Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere for the last couple of years or you have never trained before you must have heard of Crossfit?
Crossfit has literally exploded lately. Reebok has even started sponsoring them and really discredited their already tarnished name in the process with stupid posters and taglines.
What is Crossfit? It is a mix of strength training, Olympic lifting, gymnastics, trx training, endurance training and kettlebell training all rolled up into a selection of workouts that contain random, mostly contradictory exercises with no programming that are randomly strewn together in nonsensical fashion with a girls name pinned to them.
Sounds great right? Well, it is and it isn’t… Let me explain and you’ll see that I am both for and against the use of Crossfit. Well, mainly against but it depends…
Before I begin, I’ll tell you that most personal trainers and bootcamp instructors simply hate Crossfit because they are better at marketing and steal clients on them. Simple as that. The personal trainer probably doesn’t have a clue what Crossfit is, they’re just pissed because they can’t beat them at their marketing game. I’m not a jealous person and I never have been but the marketing behind this training ‘game’ is amazing.
Oh… The guy on the left is the creator of Crossfit by the way. NOT the guy on the right…
Just in case you’re wondering.
Quite the picture of health and fitness right? Or does he look like a good marketer who has no idea about training, health or fitness?
Cross fit has become the Mc Donalds of health and fitness, especially in the United States. They are everywhere and they are all more or less the exact same. You go to New York you get a WAD named Patricia. You go to Crossfit Dublin you get a WAD named Patricia. The marketer above has it sussed. He franchises cross fit out to inexperienced trainers who then have to pay him commission and run their location like a Mc Donalds does. Okay, maybe I’m being harsh. Their paleo diet is kinda cool, their warm-ups are okay and their workouts are, well, different. So just when I was going to let it slide and compare cross fit to Starbucks instead of Mc Donalds ‘the creator’ goes and says something like this…
“We do your stuff nearly as well as you do, you can’t do ours very well at all, and we do everything that we both don’t do much better than you can. Not very humble, I know, but true.”
What on earth does that mean? It makes absolutely no sense and even if you do translate it he’s basically saying that Crossfit is nearly as good as other training types and we (other trainees) are no good at Crossfit or other disciplines that we don’t currently partake in…?
1. I’ll say two things about this. If they’re the best… how come Olympic athlete’s and world champions don’t do it? Not one that I’m aware of does Crossfit. Go figure.
2. What Crossfit tries to be is ‘the jack of all trades, master of none’.
I mean that purely from a training goals viewpoint.
If you are a competitive Crossfit athlete, I can imagine how fun it is and I know its tough. That’s what it’s designed to be. Tough.
You will ‘feel it’ the next day. It probably will be a gruelling painful workout. Does that mean its necessarily what you need?
Nope, no more than jogging for 2 hours is painful. No more than a punch in the face is painful. You ‘feel’ a punch in the face, doesn’t mean its good for you.
Think of it this way. If you want to lose fat there are better ways to do it. A well written fat-loss program will smoke any WAD any day of the week because that’s what is designed to do. Make you lose fat, not make you puke. Make sense?
If you want to gain muscle, there are definitely better ways to do it. If you plan on gaining muscle by leaping around the place 4/5 times per week then you have another thing coming. You need to slow things down and lift heavy stuff in a controlled manner, eat big and try to minimise the amount of moving around you do in between 
If you are a beginner you should definitely NOT do Crossfit. You simply aren’t ready for it.
Crossfit is for sadists and people who want to ruin themselves. Not achieve anything other than improving their girl’s name time. Every single Crossfit workout is an absolute ball-buster because every workout is a competition and as a result, every workout is a liability and an injury waiting to happen.
‘Well, I could just take it a little easy’ you say. Well then you are half doing a girls name that is not even tailored towards your goal and some would call that a waste of time.
Now keep in mind I am not as anti-Crossfit as I may sound. I’m simply saying it like it is. I like ball busting workouts. I like swinging out of gymnastic rings and training hard but I will only do so if it fits my current goal in training. I.e. If I want to do something stupid or tough to get aggression out or even just to do something different. But I would not do so if I wanted the result of the session to be fat loss, muscle gain or getting stronger.
Go ask any physiotherapist in close proximity to a Crossfit HQ and they’ll tell you that they do great business because the ‘athletes’ spend their whole time injured coming to him/her for rehabilitation. Go figure.
Conclusion
I may have come across as a bit harsh here but I’m saying it like it is. If you want to lose fat or gain muscle and take the shortcut to your goal then Crossfit isn’t the way to do it. Crossfit will make you gain some muscle and lose some fat but I guess what I’m saying is it’s not optimal and there are better ways. As the creator of Crossfit says, they are the jack of all trades master of none.
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