Team Workouts, by Greg Glassman - October 03

CrossFit may well be one of only a few grassroots movements in fitness history. On launching our website nearly 32 months ago we hoped that by posting daily workouts someone, somewhere, would find them, try them, discover their potency, come back, and ultimately, draw others to our concept. We’d hoped to start a revolution in fitness that might challenge the commercial model by bringing more efficacious fitness programming to the masses. The original plan required that we structure workouts so that any reasonably ingenious or ambitious individual might participate. We saw our workouts as incendiary agents cast to the wind. We knew that if CrossFit were to catch it would happen through the work of a number of individuals spread around the world. All this being so, our focus and design has largely been on the individual and his workout, not on the team or group and their needs.

We’ve been successful in spreading the CrossFit concept and we now work closely with many institutional clients; military and law enforcement, sports teams, and clubs where most of our Workouts of the Day (WOD) are not so readily applied to a team. Looking through the WODs, you’ll notice that many, if not most of them, do not lend themselves logistically to teamwork. Typically, the problem would be that to run, say, 10 individuals through a workout simultaneously might require ten rowers, ten ropes, and ten kettlebells on one day and ten sets of rings, ten squat racks, and ten glute-ham developers the next.

This entire article is available in the CrossFit Store.