I’ll come at this from a different angle, as someone who has, until recently, only ever trained for functionality (I know that there are people here who hate that term), and what I mean by that is I trained for: triathlons, quadrathlons, the Marines/combat, mountaineering, Search and Rescue, exe. I had real world objectives, and I trained to be generally fit enough to overcome the kind of stuff I though I might encounter - long loaded humps through the snow, exe.
The program that myself, and a former Nautilus (back in the day) trainer came up with was in some ways very similar to crossfit, but some key differences that addressed what we found to be issues with cross-fit. Here are a few:
Range of motion - most of what they do, it’s all counted and timed… so strict form and range of motion goes out the window.
Kipping is for pussies - self-explanatory… and if you call a kip a pull-up, you’re even worse.
The focus on Olympic lifting is stupid. Not because Olympic lifting is stupid, but because it’s a skill, and this goes to the larger issue of training vs. competition. Just like you don’t just play pickup games of basketball to make it to the NBA, training like you’re competing all the time is not very productive. If your goal is Olympic style weight lifting competitions, those lifts are great, and you can practice the skill separately from pure conditioning for the lift.
Cross-fit makes not distinction… I’m sure because part of the selling point is the competitive nature of the activity. But if your goal is to train to get stronger, and not just play all the time, doing as many half-assed lifts or kips as you can.
Cross-fit is more of an activity than a real training philosophy. But I am all for training, for general conditioning, with non-stop intensity, one activity to another.
For awhile one of my workout consisted of wearing a sixty pound pack… running up hill a 1/4 mile round trip no rest to deadlift, repeat run, no rest, then bench, repeat run, no rest then bar curls. That would be once circuit, so I’d repeat that three times. My lift were clean, proper form, positive and negative. Sometimes I’d sub in weighted pullups or dips. No rest.
And it worked really well, from a general conditioning point of view, and I put some lean weight on as well.
I’m thinking of going back to a workout a week like that again.
But the idea is similar to what crossfit does, which is create system-wide shock for a system-wide conditioning.