021112: What You Need to Know About What's Right About CrossFit
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 3:14PM See you this weekend. Got some nice stuff planned for y'all.
So. Another week, another silly little 'Cult of CrossFit' article. This one's actually a reprint of an old Men's Health joint from a few months back. I suspect as Reebok pumps up its involvement with CrossFit and the number of affiliates increases apace, we'll see more and more pieces like this one--and, to be fair, some puff pieces as well. But that's not really our concern. At the end of the day dollars will be exchanged, laughably thin pieces will be written, and we'll all go to lunch. Life goes on.
But you...you've just joined a CrossFit affiliate. Happily, I'm going to presume, that's right here at Woodshed. You joined because you saw CrossFit on ESPN, a friend comes here, you drove by, the Reebok commercials during the football game raised up your hackles, you heard us screaming from ten doors down, etc. However you got here, you got here, and now the onus is on us to make sure you really, truly understand that you've walked into the right saloon. You're bound to hear it from both sides now: "you joined a WHAT kind of gym? Those people are fucking lunatics!" OR "oh yeah, let me tell you, I've been doing CrossFit for two months; I lost 75 pounds, I can squat five times my bodyweight AND run a 4 minute mile." What do you need to know? And what's right about CrossFit?
1. Let's start here: CrossFit is not a franchise-based program. For better or for worse, this is not Curves, this is not Gold's Gym, this is not Zumba or Jazzercise. CrossFit is an affiliate-based program: as affiliate owners, while we are ANSI-accredited within a broadly designed strength and conditioning curriculum over the course of a hands-on weekend certification, we are free to program, outfit, and position our gym individually once we've decided to affiliate and license the brand name CrossFit. To wit, there are fantastic CrossFit gyms and there are not-so-fantastic CrossFit gyms. Blanket statements regarding the efficacy, safety, and salience of CrossFit gyms or CrossFit methodology as such are therefore effectively inadmissable: there are great Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gyms and there are terrible Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gyms, neither of which brings judgement to bear on the parent philosophy. Like the old Eric Clapton song, it's in the way that you use it.
What you need to know: This is simple. Are you getting stronger, faster, and fitter at your CrossFit gym? Do you feel cared for? Do your trainers discuss recovery and program periods of lower volume with as much force as they do intensity? Are you able to go about your daily life without wincing every minute on the minute? If so, you're probably in the right place and you are one thousand percent doing right by CrossFit.
2. Understand: CrossFit is broad training protocol AND sport, and rarely do the twain meet. The women you saw on ESPN...the ones whose upper bodies, quite frankly, frightened you a little bit? These are CrossFit Sport athletes, a gathering number of whom are professionally sponsored. In the main, they are also affiliate owners--the organizing principle of their lives is the workout. Absent that time, job description, incentive, and perhaps some other unmentionables, you aren't going down that road, sunshine.
For the great majority of us, 'doing CrossFit' simply means attending a local CrossFit gym and training according to its programming. There again, the devil's in the details. Do your daily workouts ceaselessly resemble Gordian spasms of high-intensity clockwork--everything for time, everything for points, rest when you're dead? You may be training like a CrossFit Sport athlete, and it's on you to decide whether you'd like that to be your lot in life. And make no mistake--this isn't to disparage those who've chosen that path. We have quite a few here at Woodshed, and we support them completely. They see CrossFit as a sport comprised of movements and modalities, and they strive to master those many domains--the 500 meter row and the gymnastic pullup, the twenty minute conditioner and the heavy deadlift.
To the CrossFit Sport athlete, fitness is sport and calculated risk: the skill that comes out of today's hopper may be your cup of tea or it may be the movement you've been neglecting; similarly, today's CrossFit Sport event may waft by like a breeze in your wake or it may put you on the shelf for several weeks. In much the same way that a Motocross or Ultimate Fighting competitor lives on the edge, CrossFit Sport athletes engage in a cautious brinksmanship--to paraphrase CrossFit's co-founder Greg Glassman, the CrossFit Sport is optimized at the margins of our experience. Indicting the whole of CrossFit Training on the basis of how its Sport athletes train and compete misses the forest for the trees: the CrossFit Training Protocol by its very charter is meant to deliver a fitness that is broad, general, and inclusive. That is to say, the quality CrossFit gyms concern themselves with making their general population clients stronger, faster, more mobile, and healthier--almost always at the expense of training those clients as hard and as particularly as they'd train their CrossFit Sport athletes.
What you need to know: Read the first part of that last sentence again, right up until the dash. If you're checking out this blog post and you're wondering exactly what this CrossFit thing you've gotten yourself into is...well, that's it. Pretty easy to explain, right? I'm doing CrossFit to get stronger, faster, and fitter. That's what's right about the fitness a good CrossFit gym delivers to all of its clients.
3. Make No Mistake: CrossFit Is Revolutionary. But ay, there's the rub--what revolution are we talking about here? Is CrossFit the movement that's meant to turn all of strength and conditioning on its head, or is the revolution something far subtler and far more important?
But first, we backtrack a few steps. Here's the dictionary definition of shooting fish in a barrel: blogger writing a 'CrossFit story' navigates to a local CrossFit blog and finds three mentions of 'intensity' and 'variance' as the sole stipulants to health and wellness. Decades of received wisdom on intelligent, periodized strength and conditioning protocols fly by the wayside, and two clicks later he's reading that working on the ability to revolve a rope twice underneath one jump will surely increase one's clean and jerk. Game, set, and match--his story's already written: "they want you to go until you drop, you'll probably really hurt yourself, and by the way, they say some stuff that really doesn't make very much sense at all." So what are you to understand? Have you given your body over to crackpots and mad scientists?
Start here: CrossFit is a movement away from the mean. Movements by their very nature inculcate a certain degree of zealotry. Or perhaps the zealot's the subject here...whichever the chicken, whichever the egg, we need to understand that for some, CrossFit holds no valence outside of a full upheaval of all existent strength and conditioning protocols. 3 weeks of hard work and a week of rest? Fuck you, I go hard 24-7. Barbell complexes for peripheral heart action? Idiot--we invented that shit and it's called 'metcon.' Training? Every day's a competition, bro. CrossFit sure isn't your mother's program, and thank God for that.
But here's the thing. To the intelligent affiliate owner, CrossFit is your mother's program: it delivers strength, conditioning, mobility, and recovery in equal measure. We typically find that folks who have played or coached competitive sports (particularly contact or quasi-contact) at a relatively high level (think competitive high-school or above) typically get how to train folks intelligently within the broad and inclusive CrossFit training paradigm. Movements which provide the biggest bang for your buck are prioritized and laid out in a manner meant to induce progression, recovery, and progression. More to the point, the truly revolutionary nature of CrossFit training is laid bare at an intelligent affiliate: you are meant to strength train among peers in the manner of power and Olympic lifters, you condition with your classmates in the manner of a collegiate soccer team, and you attend to your technical work and mobility with the precision and humility of a martial artist studying under a tenured sensei--and that's a combination you'll be very hard pressed to find formalized elsewhere. This is the magic of CrossFit as a training protocol and a community-based platform.
These marriages do not always tend heavenward, of course; we've observed that affiliate owners with a heavily conventional exercise science bias tend to self-consciously overstate and overplay the revolutionary nature of CrossFit--if it's been done before and done well, it's probably not worth doing again lest they feed The Man. Similarly, we find that bootcamp and aerobics backgrounds often mitigate against a truly effective general CrossFit application: the athlete's enervation is ceded primary barometric and a paucity of attention is paid to daily progressions and recovery metrics; under this sort of tent and within a competitive atmosphere, each day's is training is essentially and unfortunately rendered a zero-sum endeavor.
But in much the same way we don't malign eating your fruits and vegetables after watching The Crazy Juiceman's infomercial, we ought not to categorize CrossFit according to the affiliates who fashion their programming along these lines. Unfortunately, these are usually the...loudest affiliates and make for the sexiest pull-quotes and sauciest I almost-lost-my-lunches. But ultimately, that's lazy journalism. Circling back to that Yahoo piece: how I would have loved for the author to have asked Robb Wolf to talk about what an effective and safe CrossFit affiliate would look like. We're out there, you know, and we're getting good and goddamned tired of being judged according to our least common denominators in prose and explication that doesn't go too far afield of TMZ dot com.
What you need to know: How to ask questions. Ask your CrossFit trainer what pieces of training protocols from the past are worth maintaining today; ask how you ought to judge and catalyze progress once you've beached on the shores of your first plateau; above all, take a huge risk--ask your trainer to explain how they'd handle you forty years from now, hobbling in on an arthritic ankle and 95% less cartilage in your knee. The great ones will have a vision and a clear, likely unorthodox means by which you'll continue to train to get stronger, faster, and more mobile. The lesser ones will stand there scratching their head: "how do I scale down Fran for someone with two bad wheels?" The great ones are out there, and make no mistake, they are what's right about CrossFit.
Reader Comments (8)
just doing some stuff
squat 135x5, 245x2
kb complex w/35s x 5:
8 double press, 8 dbl clean, 8 dbl front squat, 8 dbl deadlifts
incline press 111x5, 131x5, 161x5
dbl kb row (w/35s and 20lb chains): 4 sets of 8
what a day for the lunchbox...
Press: 135x2
Situs: 34, 33, 33
Man makers: 35x7x2
Congrats to Lunch on the PRs! Awesome work today!
Nice post, JK. I am not inclined to worry about the naysayers. I know how much stronger and capable I have become.
Today, I benched and snatched with the ladies! 90x5 (no help this time) and 1RM at 95 lb. bench press. Snatches, 2@80 lbs. and gaining on that elusive 85 lbs.
Special visit from The Boy with Cute Haircut!
Fun conditioning (per Daphne's request) of 7/7 Man Makers (per Arnaz's suggestion) and 100/100 single unders (no partner).
Great article Justin. You should submit it to the CF Journal.
Great piece.
thanks everyone. Monica, always wonderful to hear from you.
I wrote this because I think it'd be a bummer for newer folks who come here or other good affiliates like CFB, H20, or Mountain Strength, and don't really know all that much about CrossFit (and more to the point, the criticisms out there) to read stuff like the Yahoo piece and feel beset by all of these doubts and scary thoughts all of the sudden. Hopefully this helped.
Very nice piece. Thanks.
--bingo
Loved reading this JK!
Thanks for the mention!