In spite of the overwhelming proof of the results that come from CrossFit training, there are still people who refuse to investigate it and instead dismiss it as dangerous, too hard, only for professionals, only for the young, etc. Almost anytime you hear those kind of objections, they are coming from someone who either has never tried it and bases their opinion on an outside appraisal, or someone who has tried the workouts with doing their homework and learning the methods of CrossFit first. Let’s be honest, doing CrossFit without proper coaching is dangerous, but so is driving a car or playing football. Some good coaching makes even something that seems difficult or dangerous become simple and extremely enjoyable.
In an effort to help everyone understand what CrossFit is and is not, let’s go over the four basic tenants of CrossFit here and then look at some of the foundational articles from the CrossFit Journal as well.
1. FUNCTIONALITY – meaning that the movement is a natural function of your body, nothing that isolates your joints from their natural use, and nothing that causes you to move outside of a safe range of motion are considered functional. The beauty of functional movements are that you do them every day as you live your life. You may hear about people who don’t want to do squats because they have bad knees or something, yet they sit down on the toilet daily performing the same range of motion as a good squat. We train those functional movements so that when your life demands them of you, you’re able to perform them safely and effectively due to your training.
2. VARIANCE – meaning that one’s training shouldn’t consist of repetitious and segmented movements. If your training is based in endurance then you’ll be weak in strength. If your training focuses in olympic lifting, you’ll be weak in agility and gymnastics, etc. Any solid training program will cover a broad base of training methods in an equally broad range of modalities as well. Training should cover all broad modalities to hit all three energy pathways so that an aerobic inconsistency doesn’t develop. Basically, you don’t want to only be able to perform in quick bursts or sustained outputs, but both, and well.
3. INTENSITY – meaning that your training should push the limits of your abilities in the 10 general physical skills (strength, power, agility, flexibility, speed, etc) to the point you are forced to adapt, and thus elicit a change in your performance. Intensity is key to measurable success and results from your training. It’s the difference in completely changing your life over the next 6 months and spending 6 years wasting your time in a globo-gym flexing your biceps and pecks on shiny chrome machines.
4. VIRTUOSITY – meaning doing the common, uncommonly well. Nothing about CrossFit is out of the reach of the average Joe. Most people don’t think of themselves as athletes, but we’ll change that. Every person who moves at any moment during their day is an athlete. The house wife, desk jockey and pro sprinter all have the same biological and physiological needs, they don’t differ by kind but only by degree. The desk jockey needs full range of motion and adequate strength through his hips just as the pro running back does, just to a lower degree is all.
REQUIRED READING – check out these articles to cover all your bases. I promise, read these articles and you’ll have all the resources you need to get started. All that’s left then is just to show up, and put up!
Yet again, we’re forced to resort to garage/basement workouts. It looks like the rain will be over after today for a while, but we’ll then have some cold temps to fight. Here’s the plan for today’s WOD, post your times to the comments section…
I know that some of you weren’t quite able to keep the ball rolling with your training when we had to spend a few days at home at the end of last week due to rain. However, we’re back at it in the parks now and no more excuses (at least for a week or so).
Well, believe it or not, the weather man was off. I know – hard to believe. It’s now looking like it’s going to rain us out today AND tomorrow for park workouts. It may be possible to grab one Friday night, but things will likely be super soggy. Here is the workout info for the next two days of programming. Try and get these done in your garages or basements and post your times below on the comments…good luck!
