The Enigma that is CrossFit
If the mere mention of Crossfit has your head spinning, welcome to the club. In Santa Monica there are 4 studios (in CrossFit lingo: "Boxes") within 2 miles of my home. All are called Crossfit, yet are all entirely separate businesses. As Wikipedia tells us, CrossFit encompasses “high-intensity interval training, Olympic weightlifting, plyometrics, powerlifting, gymnastics, girevoy sport, calisthenics, strongman and other exercises”. Wait, is that all? Yeah, if your head wasn’t spinning before, it surely is now.
Admittedly, none of these things (with the exception of HIIT and plyometrics) appeal to me at face value. Here I am, a stay at home Mom, just trying to carve out time to get my workout on and feel fit and strong. I’m not trying to enter a car-lifting competition. But when I sat down with Kenny Kane , owner of Crossfit LA (@crossfitla) (@thekennykane), he broke it down for me in a way that cut through all the noise.
Highlights:
*CrossFit is big on functional training. It revolves around the following motions: push, pull, bend, twist, lunge, jump and squat. (Ok, this sounds very useful when holding a 30 pound child while lifting a 30 pound stroller into the car).
*CrossFit focuses on many different kinds of fitness. One goal is to get practitioners to a place where they could jump in a ½ marathon tomorrow with no official training, lift increasingly heavy weights (including your own body weight), kick butt for 10 min of HIIT, etc.
*CrossFit will get you to your goals with heavy-lifting. PSA: Lifting heavy weights will NOT bulk you up. Kenny is desperate to bust this common myth (mostly spread by us women folk). He told me that 1 pound of muscle takes up ⅕ the amount of space as 1 pound of fat. Well, that’s persuasive.
*CrossFit is necessarily about the long game. Kenny measures clients in a variety of fitness areas 3 times a year to see their progression.
So with all that to think about, I made the rounds to try and make sense of the enigma that is Crossfit. Here are my impressions.
The HIIT part of the workouts are hard core. They are referred to as WOD’s (More CrossFit lingo = Workout of the Day). Number of reps are recorded on a white board, thus infusing some motivating competition into the mix. (More so against yourself, which is the kind I like).
Kenny had me do 4 rounds of a 7 calorie burn as fast as possible on the air assault bike, followed by 20 battle rope rainbows (think swinging the ropes up, around and down from side to side). Oh. My. God. My heart was exploding.
When I tried CrossFit Burke (@crossfit_burke), while in Virginia visiting family, we spent the last 20 minutes of the class doing HIIT (WOD) rotations that included wall balls (throwing a heavy ball up high against the wall and catching it in a squat), abs, and a deadlift/upright row type of move called the “clean and jerk”. Note: this is an example of a classic CrossFit move and one that will be done at any Box. Anyway, all this I liked - the sweat was pouring. But the majority of class was spent doing the clean and jerk over and over again while increasing weight. I never really got a handle on it (literally) and I really wanted to be running laps around the gym...or something.
At CrossFit Santa Monica (@crossfitsantamonica), I was encouraged that when I popped in to sign up for class in advance, I was told to just show up for my first (free!) class and assured that I would get a solid workout. Busy Mom win. And indeed the class felt a bit more well-rounded from start to finish. Coach Jackson Day (@jacksondela) had us do a solid warm-up including kettlebell, air assault bike and squat rotations. We then spent some time doing bench presses and rows. The subsequent HIIT/WOD portion was 4 rotations of air assault bike, box jumps (think repeatedly jumping up on a wooden box that seems far too high to be doable) and wall balls. I was dying and loving it.
CrossFit Takeaways:
- There are a lot of moves that involve tremendous nuance and a steep learning curve. Thus, CrossFit isn’t intended to be a sometimes-workout. It is meant to be a regularly and consistently followed program. Jackson D. told me he expects people to start at 3x/week and quickly increase to a minimum of 5x/week.
CrossFit is controversial. A lot of the moves seem dangerous and this is certainly borne out in the vast anecdotal and journalistic evidence. You can find a ton of articles online outlining various injuries sustained during CrossFit. Lawsuits against the founder, Greg Glassman, abound. Many CrossFit locations require a tutorial program or personal training before starting group classes and this likely helps mitigate risk. But with something like box jumps, missing the box (i.e. not jumping high enough to land on it) seems inevitable - especially when your legs are already worn out. In such a situation, scraped calves are probably the best outcome you could hope for. (An outcome of 2 broken wrists was an anecdote from a friend upon sharing my intentions for writing this article).
All the Boxes I visited had a really positive, communal feel. The coaches knew everyone’s name and offered good personal attention. Each location seemed to have a lot of community oriented fitness events, competitions, social outings, etc. Some say CrossFit is quite culty. My impression is that this is because people get so obsessed with it. The cult-like feel is compounded by the fact that there is basically an encyclopedia of CrossFit lingo and jargon.
In sum, CrossFit seems like a love it or hate it situation. I’m somewhere in the middle and this doesn’t really work for the frequency required to make it worthwhile. But if the push-to-your-limit, lift super heavy weights/jump super high type of atmosphere sounds empowering, CrossFit could be a GoodFit.
