10 Things You Should Know About Crossfit
(7 Minute Read)
Imagine a couple of sweaty dad-bods playing catch with loaded barbells.
Thanks to Crossfit, you don’t have to...
The exercise in the video may not be sanctioned by Crossfit, but the abundance of similarly ridiculous exercises is one of the reasons Crossfit unfairly got a bad rap. Unfortunately, there are many, many valid reasons it deserves a bad rap. As a professional fitness & nutrition coach, I care when I see people working obscenely hard to reach a goal not knowing how futile it might end up being. Crossfit (a corporation, not a sport) is a departure from logical and sensible fitness & training. There’s a lot to unpack here, allow me to elaborate.
1) It’s not for bodybuilding, rehabilitation/recovery, weight loss, or any sport training. It’s a business, plain and simple.
From a bird's eye view, Crossfit looks like an athletic training program or a fun group training sport that promotes fitness and health. Crossfit does not even have a specific definition or targeted purpose at all, despite their elaborate claim. Crossfit is a successful company designed to sell coaching certifications and box gym licenses at exorbitant prices. Seriously, read their own vague and wordy definition:
“Crossfit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide. Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist. The Crossfit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs.”
Uh, what??
MLB, NBA, IFBB, X Games are all businesses based on their respective sports but those sports existed before, and exclusive of, the businesses. Crossfit was started and proliferated exclusively within the confines of its entity.
I’m all for big business and entrepreneurs, but the problem here is the lack of purpose, origin, and inclusive nature of a contrived “sport” that is not even close to being the most effective method for police officers or our military. Professional athletes may engage in Crossfit, but most don’t due to the high risk of injury.
If it’s for the most highly skilled athletes and military professionals in the world, is it really for everybody?
1) Absurdly reckless “WODs” (workout of the Day)
This isn’t so much of corporate Crossfit fault. But when the standard of WODs is intense, fast-paced, high rep, and using advanced motions administered by ‘coaches’ who have had a total of two days education, it’s not surprising to see thousands of internet videos mocking them and a staggering amount of injuries compared to the rest of the fitness community.
Most of the powerlifting movements and lifts are slow and controlled so you don’t wreck your back, knees, or shoulders. There’s almost no way to engage and activate all of the proper muscles and muscle groups needed to perform many compound movements so the point of them is lost to speed and unnecessarily high reps.
2) Kipping Pull-ups (and reckless use of advanced movements)
Kipping is a full-body natural movement that occurs after an individual has performed strict pull-ups to fatigue and begin to compensate by swinging their hips for momentum. Crossfit teaches this as a standard movement which has lead to many incidents and injuries.
The Crossfit CEO himself, Greg Glassman, who invented the kipping pull-up has expressed regret for teaching and encouraging the method.
Aside from kipping, there are many (unqualified) cavalier coaches or ‘Crossfit Boxes’ that come up with and often encourage exercises that are inherently dangerous to the average person like; Sumo Deadlift High Pull, Snatch, and Box Jumps. These are great exercises and seemingly fine but require multiple muscle groups, exceptional form, strength, and stability. Here’s a great write-up on the problem with the SDHP. They should be coached by true professionals and practiced extensively, so I don’t know why Karen is over there doing 100 of them as fast as she can, which brings me to my next point.
3) Excessively fast and high-rep Olympic lifts
I looked up the ‘WOD’ on 2/18/20, the day I began writing this. The workout was as follows:
20 MIN AMRAP (20 minutes - “as many reps as possible”)
10 HPS 65/95 (Hang Power Snatch)
10 WALL BALLS (throwing a heavy ball at a wall)
10 OHS 65/95 (“overhead snatch”)
50M OH WALKS 25/45
This is a small sample but representative of a basic WOD found all over the internet daily. The HPS and OHS exercises in the workout are great for someone who knows exactly what they are doing and are to be performed with precise control and form. But…
AMRAP is a great method for conditioning muscles but insinuates speed and high reps. This is counter to the teaching of potentially dangerous Olympic lifts like HPS and OHS. Having a casual lifter, or even a very experienced lifter, bang out as many of these as possible while inevitably exhausted in a perfect storm for injury.
Often you will see “For Time” as the tempo of the workout. This simply means get everything in the WOD done as fast as possible ‘for time’. Same problem here; you pressure masses of people to rush through complicated, heavy exercises, and you’re asking for a blown-out knee or rotator cuff.
4) It only takes 2 days to get certified as a coach
Meet your coach!
No, really. Spend a weekend, and a measly $1000, attending the Level 1 certification course and you are fully entitled to tell average people how to rapidly perform advanced movements and Olympic lifts.
Given the last few points, you’d think they’d stretch the qualifications a bit more before a group of soccer moms stroll in for 50 dead-lifts, 50 power cleans, 50 “upside-down Swiss-ball kettle-bell single-arm throws”… as fast as possible.
Oh, they have higher education! You should search for a Level 2 instructor. They go through an entire 2 additional days of training! (and another $1000)
Still, though, none of these courses will cover any sort of periodization, programming, or biomechanics, all of which are critical to a successful and progressive training regimen.
For comparison, my basic Certified Personal Trainer course through the National Academy of Sports Medicine was a 4-month long course and set me back about $1200. This was with my military discount and did not include my NASM Sports Nutritionist or SAQ courses)
5) antithetical approaches to muscle growth & Strength
The swole, ripped dudes you see in Crossfit ads did not get that way from by-the-book Crossfit methodology or Crossfit alone. They got that way from bodybuilding methodology & nutrition, or a combination of both practices. It wasn’t made for bodybuilders anyway.
Without going too deep into muscle science, muscle is built through:
Progressive overload - adding volume over time in the form of weight, reps, or sets will allow you to keep making gains.
Caloric/protein surplus
Rest
The typical Crossfit schedule is 3 days on, 1 day off, or 4-6 days/week. Depending on the WOD, high intensity and high rep training of multiple muscle groups each day mean those muscle groups aren’t getting sufficient rest during those 3 days or even with just one day of rest in between.
This also suggests that certain muscle groups may easily be neglected since WODs are mostly random and are not considerate of any one person or their previous/next WOD. This conflicts with progressive overload since WODs won’t be programmed the muscles you’ve train in the days/weeks prior or the load/tempo/movements you used to train them.
In most cases, you’ll want, and need, to be eating a caloric surplus most of the time to compensate for the intense training and not burn muscle.
Speaking of burning muscle…
6) You’ll lose weight. They didn’t say it would all be body fat.
Or maybe they did. Either way, constant muscle failure, and burnout will put your muscles into a catabolic state. This is called Over Training Syndrome (OTS). Even if rest days are taken, the excessively high reps/tempo of compound lifts can lead to muscle breakdown.
Fat loss is something that can be done all well and good in Crossfit. High-intensity resistance training is a solid practice for weight loss but expect the high-probability of losing some muscle in the process if you are not eating sufficiently high protein while still maintaining a caloric deficit. (Please find a qualified nutrition coach if you are unsure how to manage this)
7) Group training and WODs are not personalized. Fitness and nutrition must be.
If you are just looking for a community to workout with or keep you accountable, that is great and you should use whatever motivates you to work out. Just be aware, if you are looking to achieve a specific or personal goal, that fitness and health are very personal things that must be tailored to you. A group class does not care which body part you want to grow, what injuries or conditions you may have, or what your goals are. Even in personal training, a pair of athletes training together will find one not getting equal results or coaching. Height, weight, age, health history, conditions, injuries, gender, genetics, and many more factors play a huge role in all aspects of fitness, muscle, fat loss, health, and nutrition.
WODs are generic, random, and made for everybody but are made for nobody. Unless you are competent and skilled in target muscles and methodology of weight loss and/or bodybuilding, you’re very unlikely to select a WOD each day that coincides with your specific regimen and what journey you are on. It won’t be tailored to what you lifted the day before or what you will lift the day after. It does not take into account your daily calorie or macro intake or your TDEE. If you just love random WODs, then enjoy them but there will be no logical or practical application to any particular goal.
9) The Inventor and CEO is a firm science-denier
This quote from him says it all:
“No successful strength and conditioning program anywhere has ever been derived from scientific principles. Those claiming efficacy or legitimacy on the basis of theories they’ve either invented or corralled to explain their programming are guilty of fraud. Programming derives from clinical practice and can only be justified or legitimized by the results of that practice.”
That’s pretty bold. What about these silly things used to train soldiers, police, rehabilitation specialists, pro athletes, dancers, performers, bodybuilders:
Biomechanics — the study of the laws of physics as applied to physical activity, exercise, and sport. It explains how muscles, bones, and joints react under certain conditions and improves performance using motion analysis techniques.
Sports Nutrition — the primary aim of the sports dietitian or nutritionist is to use a range of dietary strategies to maximize performance, commonly through individual and group/team nutrition counseling and education sessions.
Sport Psychology — a sports psychologist works with athletes to achieve their optimum mental health and well-being, ultimately to improve their sporting performance. They may deal with athletes who are recovering from injury, who are underperforming, struggling with pressure, or help to improve their motivation.
Sports Medicine — The field of sports medicine encompasses not only sports physicians, but physiotherapists, physical therapists, massage therapists, and podiatrists involved in maintaining an athlete’s fitness and physical well-being.
Oh, and there’s that time he tweeted out a cartoon character, Uncle Rhabdo, to mock the trend of Crossfitters experiencing the excruciatingly painful and life-altering condition known as rhabdomyolysis.
Or when he went on a crusade against everyone who ever received a donation from Coca-Cola, blaming sugary soda for 10’s of millions of cases of diabetes in America. (Diabetes comes from many things, sugar is not directly one of them.)
10) The risks just outweigh the rewards
In a 2015 study published in PubMed, out of over 130 subjects engaged in Crossfit, 73% suffered an injury, some of which required surgery. Those numbers are outrageous compared to every other fitness style or sport out there.
Documented in a 2011 study of ECPs like Crossfit, even the military has seen a rise in injuries from the sport.
You just want to be fit and healthy, right? There are so many low-risk avenues to achieve that and even make much more effective changes to your goals. Many offer the same things that may attract people to Crossfit like group training, community, hardcore intensity, strength training, and Olympic lifts.
Orange Theory Fitness
Zumba, Spin, Dance
Powerlifting & Bodybuilding
Barre, Pilates, Yoga
Any real sport
Crossfit: Not Even Once
The End
Thanks for reading and please share, comment, and like!
- Coach Beau
For professional guidance on nutrition, dieting, exercise, weightlifting, or literature on these topics reach out to #TeamBeau for a consultation or a myriad of related products and services.