One Crossfitter's Journey

I haven’t been immersed in CrossFit for long enough to feel entirely justified in writing the post I want to about the things in the community that I think are annoying or dangerous, but here’s my first in a potential series about crappy MSM coverage of CrossFit.

As soon as my friend Alison got me excited about the idea of CrossFit this summer, I began poking around the internet for information.  Like most hobbies I’ve picked up, or large appliances I’ve purchased, CrossFit tickled my obsessive jones for information in a serious way. I was staying up way too late reading message boards and watching videos of movements I hadn’t even heard of.  And as a regular reader of the Grey Lady, I also typed “CrossFit” into the New York Times search engine (which, thankfully, is now free all the way back to the mid-1800s) and found a number of articles, all of which were titled in such a way that it was obvious that they were written with a bit of an agenda.

As an aside, I think that part of the background hostility to the program has to do with the attitude of CrossFit itself.  For better or worse, CrossFit, at least at the national level, exudes a kind of martial machismo that probably puts people off.  CrossFit’s unofficial slogan, “our warm-up is your workout,” is really only the beginning.  The more I read the more I think that this antagonistic relationship between CrossFitters and the naugahyde-worshipping hoi polloi stems from CrossFit HQ’s culture, one that can either be embraced or rejected by the various affiliates around the country.  More on this later…

One of the things that’s interested me, especially so in light of this recent post by Robb Wolf about his unceremonious ouster as Resident Charismatic Food Genius Guy, is the relationship between affiliates and HQ.  I knew that the affiliates weren’t franchises in the legal sense but that there did seem to be a relationship of the sort that required demonstrating some basic allegiances & competencies in order to have the privilege of using some of CrossFit’s intellectual property.  The precise relationship is still a bit murky, and I will hopefully have a post up once I can get that clarified.

So, onto the NY Times, which has covered CrossFit on a handful of occasions.  There’s one longer and much-commented-upon article from the NYT Magazine called “God’s Workout” and then a shorter piece by Stephanie Cooperman titled “Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You.”  From the titles alone you can spot this trope of CrossFitting as a type of religious zealotry, a fanatical desire for fitness so intense that people are consciously putting their lives at risk with every kettlebell swing.  I can’t speak for many other gyms, but at HyperFit USA, where I train, I’ve never been part of a less threatening or more safety-conscious workout atmosphere.  It’s intense but friendly, and safety is paramount.  For people that have been without team sports for the better part of a decade or two, joining a well-run CrossFit gym is like finding an ever-expanding team to workout with.

One phenomenon that journalists are obsessed with is “rhabdomyolysis,” a kind of endogenous poisoning that takes place when muscle fibers break down rapidly and aren’t properly metabolized, becoming released into the bloodstream and eventually harming the kidneys, sometimes fatally. It’s usually seen in victims of extreme physical trauma like car crashes — presumably having your fat older brother fall through your pillow fort and onto your sleeping body will also do it — and it’s most frequently seen in CrossFitters in conjunction with severe dehydration.  Anecdotal evidence also seems to suggest that a good recipe for rhabdo is to combine a dehydrated newbie CrossFitter with large amounts of GHD (Glute-ham Developer) sit-ups. [video]

So, in typical alarmist fashion, Stephanie Cooperman’s article starts out with a cautionary tale of one Brian Anderson, a SWAT team member from Seattle who apparently got rhabdo and nearly died after his first CrossFit workout.

Yet six months later Mr. Anderson, a former Army Ranger, was back in the gym, performing the very exercises that nearly killed him. ”I see pushing my body to the point where the muscles destroy themselves as a huge benefit of CrossFit,” he said.

Now, Mr. Anderson may or may not be slightly psychotic, but there’s no attempt in this article to clarify that, well, gee, “destroying one’s muscles” is just a bluntly physiological description of how weight training builds muscle in everybody. You could have easily put this sentiment in the mouth of some circuit training grandmother and it would just as accurately describe the completely uncontroversial and safe process of lifting heavy things repeatedly and breaking down muscle fibers only to see them grow back bigger and stronger.

I’m struggling to see the distinction that this example is supposed to draw between CrossFitters and anybody else who trains intensely, gets hurt (either b/c they were an idiot or b/c getting hurt is simply one of the risks of challenging oneself), and then gets back on the horse.  Ms. Cooperman would probably respond that CrossFit is simply more dangerous and more likely to get people hurt b/c of the intensity involved.  But just like the Team In Training program would be negligent if they didn’t instruct aspiring marathoners in proper training techniques, CrossFit is only appreciably more dangerous if done without an awareness of the risks involved and zero instruction in proper technique.  It would seem to me that even in 2005, when this article was written, and before the proliferation of affiliate gyms, that the large community of knowledgeable trainers and physiologists that populates the CrossFit message boards would make CrossFit safer, overall, than many other forms of unsupervised exercise.

Have these people even been to a gym recently and seen the complete abortion of technique that the average grunting meathead employs? B/c of the intensity, I would wager that CrossFit might be directly responsible for more deaths than, say, a thrice-weekly globogym habit.  But as affiliates become more knowledgeable about what leads to rhabdo and pass on that knowledge to their clients, I expect to see cases decline.  And of course there’s no mention of the large number of people who have transformed from pizza-inhaling layabouts with bad knees and a one-way ticket to premature senescence into the Platonic ideal of physical fitness and healthy eating.  Not a single hint that your average CrossFitter, while maybe slightly more at risk for a cataclysmic cardiac event or a fatal case of rhabdo, is going to be healthier and more flexible and more mobile late into their life.

Now, I personally think that there should probably be a tighter relationship between HQ and the affiliates, and that you should have to affirmatively demonstrate both the capacity to teach the techniques properly and the knowledge to keep people safe once they’ve learned those techniques.  The current system sets up consumers to rely on the CrossFit name as a badge of authenticity without the corresponding, well, actual authenticity.  CrossFit HQ has a vested interest in making sure its brand isn’t diluted by shady owners looking to capitalize on the latest fitness trend.

More from the NY Times:

The emphasis is on speed and weight hoisted, not technique. And the importance placed on quantifiable results has attracted hard-charging people like hedge fund managers, former Olympians and scientists. But some exercise experts are troubled by the lack of guidance for beginners, who may dive into stressful workouts as Mr. Anderson did. (He had not worked out regularly for two years.) ”There’s no way inexperienced people doing this are not going to hurt themselves,” said Wayne Winnick, a sports medicine specialist in private practice in Manhattan, who also works for the New York City Marathon

Does this ring true for other people? At Hyperfit, the emphasis on technique actually precedes any emphasis on speed and weight hoisted, and maintaining proper technique is emphasized at all times.   I don’t know much about the way CrossFit looked in 2005, but my experience is that technique is everywhere a primary concern, especially in the first 1-6 months.  The whole point of the prolonged Foundations sessions is to make sure that everybody who steps into the gym is executing the lifts with proper technique and getting the muscle memory dialed in so that that technique will be maintained even as the body starts to fatigue.  Sure, a certain amount of technique breakdown is inevitable when lactic acid starts to build up and people are tired.  But anybody who’s working out to maximize their gains is going to be struggling through the last few reps of any exercise, and it’s at that point that it’s nearly certain that your technique is going to suffer a bit.  But better to do that under circumstances like CrossFit than at your local gym, where all they care about is getting your 50 bucks a month and couldn’t care less if you’re using a spotter or securing the weights before a lift or throwing 55-lb dumbbells back and forth with your buddy.

[To be continued in Part II...]