"I hate Crossfit"

Tall trees catch a lot of wind. I think I have made the comparison before between Justin Bieber and Crossfit: you love it, or hate it. Crossfit has grown enormously in recent years and is even seen as "fitness trend no. 1" for this year. With that growth in popularity, however, aversion to Crossfit is also increasing. More and more often I hear people complaining about Crossfit and Crossfitters.

Crossfit here to stay?

Why are some people so fiercely opposed to Crossfit? There are several reasons for this that I would like to cover. Unlike most articles I write, this is not a scientifically substantiated story with fifty-plus references to studies. This is an outlet for the irritation and frustration that I and so many others have had to endure since the rise of Crossfit. A lot of spitting and whining, in other words, you have been warned.

Are you a Crossfit fan (that is possible, Bieber has them too) with a thin skin? Then definitely do not keep reading. But if Crossfitters are the die-hards they claim to be, you can take it. So keep reading, and maybe you will learn something that helps you avoid some of these irritations.

First, a positive point

I have learned always to look at the positive before tearing something down, so here goes: what I consider a huge achievement by Crossfit is the way the system manages to excite millions of people. The share of women in this is especially noticeable. Never before have I seen so many women train this hardcore. Deadlifts, squats, pushups, powerlifting movements, etc. The rest of the fitness industry would do well to look at how Crossfit manages to get women excited about these training methods, which have existed for decades but have never before been so popular among this group.

Right, now that has been said, I can have a good complaint.

Lost Crossfitters

Last Monday I trained at Basicfit Purmerend. The complaint you hear most there is how crowded it is. You barely have a square meter per person to do your thing. That "thing" is normally fitness and bodybuilding according to gym etiquette. The unwritten rules that ensure training in the gym remains enjoyable despite the presence of others.

Although Crossfit is officially done in a Crossfit "box", a space set up for Crossfit, many Crossfitters also train in regular gyms. That means that alongside traditional strength training and cardio, suddenly there are people doing box jumps, somersaults, the strangest movements on the pull-up bars, jumping rope and whatever else is pulled from the Crossfit.com site. Without going into the exercise system and the exercises themselves (do not worry, that comes later), I want to make clear here that all of that is fine, but not in the gym! Why do you think Greg Glassman, the founder of Crossfit, and his clients were kicked out of so many gyms before he set up his own space for it?

When will a gym owner finally stand up and say: "No Crossfit allowed"? I do not go javelin throwing or playing checkers on a football field either, do I? The chance that a gym owner bans Crossfit in his gym is small. Let alone in a Basicfit, where apparently everything has to make way for revenue and there are more members than space. This does cause the necessary irritation, though, and I am certainly not the only one who sometimes feels like smacking the first person who does one more f#cking muscle-up with a barbell from the pull-up bar. Especially when they occupy that thing for an hour, unlike the usual three to four sets per person.

There will also be plenty of calisthenics fans among them, by the way. Do not worry, they can feel addressed too. I know this is the Netherlands and the weather is not always great, but go play on a playground if you want to hang from bars for an hour. Is there no opportunity for that in your area? Then start a petition or take action in some other way to encourage your municipality to install something like that. It would not surprise me if there are now more Crossfitters and calisthenics fans than skaters. Municipalities could use some help in their youth policy by having this pointed out to them.

Crossfit is not new

Another common complaint is that Crossfit in fact adds nothing new to systems that have existed for decades. Many components come from, among others, powerlifting, strongman, bodybuilding, HIIT, calisthenics and gymnastics, and seem to be linked together completely at random in workouts (workout of the day, WODs). The philosophy behind this is that it improves your capacity across a broad range of activities.

Functional training, however, means training specifically for the function you want to improve. Functions you think you regularly need to perform. These can be everyday movements, but also specific movements you perform during certain sports. Granted, by doing many different things, you get better at all of them. The things you train in Crossfit, however, are not functional in the sense that you get fewer injuries while doing physically demanding work, for example, let alone if you have an office job. The exercises go much further in intensity than what is needed to prepare you for your normal daily activities.

Even if you train to get better at certain sports, you use your time much better by training specifically for that sport. Although exercises such as box jumps can improve your explosiveness for football, climbing ropes adds little to your chances of getting the ball into the goal.

No structure in Crossfit

Another accusation is that there is no structure in the setup of the workouts. This makes sense, since there are no training schedules. The "WODs" are the daily training routines that can be taken from the Crossfit.com website, but they can also be devised locally by instructors.

A good training schedule looks beyond one day and takes into account the rest needed for recovery. In fitness and bodybuilding, training splits ensure, for example, that you do not train the same muscle group intensely on two consecutive days. This is to prevent your muscles from being unable to recover and therefore not increasing in strength and mass, while instead the risk of overtraining increases, performance worsens and the chance of injuries becomes greater.

High risk of injuries

Speaking of injuries. This week I was talking to another bodybuilder and in between we watched, shaking our heads, as Crossfitters did cable exercises with worthless form. On top of that, they did them explosively, while cables are not designed for that. The sudden pulling force can make them break. We heard the banging of the plates repeatedly dropping and were waiting for a snapping sound from either the cable breaking or a spine. Secretly we were hoping for the latter, since that cable cannot help being trained with so stupidly.

The most common complaint from fitness professionals about Crossfit is therefore the high risk of injuries due to the unstructured way of training and the lack of differentiation between participants of different levels.

Some time ago I wrote an article in response to a study whose conclusion was that the number of injuries in Crossfit is no higher than in powerlifting, weightlifting and gymnastics, for example.

An injury rate of 3.1 per 1000 hours trained was calculated. No incidences of rhabdomyolysis were reported. Injury rates with crossfit training are similar to that reported in the literature for sports such as Olympic weight-lifting, power-lifting and gymnastics and lower than competitive contact sports such as rugby union and rugby league. Shoulder and spine injuries predominate with no incidences of rhabdomyolysis obtained. To our knowledge this is the first paper in the literature detailing the injury rates and profiles with crossfit participation.

-P. Hak, All Wales Trauma and Orthopaedic Training Program, Cardiff

In the article about this, I expressed my doubts about the representativeness of the study because of the small number of respondents (132) to the injury questionnaire. In any case, this number is too small to say anything specific about the number of cases of rhabdomyolysis (very rapid breakdown of muscle mass), because this normally occurs in only 0.008% of the population (in the US). You normally need more than 10,000 people to encounter one case of rhabdomyolysis. Crossfit would have to make a real mess of things for cases of rhabdomyolysis to appear among such a small number of people.

More importantly, the outcome contradicts the experience of doctors, physiotherapists and chiropractors who report that their client base has suddenly increased thanks to Crossfit.

Crossfit instructors: certification in two days

I already found the AALO Fitness Instructor (I) course a bit thin. I took it to give some validity to the fact that I write articles for this site. My own experience and the knowledge I gained by doing research for these articles, however, were much greater than what could be learned in the Fitness Instructor I course, for which about six months of study time was given as a guideline.

You can imagine, then, that I am not at all impressed by instructors who earn their certification after attending a workshop of only two days. In my view, there is also simply a commercial idea behind this. The AALO no longer earns anything from the fitness professionals they trained once they have obtained their certification. To open your own Crossfit box, you have to pay $3,000 per year for a license to write the name Crossfit on the front of your "Crossfit box". A long certification course creates a barrier to starting new Crossfit boxes.  Given that there are already more than 5,000 worldwide and Glassman earns more than one and a half hundred thousand a year from this alone, you can see that it is commercially successful. Longer training means fewer branches and therefore less income for the man behind Crossfit.

If Crossfit wants to be taken seriously, the training requirements should be raised considerably. As long as Crossfit is as popular as it is now, however, you may wonder how much the opinions of others really matter.

Poor technique in Crossfit

That they have poor technique can also be said of thousands of people who train in gyms with the ever-present basic concept and get started without guidance. It is a lot worse, however, when this happens under the supervision of an instructor.

The technical errors are also inherent to the system in which you continuously measure your performance. If you consider it more important to do 20 muscle-ups than to load your back muscles maximally, it is no surprise that everyone pulls themselves up like a swinging monkey to get above the bar more easily. In fact, that is how it is taught.

The combination of high intensity and poor technique is a recipe for disaster.

"Crossfit is a cult"

That is how someone described it to me when he expressed his dissatisfaction with the increasing popularity of Crossfit. From the picture on the right, you can see that he is not the only one who thinks that way.

"A cult is the worship of a particular deity, object or idol" (wiki). I also see traits of a sect in the way Crossfitters present themselves in relation to others and the role they give Crossfit in their lives.

Bodybuilders also often say that bodybuilding is a lifestyle. I have never seen a bodybuilder crazy enough, however, to squat and bench press as part of his wedding. Because people did not believe me when I said there was a couple who did a Workout of the Day as part of their wedding, I went looking for the photo. What I could not believe myself was the large number of photos of different "Crossfit weddings" that I then came across.

Crossfit really seems to be something people are incredibly proud to be part of. For them this will have a very positive effect because it increases motivation, but to others it can come across as overenthusiastic and irritating. Just as it is nice for Spongebob that he feels like going to work, but as a parent it is awful to hear that annoying voice three times over: "I'm ready". Or that colleague who emails minutes at three in the morning to show everyone how driven he or she is.

Professional jealousy?

As I indicated at the beginning, much of the complaining about Crossfit is due to its popularity. If Greg Glassman had kept "his system" in Los Angeles, after all, no one would have heard of it and no one could have been annoyed by it.

Now that Crossfitters are flooding gyms and Crossfit has managed to create an unprecedented level of athletic fanaticism, especially among women, we as other fitness professionals are of course simply insanely jealous.

Although we have good reasons to attack the system on its content, we mainly do this because we do not understand why "we" did not manage to generate the same level of enthusiasm for more traditional fitness and strength training. When a survey showed that HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) was predicted as the no. 1 trend for 2014, the researcher describing the results could not even get the word Crossfit out of his mouth, as if it were Voldemort. Another analyst who did describe that this had to be the influence of Crossfit naturally followed it immediately with the usual criticisms of Crossfit.

Tall trees simply catch a lot of wind. As long as Crossfit continues to rise in popularity, the criticism will keep increasing.

Greg Glassman, founder of Crossfit, not exactly a role model

Although I admire his business insight, Greg Glassman would not exactly motivate me as an athlete. If you, as the founder of a new fitness system, look worse than all the people who follow it, that does not seem like a good thing to me. Age is no excuse here. Just look at Larry Scott, the bodybuilder who won the first Mr. Olympia in 1965 (right). Today he is still a great ambassador for bodybuilding by giving lectures, but above all through his physique, which is still better than that of the average 20-year-old.

Greg Glassman could learn from that. To enable the man to defend his system after all the criticism here and to underline my final point of criticism, below you will see a video in which he addresses the supposed benefits of Crossfit. Look at Larry Scott (65 years old) at the top right and Greg Glassman below (now 57, slightly younger in the photo).

Hope for Crossfit in the future

If Crossfit does not want to collapse under its own success because of fights with bodybuilders in gyms who cannot get to their training, instructors who do not know the difference between biceps and triceps, and hospitals complaining that Crossfitters are occupying all their dialysis equipment, then some improvements are advisable. Limit Crossfit activities to spaces intended for them, give instructors a decent education and create training schedules that take the necessary rest into account.

It is probably clear that I have allowed myself a certain degree of exaggeration for this article. On the other hand, I acknowledge the influence of Crossfit by adding it as a separate category in this site's menu, which shows that despite my reservations, I am willing in this respect to acknowledge something greater than myself.

References

• Hak, Paul Taro MBChB, MRCS; Mr; Hodzovic, Emil MBChB; Dr; Hickey, Ben MBChB, MRCS; Mr. The nature and prevalence of injury during crossfit training. Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research: POST ACCEPTANCE, 22 November 2013. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000000318