That’s my secret hope 
They aren’t as lean as you think, or at least certainly not as lean as you. There’s a difference between being lean and looking lean. Bigger muscles show through thicker layers of fat.
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drugs or not, they’re absolute beasts. You’re doing more than amazing too
Yeah @anna_5588 that may look impressive with the Instagram filters on to accentuate their cuts but these individuals aren’t very big even the guys. Throw a shirt on them and they disappear
I don’t care if they’re absolute beasts, tbh. I think it’s a serious issue when they compete in events that are supposed to be drug-tested because it gives people a terribly false idea of what they’re looking at.
Given your repeated admiration for people like Stefi Cohen and Crossfit competitors, I have a suspicion that your issue with your body stems from what you see the aforementioned folks achieve.
It is most likely true that Stefi Cohen uses drugs given that, afaik, she never competes in drug-tested competitions, but she’ll never say it from her mouth. At least she doesn’t seem to be intentionally trying to deceive people. Too many Crossfit competitors get busted for using drugs for me to believe that those who got busted are the only ones using, especially when Crossfit as a brand has a vested interest in promoting and maintaining said brand.
Crossfit pings a couple of top athletes to maintain their drug tested image but none of the top people. Just enough to maintain image but no one is under any illusions
Except for the millions of Crossfit devotees who seem to genuinely think Crossfit is the greatest method in the world, I think.
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Meh there’s chumps born every second. Can’t begrudge people making a buck from it.
On the topic there’s a video with a top-tier crossfit athlete wherein there’s a slight off-season sheen going on but I’m afraid that even if I write in all caps above and below the video that I think she nevertheless looks amazing it feels a bit too body shaming adjacent.
Borrowing from software engineering instead, I’ll bring to bear this line of reasoning, sometimes you have to craft something in the broad strokes first. Sketch it out. Focusing too much on the fine details during this phase will have you miss your deadline for sure, or later you’ll find that that very detailed bit meshes poorly with the next bit.
Then, in an ideal world, spend some time cleaning up the sketch to make it cleaner, and more cohesive. I’ll acknowledge very few software developers ever get to go back and clean up their stuff which is why more cruft accumulates until the organism, the code base, devolves into a monstrosity on life-support.
Intel has this engrained into their engineering practices as tic-toc. They spend a tick shrinking their current design, and a tock on every architecture change. So, they’ll leap-frog ahead in their tock and then spend the next tick improving on that entire design.
I’ve no idea what u are getting at but will roll with it
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More or less, they (CrossFit athletes) probably have to spend times building, and then removing some cruft (fat) to look at their best when they want to look their best. Like the rest of us.
Stands to reason to some degree. Crossfit isn’t as built on muscle /bulk as other strength sports so they don’t necessarily have to get to fluffy and their sheer total workload may make it difficult to be fluffy especially with PEDs nutrient partitioning and body composition benefits
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True. John Berardis G-Flux concept comes to mind.
It’s worth noting that ostensibly “looks” have little/nothing to do with Crossfit.
I’m aware this is only true if you view it at face value as a sporting contest rather than an advertising campaign.
At the basic level it requires you to be quite fit and quite strong.
However at the highest level of competition marginal advantage is everything.
More muscle means more reps on your Olympic lifts, so there is every incentive to build it.
Less bodyfat means less weight carried on runs and bodyweight exercises, so there’s every incentive to lose it.
So it’s just competitive incentives. Top athletes will have lots of muscle and low fat, and this correlates pretty strongly with aesthetics.
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I wonder what the balance is between weight decrease helping performance and the effort spent trying to lose it negatively affecting performance. I would guess the balance is exactly where you see the Mat Frasers of this world compete.
The balance will be different based on juicing Vs not, but over the long term both can get pretty lean without hindering performance. Look at the top Olympic weightlifting guys, absolutely shredded at the peak of performance.
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But also competing in weight classes, which Crossfit doesn’t have.
Which is what bodyweight exercises and cardio artificially creates. More weight adds more absolute strength, so superheavyweights always add more, but they don’t have to do pull-ups or run miles.
The benefit of being lighter is significant enough to give an advantage, and therefore significant enough for it to be a requirement at the elite level. You won’t have weight cuts, but they will absolutely be as lean as they can without it hindering performance. It’s actually a perfect case study for how lean you can be without athletic ability suffering.
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In my youth I saw a rings tutorial DVD with a Bulgarian elite-level ring gymnast and there was a short clip with Dips and the warning to not do too many as it built too much muscle. It was better to do other exercises that were harder to cap your volume as the difficulty would regulate your training volume.
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