Why crossfit sucks.

Ok, I'm about to get real on you guys for a sec. Excuse the excessive 'tude, this Crossfit talk really gets me going!!

The other day I had another student in class who was rehabbing (painfully attempting light-weight controlled lifts) a Crossfit injury.  I've been asked more than a handful of times recently about why I don't do Crossfit. If you're part of the Crossfit cult  community you should probably stop reading.

Let's start here: If you're a crossfitter, this is a pull-up:

Before I rip into this pull-up, lets give Crossfit a chance to explain who they are.

From Crossfit.com

CrossFit begins with a belief in fitness. The aim of CrossFit is to forge a broad, general and inclusive fitness. We have sought to build a program that will best prepare trainees for any physical contingency — not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable. After looking at all sport and physical tasks collectively, we asked what physical skills and adaptations would most universally lend themselves to performance advantage. Capacity culled from the intersection of all sports demands would quite logically lend itself well to all sport. In sum, our specialty is not specializing

Training for all movements, functional and specified, so your body is in all-around good shape. It's constantly varied, high intensity functional movement, I dig it.  Cross training can help prevent plateau, its not mundane, and it's challenging. Crossfit didn't invent cross-training, but their claim to fame is taking cross-training a step further by including "any physical contingency", "the unknown" and "the unknowable." I like your style, Crossfit, I do.

CrossFit itself is defined as that which optimizes fitness (constantly varied functional movements performed at relatively high intensity). CrossFit is also the community that spontaneously arises when people do these workouts together. In fact, the communal aspect of CrossFit is a key component of why it’s so effective. 

Oh yeah, and it's a cult community.

If you're not a trainer or you're not educated in proper biomechanics then you get a free pass on this whole crossfit thing. On the outside, Crossfit looks badass. You feel strong as hell doing 200lb deadlifts, and any time a tire is involved it feels like the army. So I get it. Doing badass things with badass people is fun, but a lot of these crossfit exercises are either incredibly intricate and complicated, or they're just being taught and performed totally wrong and dangerously by people who's bodies aren't able to perform them correctly.

So, alright, the pull-up.

If you have the previously established functional strength to be able to carry out this complicated movement perfectly, then awesome, but Crossfit coaches push you to perform these movements as fast as you can, at maximum effort, and then do several different exercises of equal complexity right after that, so if you're not an expert at the proper mechanics of each one (and strong enough to do them right) then good luck.

"Proper form" is all over their website, but take a Crossfit class and you're lucky if proper form is mentioned let alone practiced by the majority.

functional strength

Web definitions

1. The ability of the neuromusculoskeletal system to efficiently and effectively produce force, reduce force, and dynamically stabilize the entire human movement system during human movement.

Stabilize. Efficiently. Effectively.Crossfit is pretty much none of these things.

Any kind of training without attention to proper biomechanics is dangerous. Especially training with random, sporadic, fast, repetitive, complicated, heavy-weight lifts in preparation for the unknown. 

lol.

Taken from postgradproblems.com (A NY Times Bestseller)

Any trainer will tell you that working out with improper form is incredibly unsafe. For this reason, proper form is stressed to no end in a CrossFit gym. This is because you’re doing an absurd amount of different lifts and motions on a totally sporadic basis.

The problem is, nobody actually uses proper f*cking form. People were dropping like flies in there. Once a week, which was exactly how many times I actually showed up, someone would stroll into the gym with a heating pad wrapped around a part of their body, and sit in the corner with a massive rubber band, rehabbing their injured muscle.

Most of these people will have zero cartilage left in their body by the age of fifty.

Read more at http://postgradproblems.com/stopcrossfit/#tLfyMuiZIAMFT7w9.99

It gets worse.

Have you heard of the Crossfit disease? No really. The Huffington post put out an article last month called Crossfit's Dirty Little Secret that explains the disease called Rhabdomyolysis, which shuts down and destroys your muscles, and the protein and tissue (which are toxic to the kidneys) are released into the blood stream and then to the kidneys. This can ruin your body and even kill you. Rhabdomyolysis occurs in people who were in an earthquake or a bombing. And some who do Crossfit.

Crossfit acknowledges that "Rhabdo" is a common occurrence among Crossfitters. (here's their cartoon newsletter "warning you" about your risk. 

I'm not saying crossfit won't make you ripped, it will. It will also undoubtedly injure you at some point, to some unknowable degree. My bottom line with Crossfit is that in an effort to be extreme, these workouts are poorly executed, and the elitist attitude of the Crossfit community rubs me the wrong way.

And, I don't want my muscles to shut down, disintegrate, or kill me.

Do some cardio, hire a personal trainer even for just a few sessions to establish proper form and discuss your goals and the best way to reach them. If it's the community you're looking for, join a fitness studio.

Disclaimer: Please don't respond with reasons why Crossfit doesn't suck. I don't care.

:)
xoxo