Why CrossFit girls are stronger than you

The female strength training revolution

Has anything advanced female super-fitness more than CrossFit? That's a rhetorical question and the answer is quite obviously 'no'. Due to the popularity of CrossFit, more women than ever before are training with weights, getting stronger than ever before and looking better than ever before. Neither bodybuilding nor the popular "bodybuilding light" - figure class, bikini class, etc. - have attracted as many women as CrossFit. Whether you love CrossFit or hate it, these are the facts. In the past, I've dubbed CrossFit with such unflattering terms as the "Scientology of Fitness," but it's hard to miss the legions of extremely trained, insanely strong women popping up everywhere.

Back in the eighties, when I was just starting my coaching career, a woman who could do deadlifts and presses at 65 kilos was as rare as someone doing deadlifts at Planet Fitness. Today, on the other hand, you can find many women who can perform the "queen of weightlifting exercises" at 90 kilos. Three decades ago, the only place you would see a woman with a six-pack was at a bodybuilding competition. Today, a six-pack in women is nothing special anymore and this is largely due to CrossFit.

Let's look past the shortcomings of CrossFit

I can already hear the objections starting to sprout in your brain. You think CrossFit is dangerous, that they're all using steroids, etc., etc. But you know what? Just like the best athletes, pretty much all popular training systems get some things wrong, but in the end, these athletes and training systems are still successful because they get so many other things right. There is simply no absolutely perfect training program. Let's look past the shortcomings of CrossFit and try to figure out why this training system produces so many damn strong women who will outperform the average male exerciser as early as their warm-up workout. After following the CrossFit phenomenon with interest for several years, I've been able to isolate four primary reasons that you would probably finish in last place if you were to compete in the next CrossFit Women's Regional Championships. (Oh yeah, you'd probably have the worst abs of all the competitors, too). Note: Male CrossFit athletes are no slouches either, and many of them could successfully compete in Olympic weightlifting championships, powerlifting championships and bodybuilding competitions (which many actually do). So don't let the focus on female CrossFit athletes distract you from the fact that there is a lot for all of us to learn here.

Reason number 1 - work capacity

How many hours a week do you train? I train between 8 and 10 hours per week. That may sound like a lot, but I'm in contact with a number of CrossFit coaches and CrossFit competitive athletes and I know that CrossFit competitive athletes train at a high level between 6 and 8 hours per day - at least when the CrossFit Games are approaching. This means that these athletes train about 4 to 5 times more than you and manage to recover from this amount of training. Are you worried about getting into overtraining? Hey, I can understand that, but the longer I train, the less I worry about this much-feared affliction. Remember that training volume - and therefore workload - is the key factor in muscle growth. As long as your intensity is at 60% of 1RM or above, the more work you do (as long as you can recover sufficiently from that work), the more adaptations you will achieve.

I'm as fascinated by the workload of these CrossFit competitive athletes as you are, but I attribute it to the slow waning of scientific ignorance. Some readers will be too young to know this, but the IOC did not allow women to compete in marathons until the 1980s because of the widespread assumption that the "weaker sex" was incapable of handling the stresses of such long distances. Today - only about three decades later - the world marathon record for women is only about 15 minutes slower than that of men. Oops, I guess we were wrong and maybe we are wrong in our assumptions about how much work a strength athlete can do. On a related note, I know trainers who still believe that all your efforts will be undone by a sudden shitstorm of catabolic hormones if you train with weights for longer than 60 minutes. This was common knowledge in gyms around the world just a few decades ago, even though world-class bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger had clearly never heard of this idea and were doing much longer workouts.

The bottom line is that the problem may not be that you're training too much, but rather that you're not training enough.

Reason number 2 - Forcing progression

We all know that progressive overload is important and you can believe me when I say that you are doing your best when you increase the weight on the bar by 2.5 kilos every week. With CrossFit, however, things look a little different. Each WOD(Workout of the Day) is a group competition. WODs typically involve improving your best time for a specific training session or trying to do more work within a given time window. Either way, WODs are total hell and probably a bit more intense than YOUR typical workouts.

I'm not suggesting you should throw up from overload after every workout (or any workout), but many typical exercisers lose sight of the important importance of progression and intensifying workouts. Sure, we all try to beat our personal bests whenever we can, but CrossFit has a very different focus on this.

In CrossFit, you don't go to the weight room to "see how you feel that day". When you go to the gym, you give it your all. It's more of a "do it or die" scenario. Sure, there are some downsides to such an approach, but you can't deny that the typical CrossFit athlete trains hard and is always trying to train harder.

The bottom line is that you may not be training as hard as you think you are.

Reason #3 - Novel, unexpected training challenges

If you've ever watched a real CrossFit training session, you may have noticed that this type of training is a little different from what you do. You probably never perform more than 5 reps on the deadlift or 2 to 3 reps on the Olympic weightlifting exercises. And as everyone knows, "low reps are for mass gain and higher reps are for definition." Okay, I just had to let that one go (sorry), but you probably also believe that the optimal range for gains is between 8 and 12 reps. Or that if you want to increase your strength, it's probably best to train in a range of 1 to 5 reps. Additionally, you'll probably train with weights during some workouts and cardio during others. And you know what? The science more or less agrees with your approach to all of this.

The fact is, CrossFit hasn't really caught wind of these ideas yet, which is why things are done a little differently here. So if you walk into a CrossFit box and want to start a WOD, here's what you might see people doing:

The dirty 50:

• 50 box jumps on a 60 centimeter box
• 50 jump push-ups
• 50 repetitions of kettlebell swings
• 50 walking lunges
• 50 Knees to Elbows
• 50 repetitions of standing shoulder presses with leg swing (push press) with 20 kilos
• 50 back extensions
• 50 wall balls with a 10 kilo ball
• 50 burpees
• 50 Jump Rope Double-Unders (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSPslSgkp60)

Murph

• Run one mile (1.6 km)
• 100 pull-ups
• 200 push-ups
• 300 squats using only your own body weight
• Run one mile (1.6 km)

King Kong: 3 rounds consisting of

• 240 kilo deadlift
• 2 muscle-ups (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS1A--3mNZ4)
• 3 x repositioning from the squat position with 120 kilos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9Y8QwctmhU)
• 4 handstand push-ups

I would go so far as to say that you've probably never done anything remotely resembling one of these workouts. After all, at least at first glance, these workouts seem to violate pretty much every well-known training principle. But as wacky as these workouts may seem (and perhaps are), they offer a unique benefit: they place threatening demands on the body that cause disruptions to homeostasis. In other words, your body will literally feel threatened by the extremely unfamiliar demands of these workouts and begin to build both muscle mass and strength to protect itself from similar threats in the future.

At the core of this basic assumption is the idea that something new is a key feature of effective training, which is especially true for muscle hypertrophy. Think about this: if you had to provoke a sore muscle the next day, what would you do today to achieve this? Would you do something familiar or something unfamiliar? And the more experienced you become, the more important new types of training sessions will become. When you go to a gym as a beginner, everything you do there is something new, isn't it? And of course you will build muscle and strength quickly no matter what you do. Later on, however, it becomes harder to shock your body even if you train hard because the exercises you do are something you are used to and you have already adapted to them.

The bottom line is that you should consider scaring your body (with caution, of course) with novel and unexpected training challenges.

Reason number 4 - Social support

My final observation that might help explain why CrossFit seems to be so effective for many people involves peer pressure, er, I mean peer support of course. We all know the value of a motivated workout partner. If you have the right training partner, then you can push and support each other to perform better and some friendly competition will definitely help you give it your all, even if you might not have otherwise.

Now multiply that effect by 15 or 20 and you have what happens in a typical CrossFit environment. When you start your WOD, as the big timer on the dial approaches the 00:00:01 mark, you and your fellow exercisers are part of a highly charged athletic competition, not just a training session. It's a competition, it's intense and you can't help but do your best not to lose face. I would also like to note that at a high level of athletic training, even in individual sports like weightlifting and wrestling, athletes train in a team environment. Look at the famous Westside Barbell Club in Columbus, Ohio. Over the years, several respected weight training experts have told me in confidence that they believe 90% of Westside's success comes from the high-intensity team environment and has less to do with the unusual training methods they use. The bottom line is that you will train harder in a group environment. Consider finding such an environment.

A different perspective

Sure, a lot of what's done at CrossFit seems completely stupid and dangerous (and maybe it is), but you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you take the time to look a little closer, you'll find that there are hidden treasures to be discovered. And as a final thought, let me remind you that the activity we all know is so valuable for health, performance and athletic preparation - resistance training - was dismissed as a bad idea by virtually everyone just a few decades ago.

Scientists, doctors and trainers warned that training with weights would stunt your growth and slow you down. Today we laugh at such views, but have you ever wondered what people will be laughing about in 50 years' time?

By Charles Staley
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/why-crossfit-girls-are-stronger-than-you