are not a pussy if you recognize the fact that this is not always a good idea. Box jumps from 60 centimeters with added weight and high repetitions represent a potentially very dangerous dose of stress - from both a metabolic and structural perspective - that becomes even more dangerous when combined with several other high repetition exercises that can exhaust the athlete in the short term and produce high levels of tendon and muscle inflammation in the long term. Is anyone who earned the CF Level I certification last weekend really in a position to evaluate which people on the course should really be doing this workout? The ugly thing is that one of the best things that has ever happened to strength and conditioning training is also the worst thing that can happen to some very good people. People who trust you because you have shown them progress and who, because they are part of your group, will do things you tell them to do. This is unfortunately true because people are people and it has led to some getting badly hurt.
A coach should know better than to put people in a position where they can hurt themselves by asking them to do things they shouldn't or can't do. The fact that everyone all over the world does these things should not matter to a coach. There are hundreds of very good CrossFit facilities around the world, staffed by coaches with more than adequate experience and excellent judgment about everything involved in exercise and training. I know many of these people and I can tell you with absolute certainty that they know what they are doing.
The ugly thing is that there are many thousands of CrossFit branches all over the world and hundreds of new trainers every weekend. You should think very carefully about this.
By Mark Rippetoe
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/crossfit-the-good-bad-and-the-ugly