I’m not sure why the high rep olympic lift thing is thought of as being so dangerous. The weights your average crossfitter is using aren’t very scary, the lifts (as far as I’ve seen anyway) are done from a hang (and so requiring less mobility) and done for such high reps that is basically just amounts to a lot of jumping up and down and shrugging.
As for crossfit being more injurious in general: meh, pretty much everyone I know who works out or plays a sport has got some kind of chronic injury they work around. Footballers have fucked up knees; rugby players have fucked up necks, shoulders and backs; powerlifters all have fucked up everything.
I don’t see why crossfit gets singled out as being any worse than anything else.
Many of my points were about the CrossFit of 5-8 years ago so take them with a grain of salt. As I said, as more legit trainers have gotten into it, it has become better. Others have mentioned it, but many trainers, like CT, understand that training to reach a high level in the games often requires one “not do CrossFit” in the traditional sense (doing the WODs as laid out in the site)
The level 1 thing was not to knock the information you get in the course, but rather the potential for misuse of the info by both the trainer and a naive trainee.
I will say that it has gotten better over the years. If someone at your level speaks highly of it that says a lot to me about how it is now a days.
I think there’s misunderstanding about what Crossfit is.
Crossfit is constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity.
That’s it.
My gym uses the programming from Invictus Performance. It’s CrossFit. The programming posted on the CrossFit website is Crossfit. CrossFit is a specific program in the way that “powerlifting” is a specific program. It’s not. So if you’re saying that games athletes aren’t “doing CrossFit”, then that’s entirely false. If you’re saying that they’re not getting their programming from mainsite, then yeah, I don’t think anyone anywhere would dispute that.
5 years ago, Crossfit already had a multimillion dollar deal with Reebok, the games on ESPN, 10k affiliates, ties with SME’s at the forefront of their respected sports (Burgener, Louie Simmons, etc). There’s this weird narrative that only exists on bodybuilding and strength sports forums that Crossfit is only legitimate because outsiders benevolently helped fix it and that’s really far from the truth. CT didn’t try Crossfit because he wanted to make it legit, he tried it because it was already legit.
Again, if you’ve never attended a Crossfit gym or trainer course, then you really shouldn’t be speaking with authority about what it is or was.
As a philosophy fan, I am kinda curious about what crossfit ISN’T. A lot of times, when I see something that I think isn’t crossfit, I find out that it is crossfit. Is there anything that explicitly is not crossfit?
Because as you said the sports are already prone to injury even by those who do it correctly. There isn’t any need to expose a novice trainee to even more risk when their goals (more muscle, less fat 98% of the time) could be achieved equally well or better with other methods.
I tried Fran (or whatever the 21-15-9 on front squat thrusters is) on a lark one day and it jacked my wrists up for a week. And I’m a moderately experienced trainer. Granted I was probably stupid for doing it without adequately warming up or working up to the load over a few workouts, but that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. It increases the risk of injury by having people do dumb things.
I’m speaking about my perception of what it is (or was) which was where the initial question was asking (why all the hate?). Many years ago CrossFit was much more centralized to the main site, my time frames are likely off but the point remains that doing the WODs on the main site used to be “ doing cross fit”
It’s true to an extent that CrossFit is just varied exercise to get get good at the 12 training qualities or whatever they say, but come on man, you know that isn’t quite true. Crossfit has things associated with it like doing the WODs, certain rep schemes (21-15-9), doing things “for time”, etc…
Using your powerlifting analogy that is like saying you could be doing “power lifting” but only does sets of 30 and never tests their 1RM. Okay, I guess you could say that but that isn’t a great representation of training for power lifting looks like in general.
CrossFit also has the distinction of being a branded training regimen with a central body associated with it. It isn’t like body building or power lifting in that regard. That’s not to say they lay out strict rules, but there is guidance from a central source. You could do a set of push ups and sit ups in your living room but that doesn’t mean you are doing CrossFit ™️
Edit: this is right from th website: We scale load and intensity; we don’t change the program. The needs of Olympic athletes and our grandparents differ by degree, not kind.
So In fact there is “the program”, and its not supposed to be modified based on ones needs only ones ability to handle the load and intensity (the time)… so everyone does the same thing, just some people do “more”
So to describe what it isn’t, we need to dig deeper into what it is:
Constantly varied- only weightlifting isn’t crossfit. Only running isn’t crossfit. Only doing gymnastics isn’t crossfit. We fail at the margins of our experience, so Crossfit holds that we are best served by broadening those horizons whenever possible.
Functional movement- this gets tricky because everyone wants to apply their personal take on what “functional” means, but Crossfit defines functional movement as:
Natural- movements that replicate or mimic basic movements found in our daily interaction with the world around us
Essential- movements that serve a certain utility in our daily life. You’ll need to be able to screw your feet into the floor, externally rotate the hips, and contract the quads glutes and hamstrings in order squat yourself up out of your chair a lot more than you’ll need a cable tricep extension
Complex yet irreducible. A thruster is knee flexion/extension, hip flexion/extension/external rotation, shoulder abduction/outward rotation/extension but cannot be deconstructed from its fundamental form into its components. A bicep curl-to-shoulder press however…
Safe- squats, deadlifts, presses, pulls when performed and loaded properly have a net positive effect on the quality of life of the person performing them. Balance ball theatrics need not apply.
Universal motor recruitment patterns- these movements engage large amounts of muscle across the entire body in manners that offer some degree of dynamic correspondence to myriad other movements.
Core to extremity- action starts in the trunk of the body and moves outwards. Any act that requires real power to be generated starts in the hips and torso. Even the bench press requires a stable base from the legs, glutes, and back.
High power producing- remember that CrossFit’s goal is to increase the amount of work that can be accomplished per unit time. There’s no better way to affect adaptations in this capacity than by moving large loads quickly across long distances. Calculate the work per minute that can be accomplished with only a bodyweight squat in terms of mechanical horsepower, then work backwards to see how much weight and how many reps you would need to accomplish the same work in the same timeframe with a leg extension.
So CrossFit’s position is that movements fulfilling these criteria should comprise the majority of any physical conditioning program. Running the machine circuits at your local 24 Hour? Not crossfit. Squatting, pressing, pulling, sprinting, and moving odd objects? That could be Crossfit.
High intensity- Crossfit defines intensity as work per unit time. Taking 2 hours to do 5 working sets of heavy squats (aka me in powerlifting days)? Probably not. Moving through a ladder of clean and jerks in EMOM or E2M fashion? Now you’re getting warmer.
Obviously this means that the definitions of what Crossfit can be are super broad. That’s the point. That’s what makes the system of scaling workouts to each athletes capability work. You can have Crossfit without Thrusters or kipping pull ups or Olympic lifts. As long as it’s constantly varied functional movement performed at high intensity in pursuit of work capacity across broad time and modal domains, Crossfit is going to give you a thumbs up and a high five because you’re following the prescription. Fran is a Crossfit benchmark, but if all you ever did was Fran, you’re not doing Crossfit.
Those things certainly can be Crossfit, but they don’t define it. See my last post.
Crossfit is purposefully vague in its definition. It’s an approach to exercise based on the aforementioned principles (CVFMHI and WCABTMD). Everything else is up to the user to define. It’s an open source approach to health and longevity.
Do movements have to fulfill all the subbullets of the functional movement category to be considered Crossfit? And this also interests me
Is there an established frequency of rotation for a training program to be Crossfit vs not crossfit? Like, if someone does Fran 3 times in a row, are there getting out of the Crossfit realm? Or say someone attempts to employ periodization, and does a month of Fran, then a month of something else? Is there an actual guideline?
The training guide actually proposes a basic concurrent model for rotating through workout structures and modalities. Breadth, variance, and generality are what matter…structure vs chaos not as much.
It’s awesome it’s so well fleshed out. Philosophically I run into the issue that I think it would be difficult to really point at something and say “That’s not crossfit” while it happens, because we could simply be seeing a snapshot of a larger construction.
Granted, you can do the same thing with strongman. It has no set rules, just recurring themes. So I’ve actually backed myself up into a Hume-esque corner on this one.
Glad to have the conversation. Actually opened up my thinking a ton. I’ve warmed up to crossfit in the past seeing folks cross over into strongman and seeing the background it gave them. I enjoy stealing WODs from them as well.
Yeah of course. As with any training regimen, the individual workout is just the smalles building block and training itself is a process and not just a single day’s events. For example, it’s not uncommon for mainsite to program a warm up, 5x5 back squats with ascending load, and then some accessory work on the GHD. You could easily find a powerlifter and a football or rugby player performing a nearly identical workout, but all three are doing so in the greater context of three distinctly unique programs with unique goals.
The thing Its hard to get my head around with crossfit is this : Given the massive variation and rotation of moves from Olympic lifts to bodyweight etc etc etc how does the average guy/girl who does 3 x 1 hour sessions a week actually do lifts often enough to progress ?
