MGBG talks about all the good stuff about CrossFit in part 1
MGBG talks about all the bad stuff about CrossFit in part 2
Before I even get into the meat of this, I’m posting the links first because reading them is tantamount to even understanding exactly how absolutely right MGBG is about CrossFit, on both sides of the coin. Seriously, go read them, this post will still be here after you’re done, it’ll take you less than 10 minutes.
Don’t worry, I’m still here, you can keep reading those posts.
Alright, now that you’re done, I’m going to make one overarching point: everything he said about CF is absolutely right, no matter if you’re pro-CF or anti-CF, he’s got his shit dialed in, period. CrossFit is almost equal parts beating molding you into being a fit human being and getting injured, mostly by having insane programming.
I’ve mentioned this a few times in past articles but I spent my entire career in middle school and high school playing (or attempting) every competitive sport my schools offered. For 5 years straight (7th to 11th grade), I played both ways on my football teams, I played every offensive and defensive line position there was. I was even a really terrible tight end for half a season. In high school, I was recruited to special teams for one single purpose: nail the receiver the moment he catches the ball because I was fast. Then after football was done, I wrestled. Again, for 5 years straight. By the time I graduated, I had moved up from the 142lb weight class to the “big boy” classes of 180 and up, ending my career wrestling hulking farmers’ kids in the mountains of North Carolina. Once wrestling season was over, I moved on to track for one season in the 10th grade. I flat out sucked at track. Basically, I used it as a way to one-up my football teammates and get months of speed training on our track. Then I was a cheerleader for two years, but I was not terribly good at it at all. The strength portions were fine, I just sucked at the rest of it. Mostly, I just wanted to hang out with the hottest chicks in school and get to be grabby with them without getting slapped. After all, I was a teenage male.
I basically spent all my time running and lifting (and doing about a bazillion crunches and push-ups), it was my way of life. All my teammates and gym partners were simultaneously competition and allies, we never let each other fail, ever. By the time I graduated, I had spent more than six years inside a gym, 5 days a week religiously; I always made sure I had access to a gym year-round. Eventually, I stumbled upon the magic of tailoring workout regiments to whatever sport I was playing at the time: explosive movements for football and wrestling, lifting lots of heavy stuff for wrestling and cheer, running stairs and with parachutes for football and track. This long-winded blather illustrates the three most important points of MGBG’s first post about the good stuff in CrossFit:
- 1. Fitness isn’t measured by how far or long you can run, it’s about how well you do other shit while running for a long time, while at the same time managing to not seriously injure or kill yourself. As Steve of Nerd Fitness quips “appearance is the consequence of fitness” and it’s absolutely true and always has been. Just look at any indigenous tribe around the world and you’ll find men and women who possess incredible strength, look fit and healthy, and don’t have the typical skin-and-bones body of a well-heeled marathoner, our society’s current ideal of “being fit”. They can both outrun people in a marathon and probably bench press them afterwards. Their lives depend 100% on being fit. This is exactly what CrossFit is built on: general physical preparedness or GPP. They train you in a lot of different, difficult WODs and hero workouts to develop your body top-to-bottom, all of which is either done as quickly as possible or until failure.
2. Fitness is hard work. That means you go out there and get shit done to obtain a certain level of fitness. For years, my fitness routine only involved not vomiting until I was totally sapped of energy because if I did, I failed and that meant I got to run, do push-ups, or burpees until I puked again. Again, this translates directly to how CrossFit works. Their objectives with WODs are to totally smoke you every workout, to make you give 100% every time you step into that gym and if you don’t, you fail yourself or you get injured (or both). Thus, this itself translates to how life for every human used to work, as well: you worked to get food/get fed or you died. Those were your two options. Now, unless you planned on dying pretty quickly, you got fit pretty darn fast, relatively speaking.
3. CrossFit can be viewed at 10% fitness, 90% community, which is what’s strange about it: in reality, it’s a single-participant sport. But every box, every gym, the CrossFit games, the Open Games, and countless forums are what truly drive CrossFit forward because they exist solely to bring together like-minded people and get them to talk about something they all love and thus push the movement forward and progressing. Compare that with your typical big box gym. Most people there don’t know each other, so it’s a relatively quite environment, subtracting all the physical noise from Delta Bravos grunting, TVs and music blasting, trainers yelling, and machines making noise. Point is, there’s very little conversation going on. Go to a CF box and it’s the opposite, people are there to engage and talk to their “tribe”, this is replicated at races and competitions everywhere. CFers love to talk to other CFers and that’s the life blood of CrossFit itself. Sure, they’ve got their insane workouts but without the community cheerleaders, very few would care.
How does all of this relate to my time in sports? It’s all cross-domain applicable knowledge, whether it’s football or a hero WOD. Football is all about running and hitting people, while not getting injured, and that requires lots of running and time in the gym. Wrestling is obscenely hard work because it involves ridiculous amounts of flexibility while maintaining incredible strength in very awkward and compromising positions, arguably it’s the original CrossFit. Team sports are irrelevant if you don’t have a good support staff behind you, the team. These guys are how you get stuff done, without them, the objective of winning can never be fully realized. The same goes for CrossFit. You can do WODs at home but you’ll be much more successful in them when training in your own native tribe because they function as your natural competition and support system. Even if someone annihilates your WOD score for the day, you’re probably still going to be friends and offer accolades to each other. CF isn’t always about crushing someone else’s time, it’s about doing it and going out for a drink afterwards. Now, you can call my hypocritical because I’ve never once stepped foot inside a CrossFit gym, but I’ve done WODs on my own, I’ve got plenty of buddies that do it, and I immersed myself in a culture remarkably similar to CF’s for a huge portion of my formative time of my life. Throw out the jargon and silly workout names, and I know what these guys are talking about, the experiences they’ve had, or the feelings they get when they accomplish something incredibly difficult. I know it because I spent so many years living that everyday.
Now, that’s it for all the good stuff. Granted, it’s a lot of good stuff that’s really important. But the bad stuff, it’s really bad. In his second post on the subject, MGBG outlines the overall bad and ugly parts of CrossFit and they’re all very true. His overall points that I think are the most salient are:
- 1. Specialization is bad for overall performance. This is the GPP vs SPP argument that’s been beaten into the ground for decades. Specialization is tantamount to excelling in a chosen sport, if it weren’t, people the world over would basically all be doing the exact same workouts. But we don’t and never have. Sprinters don’t train like football players, basketball players don’t train like baseball players, and CrossFitters don’t really train for anything at all, it’s the allure of Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” theory. As he points out, MGBG discusses how his lithe female friend smoked CFers at a recent Super Spartan Race in SoCal, the same race I just ran myself. In fact, I was so intrigued by what he pointed out that I dove into her own race report to see how our experiences stacked up. Hers matched mine mostly. I saw tons of muscle-y dudes and chicks walking — granted, I did my own amount of walking since I was not acclimated to that much trail running — and punking out on obstacles. When I approached our monkey bar obstacle, I was amazed at the number of people doing burpees because they were already out of energy and couldn’t hold on, and I think that was only mile 2 or 3 into the race. After our time in the woods (miles 4-6), most people were opting for burpees and walking the rest of the race. I was simply shocked at the number of people wearing shirts/jerseys to represent their gym who were totally spent. Now, I didn’t train for the event specifically because I didn’t know what obstacles there would be but I did a few basic things: ran as much as my body would allow, repetitive complex muscle movements (see sledgehammer and kettlebellworkout reports), and lots of pull-ups. I knew those would get me through most of the obstacles without issue, and they did. Since CrossFit WODs seem to be chosen out of a hat at random, you never have a real chance to get really good at a particular WOD or movement, instead opting for lots of mediocrity until you reach the elite status of making it to the CrossFit Games. Few people in the field of sports know more about training than Dan John and his latest article at Greatist is just further proof that if you want to excel, you specialize, period.
2. Refusing to evolve and ignoring your problems. I’ve talked about it before but CrossFit looks like it’s designed to injure you and with so many reports of injury from things like kipping pull-ups and ill-trained Olympic lifts out there, it’s pretty obvious it does injure people. Sure, any workout regiment can injure you, but in sacrificing efficiency and knowledge for speed and insane workouts, CrossFit is balls-out crazy. They know about these problems too but there’s no one changing them from the top-down, it’s only going on at local affiliates
3. It can be stupidly dangerous to your health and others. See #2 above, then go look at the video MGBG posted in part 2. I’ve seen that video probably a dozen times and it scares the shit out of me because these are people who are trying to get fit and healthier and are being taught by complete idiots and no one has noticed. These people are getting hurt doing movements that are going to cause severe injuries. Seriously, just go read what he has to say about this appalling video.
4. It’s incredibly popular and everyone’s getting certified as a Level 1 instructor, possessing extremely specific and narrowly applicable workout knowledge. This simply leads to people opening CF boxes to make money, not make people’s lives better. It happens with every fad workout and CF is no different. This goes hand-in-hand with points 2 and 3. The instructors in the video he links to are most certainly people who are training CrossFit because they fell in love with it six months to a year before the video was filmed, went and got certified, but otherwise had almost no exercise experience otherwise. Take away that certification and they’d be hard-pressed to program a decent workout in a typical big box gym. When my ex-girlfriend worked at a local gym, every trainer there that was getting either CSCS certified or PT certified was doing it built on a few years of training themselves and it was never in a specific workout regiment. They had a passion that they wanted to be able to teach to people and make money at it and certification gave them that avenue, legally. Hell, I even trained people after high school, only because I had people approach me and ask me to do it. I only ever told people to do Olympic lifts and some specialization lifts because that’s all I did myself. That was something you couldn’t take away from me, it was ingrained and I wasn’t capitalizing on anything.
Well, this certainly turned out to be much longer than I had originally anticipated, but he’s articulated the best and worst of CrossFit I’ve seen in a long time. Whenever I read about CF, it’s one side of the debate or the other, MGBG swung both ways on this one. But the more I read what he wrote and starting writing myself, the more I realized that I wanted to expand on a few points and provide a little more insight to what he said tied in with my own experiences. It’s true, I don’t do CrossFit in a gym and probably never will, but that in no way precludes me from having had the same experiences before. Everything he points out, I’ve either done or gone through before and it’s incredibly important to realize these things before they jump into something new. However, his explanations are some of the best I’ve read this year and possibly in recent memory about CrossFit, and sports in general.