Do your friends and family think you are a little crazy for doing CrossFit? At the very least I think that the majority of CrossFitters are viewed as a group highly devoted to elite fitness, conscious of their bodies and diets, and perhaps "taking it all a bit too far." My wife thinks my love of CrossFit is all part of my midlife crisis but harmless enough—despite the fact that I spent a couple thousand dollars on my garage gym. (Of course, with a good friend getting a classic Lotus Elan when he turned 50, my wife thinks she is way ahead.)

Maybe seeing the term "Forging Elite Fitness" on the website is why some view CrossFit as being for a select few, but I would suggest the main reason is the standard understanding that "fitness for health" means traditional cardio exercise and maybe some low-weight, high-repetition resistance training (with machines and/or springs).

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V02 max: Maximum amount of oxygen that can be used continuously divided by body mass. Long the gold standard of aerobic fitness, the slight advantage that endurance athletes have over anaerobic athletes in V02 max can be attributable to the low body mass of endurance
athletes. I can use a similar definition of strength – by dividing lifts by weight - to show that little guys are stronger than big guys.

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With medicine ball training, velocity or a combination of velocity and weight should always be the overload mechanism of choice. This is the mechanism of the Olympic lifts and their variations. Olympic weightlifting’s generation of horsepower through the bilateral summation of forces from ankle, knee, hip, posterior spine, shoulder, and elbow is unmatched, as all of the joints are working ballistically in the proper sequence at precisely the proper time. Medicine ball work can also provide excellent horsepower training, using many more combinations of force summation, as long as the load is not too great.

When this is the intent, lighter balls should always be used. Where pure strength through less complicated movement is the only intent, heavier balls can be used as a strength-training implement. Coaches, trainers, and physical educators are often baffled when an individual’s performance at a physical task does not correspond to expectations based on the measured strength levels of the body segments involved in the task. Failing to recognize the reason for the discrepancy, they continue along the same path of trying to develop greater strength. Though psychological and other complicated physical factors may partially account for the performance shortfall, the primary cause is often the insufficient generation of power through the summation of the forces involved.

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Training groups has several challenges, not the least of which is the disparity in experience, skills, and capacities among clients. Skill-based warm-ups can help bridge that gap while setting standards for technique and range of motion and developing coordination. Relatively new clients can learn the movements and sequences well enough to complete a related workout, and experienced clients can refine their skills or at least get a thorough warm-up.

Having the group do skill transfer exercises for the Olympic lifts (à la the Burgener warm-up) with a length of PVC pipe or dowel is a frequently the basis of warm-up sequences at CrossFit Santa Cruz. Another favorite is a medicine ball clean and jerk warm-up using the standard 14-inch Dynamax medicine balls (smaller diameter balls are difficult to jerk overhead properly).

After some mild monostructural movement (run, bike, row) and some dynamic stretching, clients select their medicine balls. We have a wide variety of weights (from 4 to 28 pounds), and most clients know what weight they need (in some cases, they might warm up with a lighter ball than they’ll use in the workout). We put the best-moving client in the middle and the others circle around.

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Falling is something we worry about as we get older. We often see our older friends slow down as they age, take shorter steps, need help getting up from a chair, and then need a walker. We watch this and are not surprised to hear that one of them has taken a fall. But even older folks who are active can suffer serious consequences from falling. As we age, our recovery times get longer, and bones break more easily and heal more slowly. A major bone break can start a downward spiral that may result in lost mobility that is never recovered.

Jim Baker and I are coaching a group of seniors in a class we call CrossFit Elements. Now that our clients have begun CrossFit, they are starting to feel some progress toward becoming fit and commanding more balance and agility than they used to. This in itself will reduce their risk of injury from a fall. That risk can be further reduced by knowing how to fall.

Adding falling practice to the set of skills one tackles in CrossFit makes good sense, not just for older or beginning participants but for everyone. Adding falling practice in slow, incremental steps is an example of CrossFit’s being scalable to all ability levels.

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What should the shoulder’s contribution to overhead lifting be? Should the shoulder remain fixed or should it elevate, moving toward the ear, during an overhead lift? These questions were recently raised on the CrossFit message board and found their way over to other pop fitness sites where our answers and practices are contrary to local orthodoxy.

As interesting as the questions are— and they are potentially vital in terms of both safety and efficacy—they also offer a ripe opportunity to delineate how we at CrossFit typically evaluate all training methods and resolve issues and concerns of technique. That is very much the purpose of this article—to reveal our thinking on what guides and substantiates our beliefs and practices.

To answer the question regarding the shoulder’s role in overhead lifting, we want to look to the methods and techniques of athletes who lift or support substantial loads overhead in the normal course of their sport; evaluate those methods against any observed, trusted, and acknowledged principles of human performance; and conduct local experimentation, where it is ethical and sensible to do so. We evaluate methods experientially, theoretically, and clinically, but each step has an empirical nature. Even our theories have utility only insofar as they are consistent with observation.

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Rising popularity of CrossFit within military and law enforcement circles has led to sufficient institutional and group adoption of our program to draw important lessons on the differences between traditional military PT and CrossFit PT. Some of the differences were wholly expected others were less expected but no less significant.

One glaring advantage with the adoption of CrossFit PT is improved fitness – dramatically improved fitness, but what is singularly unique about our program is the manner in which the improved fitness has been demonstrated. CrossFit PT has been measured against other PT programs by testing its adherent’s performance against the testing standards of the program it replaced! At first this may not seem significant but testing of traditional PT trained athletes against CrossFit-like demands produces more DNF’s on test day than above average performances.

One striking and important example of this is running. CrossFit programming calls for infrequent long distance runs and frequent sprints of 400 meters. Repeatedly, CrossFit has produced better long distance running times in head to head comparisons with programs where distance running is a staple. Better running times at less than 1/3 the volume has been the trend.

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What Is Fitness and Who Is Fit?

Outside Magazine crowned triathlete Mark Allen “the fittest man on earth.” Let’s just assume for a moment that this famous six-time winner of the IronMan Triathlon is the fittest of the fit, then what title do we bestow on the decathlete Simon Poelman who also possesses incredible endurance and stamina, yet crushes Mr. Allen in any comparison that includes strength, power, speed, and coordination?

Perhaps the definition of fitness doesn’t include strength, speed, power, and coordination though that seems rather odd. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines “fitness” and being “fit” as the ability to transmit genes and being healthy. No help there. Searching the Internet for a workable, reasonable definition of fitness yields disappointingly little. Worse yet, the NSCA, the most respected publisher in exercise physiology, in their highly authoritative Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning doesn’t even attempt a definition.

Crossfit’s Fitness
For CrossFit the specter of championing a fitness program without clearly defining what it is that the program delivers combines elements of fraud and farce. The vacuum of guiding authority has therefore necessitated that CrossFit’s directors provide their own definition of fitness. That’s what this issue of CrossFit Journal is about, our “fitness.”

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The CrossFit family mourns the recent passing of Dr. Roy Walford, the world’s preeminent longevity researcher. Dr. Walford published over 300 scientific articles on the biology of aging. From his laboratories at U.C.L.A., where he worked for nearly forty years, Dr. Walford’s work centered on extension of life span via caloric restriction.

Dr. Walford’s untimely death at 79 (he’d long and publicly planned for 120) from ALS does not, in the least, challenge the validity or contribution of his scientific work on aging. The suspicion among many researchers that caloric restriction might, as it has in lab animals, extend human life span, should, and will at least in the short term, survive Dr. Walford’s death.

Sadly, we expect Dr. Walford’s shortfall to marshal, somewhere, a case for gluttony. We will honor the Dr.’s life and work by helping keep perspective. We do the same for the late Dr. Atkins when we remind some of his detractors that terminal brain injury from accidental head trauma could not have been realistically prevented by his or any other diet.

The culture we endeavor to nurture within the CrossFit community is focused on practice and results above theory and theory above personality. For us too much of fitness, nutrition, medicine, and health is marketed, associated, promoted, understood, debated, and even recognized in connection to a personality first, a theory second, and clinical practice or efficacy only third.

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Rhabdomyolysis was first described in the victims of crush injury during the 1940- 1941 London, England, bombing raids of World War II - and more recently in Eugene’s garage.

A rugby player performs intense sets of squat jumps on a hot day, collapses, and is rushed to the hospital, where he spends two days in intensive care. Doctors notice that his heart is beating abnormally and that he has unusually high levels of potassium in his blood. A soccer player runs a series of 100- meter sprints at near maximum intensity. After his eighth sprint he collapses to the ground; when he gets to the hospital he is found to have high levels of potassium and myoglobin in his bloodstream. He spends several days in the hospital and is unable to train for several weeks. A highly fit marathoner holds a 6:30 pace for 26 miles but collapses only a few feet short of the finish line. Blood tests reveal a potassium concentration three or four times the normal level and he dies.


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CrossFit is a core strength and conditioning program. We have designed our program to elicit as broad an adaptational response as possible. CrossFit is not a specialized fitness program but a deliberate attempt to optimize physical competence in each of ten recognized fitness domains. They are Cardiovascular and Respiratory endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Coordination, Agility, Balance, and Accuracy.

The CrossFit Program was developed to enhance an individual’s competency at all physical tasks. Our athletes are trained to perform successfully at multiple, diverse, and randomized physical challenges. This fitness is demanded of military and police personnel, firefighters, and many sports requiring total or complete physical prowess. CrossFit has proven effective in these arenas.

Aside from the breadth or totality of fitness the CrossFit Program seeks, our program is distinctive, if not unique, in its focus on maximizing neuroendocrine response, developing power, cross-training with multiple training modalities, constant training and practice with functional movements, and the development of successful diet strategies.

Our athletes are trained to bike, run, swim, and row at short, middle, and long distances guaranteeing exposure and competency in each of the three main metabolic pathways.

We train our athletes in gymnastics from rudimentary to advanced movements garnering great capacity at controlling the body both dynamically and statically while maximizing strength to weight ratio and flexibility. We also place a heavy emphasis on Olympic Weightlifting having seen this sport’s unique ability to develop an athletes’ explosive power, control of external objects, and mastery of critical motor recruitment patterns. And finally we encourage and assist our athletes to explore a variety of sports as a vehicle to express and apply their fitness.


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Fundamentals, Virtuosity, and Mastery
An Open Letter to CrossFit Trainers
CrossFit Journal August 2005
Greg Glassman

In gymnastics, completing a routine without error will not get you a perfect score, the 10.0—only a 9.7. To get the last three tenths of a point, you must demonstrate “risk, originality, and virtuosity” as well as make no mistakes in execution of the routine.

Risk is simply executing a movement that is likely to be missed or botched; originality is a movement or combination of movements unique to the athlete—a move or sequence not seen before. Understandably, novice gymnasts love to demonstrate risk and originality, for both are dramatic, fun, and awe inspiring—especially among the athletes themselves, although audiences are less likely to be aware when either is demonstrated.

Virtuosity, though, is a different beast altogether.

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We are routinely challenged to provide workouts for individuals with little workout experience and very limited resources. That’s not our first choice of circumstances, but the exercise seems worthy. The challenge then is to see how much fitness we could motivate around the following parameters:

• Require a minimal amount of equipment
• Doesn’t necessitate gym membership
• Requires minimal coaching
• Low technical requirements for movements
• Fixed, easy to follow regimen
• Accessible to nearly every fitness level
• Unlimited in potential for development

We realize that to go at once from limited resources and experience to building a home gym with a rower, rings,
Olympic weight set, kettlebells, medicine balls, pull-up bar, mats, and to start out on a course of self instruction
requires undaunted courage and a considerable leap of faith. Our hope is that a graduated regimen involving
a few simple exercises would provide sufficiently dramatic gains in fitness as to inspire greater interest and participation in more advanced programming.

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We get email asking about the appropriateness of our program for your kids but even more concerning your parents and grandparents – our seniors. Let’s start with them.

The needs of the elderly and professional athletes vary by degree, not kind. Where one needs functional competency to maintain independence, the other needs functional mastery to maintain dominance. Improved hip capacity will help a pro ball player’s throw to first; it will also reduce the chances of grandpa falling in the tub. The squat is the perfect tool for both.

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