*ATTENTIONALL OF YOU INTERESTED IN TRAINING, FITNESS OR SPORTS!* So this is going to be a fairly lengthy critique, more or less, of Crossfit. I want to address some of the problems with its prescribed workouts, its competitive events, and its general objectives and rationale for its existence. Now, I realize many of my friends and comrades on here are workout fanatics and a few or several of you may partake in, and be fans of, Crossfit. That’s totally fine; I’m not trying to say it’s all bullshit or it’s wrong to do. I’m just going to try and explain why I think it’s not the most optimal method in athletic and/or fitness training, and why some of its ideas and concepts are misguided. Similarly, I think it’s great if someone wants to train in Tae Kwon Do or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu; I just don’t think those are the most optimal styles to train in, especially if you have certain objectives in mind. So firstly I take issue with many of Crossfit’s prescribed workouts. Putting aside some truly obnoxious instances of Crossfit gyms teaching dangerous exercises to complete beginners, as can be seen in this infamous video of a Crossfit gym teaching the axil continental clean and jerk (a very dangerous lift done in Strongman competition, where the singular objective is to get the weight up) to inexperienced clients: youtube/watch?v=M8up6A4QesU There are still problems in the more professional programs they recommend. For instance, take this three-week regiment prescribed on Crossfit’s official website: crossfit/ Not a tragically bad program, no doubt, but there are several crucial flaws. First, notice the blatantly arbitrary combination of exercises. The same workout will often have you training completely unrelated muscle groups with completely unrelated goals. You’ll be conditioning your legs to build your slow twitch fibers with a distance run, and then building your upper-body strength with pull-ups. Then there’s the abundant programming of circuits and supersets, again with often unrelated exercises. That’s not a BAD thing to do, but it’s purely random and arbitrary with the only reoccurring theme being that the workouts follow the same rough exercise methods that do the equally random and arbitrary events at the Crossfit Games. They’d be better off having workouts to specific attributes (absolute strength, endurance, explosiveness, etc.), as well as specific sections of the body (upper body, lower body, posterior chain, etc.). Anytime you’re designing or borrowing a training program, you should consider the reason for every single part of it. You should have a reason for every exercise, every number of sets/reps, and have a reason for which order you do them in and on which days. Programming is everything, and you need to know why you do what you do. The only identifiable reasons for the Crossfit programming are the correlations of the workouts with the game events, and just the vague general goal of Crossfit to train in several unrelated methods. The second flaw is caused by the first one. You won’t get particularly good at any of the exercises you train if you train them like this. You’ll get better at them, especially if you’re a beginner, but you won’t get very good. If you want to be a good runner, this isn’t the way to go about it. If you want to be good at Olympic lifting or Powerlifting, this isn’t the way to go about it. Even if you want to be good at circuits, this isn’t the best way to go about that. The first reason this program isn’t the best thing for development in any of those areas is the fact that several of those goals aren’t particularly compatible. There are several reasons it’s normal for high-end weightlifters to also be good at jumping or sprinting, but not be good running marathons. One of the reasons is what I mentioned earlier, which is that simultaneously training your fast and slow twitch (the former being involved in strength and explosive exercises, and the latter in endurance ones) is usually counterproductive. Your muscle will end up favoring either the fast or slow twitch fibers, and either why it goes one of your exercises will suffer. The third flaw also causes the second one; there are virtually no assistance exercises. That is, there aren’t any of the countless exercises (skull crushers, curls, back extensions, good mornings, glute ham-raises, etc.) which are designed to strengthen specific muscles as well as help build your main lifts (Olympic lifts and Power lifts). Your deadlift isn’t going to keep going up if you just do deadlifts over and over. It’s the law of accommodation; your body will adapt to the work you put it through. Not only that, but if you have a weakness in a given lift like the deadlift (say at the top) you’re not going to improve on that weakness by just doing the lift; you need to do assistance work to target that weak area. The same way, if you have a weak area in your martial arts game as a result of your current training, you need to adjust your training to target that weakness. It is important to note that some Crossfiters do other exercises which are lacking in the general Crossfit regiment. No two athletes do the exact same training, and there are Crossfiters doing things like dynamic work (speed bench presses, speed squats, etc.), and extra posterior work, but on the whole they’re absent from the system of Crossfit. So those are a few issues with Crossfit’s training programs; now on to its competition, which is largely the father of the training issues mentioned hitherto. The primary argument in defense of Crossfit practitioners, and more specifically Crossfit competitors, is that there’s a greater value in a being a jack of all trades than a specialist. That is, it’s better to be pretty good at everything but elite at nothing than it is to be elite at something but poor at everything else. A person in the former group is more “fit” than a person in the latter group. That’s a valid notion, though I don’t always agree with it. However, I argue that Crossfit doesn’t actually live up to this mantra. The Crossfit games are known for their diversity of events, but I put to you that there is a lot less variety than there appears. Examine the events for this year: games.crossfit/ Distance swimming, rowing and running. A short obstacle course. Circuits involving rope climbs and mostly Olympic lifts. Handstand push-ups. Am I the only one underwhelmed here? If these athletes are supposed to be good at everything, where are the throwing events? Where are the jumping events? Where are the gymnastic exercises? Where are the carrying events? Where are the absolute strength events? Where are the agility courses (not counting one puny obstacle course)? Also, hell, where are the combat events? Are you really the best athlete in the world a random wrestler can bend you over the table and corn-hole you? Also, a lot of the events missing from Crossfit are present in track and field. Is Rich Froning (reigning CF Games champ) really a better athlete than any Olympian with a gold medal in the decathlon? Speaking of which, the decathlon champion has been traditionally dubbed “World’s Greatest Athlete”. Sounds awfully similar to Crossfit calling its champion “Fittest Man on Earth”. I’m not saying it doesn’t take a good athlete to win the CF Games, but surely the most important word in the phrase “Jack of all trades” is “all”, and these games don’t bring all the trades to the table. Decathlon events: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decathlon#Men.27s_decathlon Now, tying into a qualm I mentioned earlier with Crossfit being very arbitrary in structure, one might argue that the structure of something like The World’s Strongest Man competition is equally arbitrary. The events are adjusted every year. Some are for reps, some for max effort and some are for time. It’s true that this is arbitrary on a certain inescapable level. However, where this differs from Crossfit is there is an actual universal theme in every event at TWSM, and that theme is strength. Having competitors lift, carry or throw an object so heavy that a normal athlete couldn’t lift it at all is a logical event for a strength based competition. It doesn’t matter if it’s for max effort, reps or time at that point. If you examine the lifting events in the CF Games, however, they often involve laughably small weight. They’ll do clean and jerks with 95 pounds, for example. That’s not a strength feat for an athlete. That’s taking something easy and doing it over and over until it becomes hard. That ties into another curious problem I have with the sport, which is the obvious marketing scheming involved. It essentially took gimmicky exercises in the fitness industry (kettle bells much?) and threw them together in programs and competitions which are difficult, but easy enough for ordinary people to get into. I don’t like it. Coming back to the Crossfit versus Strongman topic, unlike the latter the former has no theme in terms of which attributes it tests. The events are all over the place, and in some instances it’s not clear at all what attribute their testing. If I am doing a bunch of clean and jerks with 95 pounds along with interspersed running and pull-ups, and I’m doing this all for time, what physical attribute am I really testing? There’s a man named Dmitry Klokov and he is an Olympic silver medalist in weightlifting, and a world champion in Olympic weightlifting. He’s going to be participating in the CF Games in the near future, and I think he’s very likely to win, especially since the previously mentioned reigning champ Rich Froning has won by placing high in the strength and lifting events. However, when dealing with wimpy weights and bizarre formats, someone like Klokov, who is clearly the superior athlete at something like clean and jerks, may not actually win the event, since at that weight how likely is he to really have a speed advantage. It’s give or take. It’ll likely come down to irrelevant factors like height and course maneuvering. So again, what’s being tested when you randomly combine easy and unrelated exercises into a circuit for time? And more importantly, how does winning such an event give credence to the idea you’re the best athlete in the world? Here are some short but mind-bending videos of Dmitry Klokov doing Dmitri Klokov shit: youtube/watch?v=tDVNM9Yto7E youtube/watch?v=e1DG4qbiIAM youtube/watch?v=DyMlJfGV_Z4 Crossfiters will often argue that, regardless of events and the other things I’ve mentioned, someone like Froning is more well-rounded and more fit than someone like Klokov. Klokov may be elite in his lifting, and consequently have elite levels of certain attributes like strength and explosiveness, but he’s not on the level of a Froning. Let’s analyze this more closely. Klokov is about 225 of lean figure. He can clean and jerk over 500 pounds. So he can definitely jump high. He can definitely move quickly in say a sprint. He definitely has a certain extreme level of endurance, and by that I mean he can surely clean and jerk 225 pounds 20+ times because it’s a laughably small weight to him, but anyone who can do that has impressive endurance. He has very respectably absolute strength, because he can back squat 500 pounds over 10 times, and we’re talking about deep Olympic squats. He has extreme relative strength, because he can do deep handstand pushups with ease. He can almost certainly run several miles. How many I’m not sure, but any lean person in decent shape can run at least five. He can do all of these things because of his methods as an Olympic weightlifter, and even if all these aren’t quite enough to beat someone like Froning at the CF Games, he’ll be able to go home as the best in the world at his own discipline. No Crossfiter would even be in the same realm as the world’s best runners, lifters, etc., but several of them are almost certainly in the same league at Crossfit as the top Crossfiters. Lastly, perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is Crossfit’s hyper liberal use of the word “fit”. It is more than common for Crossfit proponents to say training in Crossfit may not make you stronger, quicker, or better conditioned than a given specialist’s training program, but it will make you more fit. Now this is a queer proposition. Undoubtedly being fit can mean an immeasurable number of things. A similarly broad adjective is “smart”. It can mean all sorts of things in all sorts of combinations. Using the examples we’ve already established, claiming that Dmitry Klokov is much better at Olympic lifting, but Rich Froning is more fit is like saying Stephen Hawking is better understanding physics, but John Carpenter (not the director, but the first contestant to win “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”) is smarter. Quickly that kind of reasoning goes out the window. Here’s an example of Crossfit founder Greg Glassman slipping the word “fit” while having a conversation with the infinitely more legendary Louie Simmons and others: youtube/watch?v=k7Oc6p54CTQ I think Louie is biting his tongue a little because as he often points out, the people at Westside Barbell, (Louie’s gym and the most accomplished strength training gym in the world) do all sorts of training aside from just powerlifting. People often assume a big powerlifter who squats 1,000 pounds must also be slow and out of shape, but that’s not always the case. At Westside Barbell they do lots of GPP (general physical preparedness) in the form of heavy sled drags and wheelbarrow pushes. They do lots of explosive training in the form of high box jumps and weighted jumps from their knees. They do tons of upper and lower body speed work on their dynamic bench press and squat days. They do endurance work with the prowler (the most brutal conditioning tool ever devised). And they do all of this to help their powerlifting. Surely a man who can deadlift 850 pounds is strong. Surely if he can jump on a 60 inch box he’s explosive. Surely if he can do speed squats with 500 pounds he’s fast. Surely if he’s doing sled drags and prowlers with hundreds and hundreds of pounds, he’s conditioned. Pray tell, where is the massive need for a Crossfit trainer to make someone like that “more fit”? Videos of Powerlifters doing these non-powerlifting feats: youtube/watch?v=H0_C1w8c0RU youtube/watch?v=fbZRvKMUYmU youtube/watch?v=6qrUPGfNVG0 Back to the issue of defining fitness, the word “fit” has a different component that’s a bit more determinable. If you look for a definition of the word, you’ll find it means some combination of physical ability and, more importantly, HEALTH. So it is implied when saying Rich Froning is fitter than Dmitry Klokov that Froning is the healthier individual. That’s difficult to determine, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is if Rich Froning and other top Crossfiters are the healthiest athletes on the planet. I think that’s obviously not the case. Let’s take a top athlete from a similar sport: Sasuke or “Ninja Warrior”. In Sasuke competitors maneuver through up to four different obstacle courses, trying to reach the end. They compete not against each other, but against the course. If you fall off any obstacle you fail and cannot continue. Thousands of people have attempted the course, including several Olympic medalists and other notable athletes, but only three men have ever completed it. Here is a list of notable athletes who’ve attempted it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasuke_(TV_series)#Athletes One might make the argument again that Sasuke is just as arbitrary in its obstacle selection as Crossfit is with its events. Like with The World’s Strongest Man, it’s true on a certain level, but also like TWSM there is still a universal theme to every task. Sasuke requires relative strength, a powerful grip, endurance, balance and coordination, but the unifying theme is mobility. It all tests your ability to move across space regardless of what you have to scale over to do so. Back to the issue of health, though, let’s select Makoto Nagano, one of the three men to beat Sasuke, and the man to make it to the final stage the most times. Nagano is an interesting case in contrast with Rich Froning. Rich is a thick 5’9, 195 pound man. Nagano is a slender 5’4, and only 136 pounds. At the ripe boy-band age of 26, Rich is at the top of his sport. One questions how long he can remain there. Nagano is going on 42, and in the same top tier position in his sport. Froning lives on a high protein, high calorie diet consisting of lots of protein shakes, peanut butter, dairy, and junk food as well. Nagano is a fisherman by trade, and partakes is a typical Japanese diet. Lots of fish. Lots of vegetables. Nagano training: youtube/watch?v=VYO-iAIq8rE Now having read all of these facts about these two top athletes, who do you think is healthier? Who do you think will live longer? Who do you think will be more athletic in his 70s? Who do you think is more “fit”? Perhaps most importantly, of the three athletes we examined here- Dmitry Klokov, Rich Froning and Makoto Nagano, whose traits would you want to have?
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 18:33:01 +0000