CrossFit: A Total Sham or The Second Coming?

A reader named tommythecat (not--presumably--his real name) wrote to me recently and asked me to do a post on CrossFit, a popular training system whose devotees and detractors lock horns on chat rooms with alarming frequency and leave the rest of us wondering what the big deal is.

Taking away all the hoopla--and there's plenty of that, believe me--CrossFit offers brief, intense workouts that combine a heart-pumping cardiovascular challenge with basic, old-fashioned strength moves, creating a full-body workout challenge in less than half an hour. There are CrossFit Facilities, CrossFit Websites, CrossFit Mixers, CrossFit Tote Bags, CrossFit Pregnancy Tests...the whole ball of wax, all designed to create and maintain the sprawling CrossFit Community, a large percentage of whom post the particulars of their Herculean accomplishments on the site as an across-the-board challenge to other members. So if you live in Homer, Alaska, you can check the site and see that FitYoda123 in Valpariso did the "Fran" workout (all the workouts are named for the person who first did them) in 15:45 and you can try to beat his time.

CrossFit first came onto my radar about a year ago. I read a bunch of their material and did a couple of their workouts, and overall I have to say that the workouts are pretty tough. They consist mostly of anaerobic exercises, often done in a circuit, usually for time or maximum repetitions, making them short and very intense: the idea is you are working at or near your maximum capacity for the entire workout.

For some samples of CrossFit-style workouts, I pulled up their site and saw that the last week of workouts looked like this:

TUESDAY 12/4
Front Squats, 5 sets of 5

WEDNESDAY 12/5
Rest

THURSDAY 12/6
5 Rounds for time:
400 m run
75 lbs. Sumo Deadlift/High Pull, 21 reps
75 lbs. Thruster, 21 reps

FRIDAY 12/7
5 rounds, maximum reps:
Body-Weight Bench Press
Pull Ups

SATURDAY 12/8
Deadlift 5 sets of 3

SUNDAY 12/9
Off

MONDAY 12/10
Push Jerk 7 sets of 3

TUESDAY 12/11
For time:
100 Pullups
100 Pushups
100 Situps
100 Squats

The idea of blending cardio and strength training is something I've discussed before (here and here if you're interested), and, for time economy, general health and fitness, fat-loss, and sheer, gut-wrenching toughness, it's hard to beat this particular way of structuring a workout. For most of us, this kind of anaerobic workout is the hardest physical challenge we're likely to encounter in everyday life: if you ever have to run to catch a bus, or scamper up a few flights of stairs, or help your cousin Jed unload the bricks for his new patio from his F-250, this kind of anaerobic conditioning will help you prep for it. And since basketball, touch football, raquetball, and tennis are anaerobic in nature, a CrossFit athlete is unlikely to find himself sucking wind on a rec field either.

Looking at the above week of workouts, I see that there's a pretty good balance between workouts that focus on the upper body (Friday and Monday), the lower body (Tuesday, 12/4 and Saturday), and something in between (Thursday and Tuesday, 12/11). You've got some heavy strenth work (Tuesday 12/4, Saturday, and Monday) as well as some hardcore anaerobic challenges (Thursday and Tuesday, 12/11). I don't know if it always shakes out like that, but it appears that some thought has been given to the structure of the entire week. So looking at their workouts, I'd wager (though I can't really say for sure, never having gone to their classes or seriously studied the performance of their athletes) CrossFit will produce an excellent athletic generalist, which is all most of us will ever aspire to be.

Add to all this an emphasis on competition--both against one's own personal best in a given workout and against the other CrossFitters worldwide--plus the supportive online community (real or virtual), and you've got yourself what adds up to a pretty cool little workout trend.

So in my book, the CrossFit system has a lot to recommend it.

The weaknesses in this program--yes, CrossFit has weaknesses, just as any program does--and, most likely, what chafes certain elements of the fitness population about these workouts--is their lack of specificity and progression.

Specificity is also something I've gone over before. The idea behind the principle of specificity is that the body makes adaptations based very precisely on the demands you place upon it: you won't become a significantly better runner by swimming; you won't bench-press much more by playing tennis. Sure, there may be some microscopic change, but it's not going to be a significant, performance-enhancing, wow-I-won-my-club's-golf-trophy change. If you want to get better at something, you've got to work at that thing, not its second cousin, not its next-door neighbor, but the thing itself.

So if you work at doing CrossFit, you're going to get better at...CrossFit. You aren't going to get much stronger at the bench-press; you aren't going to get much faster on the track; you aren't going to deadlift 500 pounds, you're not going to improve your forehand. Sure, if you're so out of shape you can't lift a pencil and you suddenly get a hankering to take up CrossFit, you'll certainly see some changes in performance in many skills. But you could get that effect if you started any kind of fitness program, and these improvements will plateau fairly quickly.

Even though your athletic abilities may very well see some initial improvements on many fronts, CrossFit will never make you a master Olympic lifter, or carve you an astonishingly aesthetic physique, or make you a master sprinter (unless, of course, you have exceptional genetics for any one of those things before you started, at which point--yes--any coach in the world would tell you to jettison all the other irrelevent activities that CrossFit entails and focus on your sport of choice in order to excel further). You simply won't develop exceptional abilities in any athletic endeavor unless you focus specifically on getting better at those things.

Which leads me to my "no progression" complaint. Say you're really into the whole CrossFit thing, and you really want to be able to post some impressive numbers on the site and maybe earn yourself an approving PM from CrossFitChick75. But let's say you're terrible at sprinting. Unless you figure out a way to do some carefully-worked-out sprint progressions in addition to what's posted on the site, you're out of luck, there, Freckles, because sprinting once a week isn't going to make you faster or better or much-of-anything-'er' except exhausteder and frustrateder.

And if you're terrible at, say, deadlifting, you're going to stay terrible at it because before last Saturday, the last time you deadlifted was November 28th, and that was just to test your one-rep max, which I'm here to tell you may be good for the ego but it's not much of a workout. Referring back to the week of workouts, none of the programs listed have been in the rotation for at least a month, and a couple haven't been visited since June, meaning that any specific benefits you got out of the workout a month ago will have evaporated.

So CrossFit isn't the place to turn if you're looking for a systematic way to improve any single aspect of your fitness, be it aerobic conditioning, sports skills, or maximum speed, power, and strength. There are certainly more efficient ways to improve body composition as well.

But the simple fact is that the vast majority of us don't want or need to have superior aerobic conditioning, significant amounts of hypertrophy, or superior absolute strength or power. At our most physically stressed moments in life, and during intense sport play, we need a kind of middle-ground ability to express fairly high strength at fairly high speed, which, again, is exactly the kind of sweet spot that CrossFit-style workouts develop. I suspect that a CrossFit devotee would argue that the weaknesses I cite above are actually strengths: that all-around, general fitness is in fact the goal, that avoiding what they might call excessive focus on one activity is precisely the point, and that their system fosters readiness for any kind of physical challenge.

So: who out there has tried it, and what do you guys think? CrossFit lovers and haters alike, I'm open to your comments.