One Crossfitter's Journey

Ok, Part II, let’s see here.  When we last left the article (Part I) Greg Glassman was about to tell us about how CrossFit can kill you and Stephanie Cooperman was going to chime in that CrossFitters eagerly look death in the eye and flip it the bird because they want to be fit at any cost.  To wit:

”It can kill you,” he said. ”I’ve always been completely honest about that.”

But CrossFitters revel in the challenge. A common axiom among practitioners is ”I met Pukey,” meaning they worked out so hard they vomited. Some even own T-shirts emblazoned with a clown, Pukey. CrossFit’s other mascot is Uncle Rhabdo, another clown, whose kidneys have spilled onto the floor presumably due to rhabdomyolysis.

Even though I do have my officially sanctioned CrossFit.com Message Board username, I haven’t really gotten deeply involved over there.  One of the reasons is that even a casual perusal of the message boards leads you to a fair amount of this sort of macho posturing.  And the unfortunate thing about the drafting/editing job here is that the sentence about “reveling in the challenge” which starts with “[B]ut” does a really good job of acting like people who do CrossFit revel in the challenge provided by CrossFit because it can kill you.  Well, I haven’t done a comprehensive survey, but I have friends that do CrossFit (your humble blogger also does it), and I can tell you that their attitude about it bears very little resemblance to BASE jumping or other adrenaline junkie activities pursued largely or entirely b/c of the danger involved.  People do CrossFit b/c, inter alia, they want to look good naked, beat up on the guys in their Pub Soccer League, or just generally be able to carry out daily activities and not feel old and sore afterwards.  There’s a non-zero risk of death in doing any kind of intense exercise, but if the risk of death while doing CrossFit was even approaching substantial I can guarantee you it would be a lot less popular.  I can also guarantee you that the 65-year old mother of 3, grandmother of 8 that works out at your local box is not doing it b/c of the thrill of asymptotically approaching certain death.  Granted, your average CrossFit patron isn’t elderly, but the demographics of my local box are skewed way older than I would have guessed.

Speaking of the elderly, some people are worried about grannies being forced at gun point to do handstand push-ups:

When he started CrossFit, Mr. Kassum was unable to do a handstand, but after a year with the program he can do push-ups from that position. CrossFit exercises can be made more or less intense based on a person’s abilities, but the workouts are the same for everyone, from marines to senior citizens. And some critics say that is a big part of what’s wrong.

”My concern is that one cookie-cutter program doesn’t apply to everyone,” said Fabio Comana, an exercise physiologist at the American Council on Exercise. He said people in their 60′s who have osteoporosis, for example, may not be able to do an overhead press, pushing a barbell over one’s head.

You know what Mr. Fabio Comana exercise physiologist?! This is where it might have been helpful to have the reporter’s questions asked of you via email so you had time to think about the answer.  Had you thought for more than 5 seconds before blurting out the first thing that popped into your head you might have come to the brilliant solution that CrossFit gyms across the country seem to have stumbled upon in unison: SUBSTITUTING A DIFFERENT EXERCISE! Maybe you’re of a different generation, Fabio, or maybe this isn’t how exercise physiology is taught in Italy, but surely that expensive education of yours didn’t skip over this admittedly uncreative workaround.  The idea that this is an objection to CrossFit is freaking bonkers.  I, with my medical degree provided by 7 Raisin Bran UPCs & $10, am willing to put my credibility on the line by submitting that doing “an overhead press” with a piece of PVC piping is not going to result in the sudden disintegration of legions of osteoporotic women.  Also, even if it was, there are nearly endless permutations of substitution exercises that people can do if they have some pathology that prevents them from executing the movement safely.  CrossFit is not less but more flexible than your average exercise routine .

Norma Loehr, 37, a vice president for a financial services company in New York, was sidelined for a week after she strained her back doing ”Three Bars of Death,” 10 sets of 3 lifts using barbells that weigh up to one and a half times as much as the person using them. She realized the barbells were too heavy, but she didn’t want to waste the seconds it would have taken to change plates.

Once again, this is either a failure of coaching or, more likely, Norma just wasn’t using her noggin. The fact that Stephanie Cooperman thinks it’s remarkable that this woman got injured b/c she was lifting heavier than she knew she could handle is laughable.  This isn’t an indictment of CrossFit either.  And no, I don’t think that the quantitative nature of the enterprise means that people are really that much more likely to put themselves in danger in order to achieve a particular goal.  And not only that, but this woman strained her back and was out for a week! This is hardly a catastrophic injury.  I tried to pick up two watermelons at Kroger the other day and had to avoid the gym for three days.  Thankfully, I was able to restrain myself from from driving down South and berating a watermelon farmer.

In recent months a group of New York CrossFit athletes have tried unsuccessfully to find a home gym. Joshua Newman, the group’s organizer, said gym managers expressed concerns that they took up too much space, or even that their fast and furious pull-ups would break the apparatus.

‘They used too many pieces of equipment at one time, and we got a lot of complaints from trainers who didn’t like being on the floor with them,” said Eric Slayton, the owner of New York Underground Fitness, a Midtown gym that Crossfit New York called home for a few weeks. ”They put too much emphasis on getting things done in a certain amount of time and not enough on form.”

But for Mr. Glassman, dismissals of his extreme workouts merely help him weed out people he considers weak-willed. ”If you find the notion of falling off the rings and breaking your neck so foreign to you, then we don’t want you in our ranks,” he said.

Were this paragraph not tacked on to an article that consisted mostly of quotes from blowhard doctors with an axe to grind it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  But the idea is clearly that the CrossFit community is full of people like this Joshua Newman, who seems just a wee bit undertrained in the art of not making yourself a nuisance.  I think there probably are gyms that would be happy to have people do CrossFit in them, but CrossFit is not meant to be done en masse in your local globo gym.  These gyms are designed to maximize revenue by squeezing in as many of the people who do actually show up after paying their 80 bucks a month.  The reason you don’t find Olympic weightlifting stations in most gyms is b/c they’re incredibly inefficient from a revenue standpoint.  So the idea that you and your closest 10 friends should be able to walk into your local gym and demand to be able to do a daily WOD there is kind of insane.  But once again, this isn’t an indictment of CrossFit any more than a group of jerks at your local library listening to 120 db Def Leppard through their leaky iPod headphones is an indictment of Def Leppard.  There are plenty of things that are wrong with both Def Leppard and with CrossFit (or at least the CrossFit as promulgated by HQ), but close to none of them were addressed in the Times.  Any movement as amorphous as CrossFit is going to have a fair number of morons acting in an unsafe manner, but Stephanie Cooperman’s article does a rather poor job of showing that we should be a whole lot more concerned about CrossFit than any number of other popular regimens out there.