The CrossFit Journal was launched in 2002 with this article, signaling a breaking point with the commercial gym model. “The garage-gym tradition is revered and respected. The number of athletes training in garages, barns and abandoned buildings is legion. Many of these are world dominant in their sport. Some go this route because no other resources are available, but most have chosen the garage gym realizing it best provides for their needs. The lifting, throwing, jumping and climbing essential to responsible programming will find no welcome home for you and your friends at 24-Hour Nautilus. …CrossFit endeavors to lead a revolution in fitness training, a radical departure from the ineffectual, non-functional prevailing bodybuilding model of the commercial gyms and toward the professional strength-and-conditioning model of the university, pro sports franchise and military. Your needs, regardless of your current fitness, differ from the professional or elite athlete’s by degree not kind. We’re waging this revolution in your home.”

In 2005, the CrossFit Journal revisited the CrossFit garage-gym concept to “report on the successes of what may be hundreds of CrossFit start-up gyms and the aspirations and motivations of the people behind them.” In this follow-up to “The Garage Gym,” Coach Glassman writes, “We want to fuel a revolution in fitness that advocates the pursuit of function, not form—that measures performance, not anatomy. We want rings and bumper plates in our gyms, not machines. We believe that where you train is less important than how you train and that who you train with matters more than what gear you have. We know this can be done in little boxes and we’ve proven that the garage is as good an environment as any for forging elite fitness.”

Five years ago, Richard Beddie, Chairman of the International Confederation of Exercise Professionals (ICREPS), made false statements regarding CrossFit, Inc. and its affiliates in an article published in the health section of a popular New Zealand magazine. He then attempted to convince CrossFit, Inc. and its thousands of trainers to pay registration fees to his organization. CrossFit refused and sued. On March 20, 2019, Beddie admitted that he had no evidence to back up his allegations against CrossFit and issued a formal apology.

The fourth workout of the 2019 Reebok CrossFit Games Open featured two couplets separated by a mandatory 3-minute rest. The first part was 3 rounds of 10 snatches and 12 bar-facing burpees. The second was 3 rounds of 10 bar muscle-ups and 12 bar-facing burpees. The time cap was 12 minutes, including the rest. This was the second week athletes were asked to perform a high-skill movement, and once again athletes worldwide rose to the occasion. Looking at all versions of the workout that required bar muscle-ups, there were 99,924 men and 25,327 women in total who successfully performed at least one bar muscle-up before the time cap in 19.4.

The third post in Professor Tim Noakes’ hyponatremia series continues to review the influential Wyndham and Strydom heatstroke study and evaluates its various levels of scientific evidence. Noakes also presents a scale for grading the relative validity of different experimental designs.

Dr. Nortin Hadler, emeritus professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former attending rheumatologist at UNC Hospitals, reviews the AstraZeneca-funded JUPITER trial of Crestor (the pharma company’s statin or cholesterol-lowering drug), particularly its claim that there is “unequivocal evidence” of the drug’s effectiveness. In this 2008 article, Hadler concludes, “I'd have to treat a hundred or more people with Crestor for a year to spare one of them a cardiovascular event that they would not have otherwise had. I'd have to treat several hundred for a year to spare one a heart attack, and perhaps hundreds more to spare one a stroke. I am unwilling to even suggest a life-saving benefit. …the reduction of 56 percent may be hard to ignore, but it calls for reflection rather than prescribing zeal. It is a reduction in a very small outcome to an even smaller outcome.”