Editor’s Note: Why We’re Publishing This Series
CrossFit was designed to forge elite fitness, not to treat trauma. Our coaches earn certificates and certifications in movement and programming, not psychology. So why are we publishing a three-part series connecting CrossFit to trauma recovery?
Whether we acknowledge it or not, trauma survivors are already in your affiliate. The statistics are stark: in a class of 15 athletes, nine likely carry trauma histories. Some know it. Many don’t. And coaches are navigating this reality every day, often without realizing it.
When an athlete freezes before a heavy lift, goes blank mid-workout, or pushes relentlessly past safe limits, we typically chalk it up to mindset, fear, or ego. But for some athletes, these responses are physiological echoes of past trauma. Their nervous systems are doing exactly what they were trained to do: protect them from danger that no longer exists.
This series isn’t suggesting coaches become therapists. It’s not a manual for diagnosing or treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). What it offers is a lens or a way to understand why certain athletes respond the way they do, and how the nature and structure of CrossFit — the intensity, the community, the demand for presence under stress — can create conditions that support nervous system regulation and trauma recovery.
Dr. Stephanie Arel, our guest author, brings over 20 years of clinical experience working with trauma survivors, combined with her own practice as a CrossFit athlete. She’s not claiming CrossFit replaces therapy. She’s observing that for some people, done thoughtfully and ideally alongside professional support, CrossFit offers something talk therapy alone cannot: a way to rebuild trust in the body through challenge, community, and movement.
This is exploratory work. It raises as many questions as it answers. The podcast interview with Arel dug into many of the concerns, risks, and limitations of this approach, so please listen if you’d like to know more.
A first responder to 9/11 got me into CrossFit. “You’ll love the community,” he told me. When I asked about his story, he explained that first responders weren’t just physically traumatized on Sept. 11, 2001 — they lost friends, colleagues, sometimes family. “Working out with others at CrossFit became a way to rebuild those connections,” he said. “Running alone in Central Park doesn’t give you community. And the strength training? That’s so next time something bad happens, I’ll be strong enough to protect the people I care about.”
What first impressed me about CrossFit, and what revealed its relevance for trauma recovery, was its embrace of “the unknown and unknowable,” a training philosophy meant to prepare athletes for whatever physical challenge might arise. Preparation for unpredictable challenges resonates with trauma recovery. Neither linear nor gentle, recovery demands work. Periods of intensity addressing the aftermath of trauma follow necessary rest. The pathway includes encountering difficult histories and accepting that physical and mental resolution will resolve neither quickly nor cleanly. Growth is a process.
The process persists in an interplay: encountering uncertainty and moving forward anyway. Engaging in CrossFit replicates this uncertainty. Fear, intimidation, and hesitation emerge; workouts include struggle with a “how” — how to breathe, how to jump, how to push weight overhead. The how unfolds into effort: squashing doubt and fear, moving forward rep by rep, or, if related to trauma, memory by memory. Heightened conscious awareness of parallel procedures leads to greater potential for integrating newfound change and courage – whether through exercise or memory processing.
The Body Remembers
Trauma changes how a person lives inside their body. It alters physiology, behavior, and beliefs about what is safe. The nervous system is constantly on alert, even in the absence of threat. Survivors carry this vigilance into every part of daily life, from breathing, digestion, posture, sleep, attention, relationships, and movement.
The embeddedness of the past renders talk alone incapable of repairing trauma’s imprint. Words may name horrific memories, but they cannot fully recalibrate the nervous system. Recovery must involve new experiences in the body, experiences where activation rises but the body stays engaged, eventually settling.
CrossFit offers this possibility. The training method activates the nervous system, demanding engagement, and then signaling recovery. Athletes super-compensate — after a hard workout, the body adapts and rebuilds above its previous level. For survivors, a CrossFit workout provides a space for facing what is difficult. Every rep rehearses something different: feeling stress and even fear but choosing to stay, to breathe, and to move anyway. Done with care and in the presence of a supportive coach or community, CrossFit becomes more than a workout; it becomes a physiological practice in reclaiming agency and evidence that, moment by moment, the body can tolerate intensity, reorganize under stress, and emerge stronger.
The Truth About Trauma
Trauma is ubiquitous. One in three women experiences sexual assault. Every 15 seconds, a woman is beaten. Veterans endure violence so extreme it reshapes the nervous system. And a child who is abused or witnesses a parent being harmed suffers a wound of equal magnitude; both may carry a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis. Bullying, persistent familial or societal marginalization, medical malpractice or extreme medical intervention, and natural disasters are other distinct forms of trauma — each different in nature, but united by the lasting impact they have on mental health and well-being.
Most statistics claim that at least 60% of the population endures trauma. That means that in a class of 15 people, nine of them have a story that traumatized them, leaving stress systems permanently altered. What is physiologically affected? Hormones, the immune system, and the heart. And psychologically, while symptoms range wildly, every survivor, at one point or another, experiences the present as if past trauma were recurring.
In her book “Trauma and Recovery,” Judith Herman defines trauma as being rendered helpless by an overwhelming force; terror ensues and systems of meaning, senses of safety, and perceptions of control – of both the internal and external environment – disintegrate [1]. Bruce Perry, a child psychologist who wrote “What Happened to You?” with Oprah Winfrey [2], offers another definition: trauma can be a life-threatening event or events (Big T) or a non-life-threatening set of cumulative events (little t) that can have the same pernicious effects on the nervous system as Big T trauma.
Trauma’s aftermath — the effect of Big T and little t trauma — complicates the journey of recovery. Reparation takes time. It can be as bumpy and harrowing as the trauma itself. Survivors deal with the aftermath of trauma’s impact. Different individual systems and narratives of trauma shift in any single person’s life, but trauma always increases hypervigilance or hyperarousal, a heightened alert to potential threats. Surprises become triggers for someone who gives increased attention to unexpected stimuli. These triggers arise abruptly, inspiring fear and helplessness: a firework resembles gunshots to a veteran; a loud sound inspires flinching and fear in someone with a violent parent; a plane hits turbulence, instigating powerlessness for anyone who has experienced loss of control over their bodies at the hands of someone or something else. At once, past sensations enter the body; the body responds as if events were happening in real time. Gabor Maté’s work highlights how present triggers provoke responses shaped by the age at which the parallel stress occurred, rather than by one’s present age.
A double bind emerges. The stress system goes haywire, and confusion about where and to whom to turn ensues. This latter effect is a result of internalized shame, which acts as a brake to the arousal system, especially pernicious if trauma results from interpersonal relationships [3]. Shame communicates the withdrawal from connecting to others. Unfortunately, relationships often lie at the heart of trauma narratives.
Trauma Lives in the Body
Seeing the world through trauma’s residue sustains chaos in a disrupted stress system. This residue marks a life led seeking protection of the self and the body, long after exposure. Fear and shame motivate this behavior, effectively inspiring a belief in low self-worth. Such a belief, as do many physical markers, contributes to impeded athletic performance. Mental battles with performance haunt physical efforts at accomplishment. Physical markers of trauma also emerge to interfere with performance, such as lower heart rate variability (HRV). Lower HRVs have been repeatedly linked to PTSD and trauma histories [4]. Impaired autonomic nervous systems and less vagal activity challenge the neurological roadmap to balance. Disrupted homeostasis or regulation is reflected in low HRVs.
When trauma happens in childhood, the quest for balance or normalcy is doubly challenged. Early adversity often leaves a lasting mark on the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, the body’s central stress circuit. An impacted HPA axis has a domino effect. Cortisol levels may run chronically high, inflammation increases, and immune defenses weaken. The result is a greater risk of anxiety, depression, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and injury. Under normal conditions, the HPA axis coordinates survival: the hypothalamus and pituitary signal the adrenal glands to release cortisol, mobilizing energy in moments of threat. But with relentless stress, the system misfires. Cortisol rhythms flatten or spike at the wrong times, and inflammatory signals fail to quiet, leaving the immune system vulnerable [5].
The corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), a hormone produced in the hypothalamus, lies at the heart of this trajectory. CRF not only triggers the pituitary to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), leading to cortisol secretion, but also regulates stress signaling throughout the brain and inhibits immune responses during inflammation. This biochemical chain reaction provides the physiological foundation for the body’s learned vigilance. In effect, trauma teaches the body to function as if danger never ends, a state imposed on the nervous system’s wiring.
The Distinguishing Benefits of CrossFit
Stimulating the nervous system and asking it to work to 1) balance itself under stress, and then 2) recover during rest or after a workout begins to disable the traumatized body’s vigilance. No other form of exercise open to everyone does the same. Nothing activates the nervous system and demands cognition quite like CrossFit does.
While traditional exercises like yoga, weightlifting, and running demonstrate value for trauma survivors, for instance, improving mood, lowering stress, and reconnecting the body to the mind (survivors often split off or fragment so as not to feel), none of these activate the nervous system to rebalance it the way CrossFit does.
Yoga emphasizes holding both movements and stillness, which can be profoundly calming, yet it also represents the physiological hallmark of the freeze response. For some, the exercise modality comes dangerously close to replicating experiences where past trauma required someone to be immobile or silent. This plays out in complicated ways when the core messaging of a yoga practice entails being still, calm, and, therefore, enlightened. Furthermore, staying grounded in one’s system through breath may soothe symptoms (or, in some cases, exacerbate them) but generally fails to build the agency needed to overcome the experience of being a victim. Agency is not simply willpower or decision-making; it is the ability to act in the presence of a perceived threat. CrossFit requires this ability.
If yoga invites regulation through breath and self-awareness, what does a practice built on exertion reveal? Weightlifting provokes effort and external power. For many trauma survivors, that confrontation is not neutral. Pressing weight away from the chest — especially while lying down — can reproduce the exact biomechanical position required to resist an attacker. The potential for processing trauma exists. Despite the potential, lifting movements remain isolated. Periods of rest follow exertion. Strength accumulates through predictable, choreographed loading of the nervous system. This is not how trauma operates. Trauma shocks and overwhelms. Recovery requires facing what previously exceeded one’s capacity. CrossFit operationalizes this demand. It taxes the nervous system beyond the anticipated loads of weightlifting, strengthening both the mental and physiological capacity to navigate states of trauma once dysregulated.
By contrast, consider running or repetitive cardiovascular exercise. These modalities offer real value for trauma recovery. At an easier pace, the rhythmic repetition can provide a meditative quality that soothes the nervous system, while at higher intensity, they build resilience and a sense of achievement. Many survivors benefit from this predictability.
However, the very consistency that makes cardio calming can also allow disconnection. Endurance athletes often cultivate tolerance for distress by overriding internal cues rather than integrating them. The repetitive nature of putting one foot in front of the other for miles allows the mind to “zone out,” slipping away from bodily sensations. Without variation in muscle recruitment or stress system demands, the body isn’t asked to adapt, reorient, or recruit new capacities in the moment. Repetition becomes a strategy for endurance, and the nervous system becomes skilled at pushing through, rather than adjusting — a capacity central to trauma recovery.
This doesn’t make cardio wrong for trauma survivors — it makes it different. What distinguishes CrossFit is the constant demand for adaptation under changing conditions, which more closely mirrors the unpredictable nature of both trauma and trauma recovery.
Every exercise modality can play a role in recovery, but none trains the body to handle the abrupt shifts that trauma histories reproduce quite like CrossFit. With its heavy reliance on complex, technically demanding movements performed at intensity, CrossFit pairs full-body engagement with cognitive demand in a way no other program does. The nervous system must stay present amid constant change — lifting, balancing, coordinating, breathing, and thinking all at once. When familiar patterns are disrupted, vulnerability rises. But stressing multiple systems simultaneously — emotional, neurological, metabolic, and mechanical — strengthens the whole self and demands presence be renewed moment by moment.
Limits of Talk Therapy
Because trauma disrupts the capacity to stay present, to regulate the nervous system, recovery necessarily entails rebuilding at the cellular level. The body lies central to the process. The point becomes especially clear in the context of talk therapy, which engages the mind, but not the bodily systems that trauma alters.
Where talk therapy is beneficial: it builds a relationship characterized by trust, a critical role in recovery, especially after interpersonal violence. But what Sigmund Freud called “the talking cure” has limits. Therapeutic methods that rely on recounting painful past events fail to thwart the ways in which trauma reshapes the stress system. New research shows that “The Body Keeps the Score,” a fact drawn out by Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 book by the same title [6]. Further, body awareness plays an important role in self-management regarding PTSD symptoms [7], and since many traumas include physical contact and/or physical injury, body memories beg to be addressed [8].
“The Body Keeps the Score” helped raise awareness that memories, impressions, and images of horror are not simply remembered cognitively; instead, they imprint themselves in the body through physiological responses, especially in the nervous system and musculature. This explains why trauma survivors may reexperience sensations, muscle tension, or physical impairments long after painful past events. Stories of survivors trying to address mysterious roots of pain abound. Physical tension, postural alignment, and chronic injuries are linked to trauma histories, increasing the importance of therapies that address the body’s role in recovery. Part of the journey must include survivors becoming familiar with and befriending the sensations in their bodies. A crucial question emerges: if trauma lives in the body, what does it look like to address the body in recovery?
We’ll address that in Part 2 of this series.
About the Author
Dr. Stephanie Arel specializes in trauma and the body’s role in healing. She holds a Ph.D. in theology from Boston University with a focus on trauma, and has clinical training in somatic experiencing, psychoanalysis, and trauma rehabilitation.
For over 20 years, Arel has developed rehabilitation approaches for people with traumatic injuries, including brain injury and PTSD. A former competitive ballroom dancer and lifelong movement practitioner, she brings an embodied understanding to trauma recovery that bridges clinical theory and lived experience.
Arel teaches at Fordham University, and works with chaplains, ministers, and private clients navigating severe physical and psychological trauma. She integrates somatic experiencing, psychoanalysis, and meaning-making to help individuals and organizations heal the body, psyche, and spirit as an interconnected whole.
Learn More
In this episode of the CrossFit Podcast, host Jocelyn Rylee sits down with Dr. Stephanie Arel, whose work bridges religion and psychology. Drawing on her academic research, clinical work with trauma survivors, and personal journey as a CrossFit athlete, Arel explores how CrossFit’s methodology intersects with trauma recovery.