CF Ya Ya, the Sequel.

"An athlete diminished by excessive aerobic training is slow and weak. At CrossFit we call that state, 'spun-down.'" - Greg Glassman

"Training for a fight by running twenty minutes everyday makes perfect sense if you plan on running away from your opponent and know you’ll be getting a ten minute headstart." - Greg Glassman

"We have doctors to thank for lots of S.B. The advice to always ask a doctor before you (yes, you) start any exercise program is rather self-serving, considering the fact that they are the ones billing for the office visit, and the silliness of insisting that a healthy 35-year-old get a checkup before he starts to lift weights makes one suspicious of the actual purpose. As mentioned earlier, the medical community is famous for equating exercise with running, walking, cycling, and other such monostructural aerobic-pathway activities that are measured by the time spent engaging in them. The pamphlet rack in the waiting room is typically stuffed completely full of references to “20 minutes of exercise a day, 5 days a week,” as if the only way to quantify a stress that leads to an adaptation is with your Polar RS 800 fancy watch/heart rate monitor." - Mark Rippetoe

CrossFit is a broad based strength and conditioning program. It is designed to enhance an individual’s competency at all physical tasks.

We train functional movements, we don’t teach isolation exercises.

Functional movements are those things that you need to do everyday … bend over, pick stuff up, move it overhead, carry it.

We train for power, which is part strength and part speed.

We don’t specialize, and we don’t train for aesthetics, although people who train our method and eat a good diet have amazingly beautiful bodies.

More specifically, CrossFit is a general physical conditioning program built upon the three pillars of:
1) Constantly varied
2) Functional movements
3) Done at relatively high intensity.

What exactly do you mean by constantly varied, functional movements done at relatively high intensity?

Constantly Varied - We mix things up ... a lot. The body gets used to doing the same exercises, in the same way, over and over again. Mixing up the stimulus keeps the body guessing, and this produces greater physical adaptions.

Functional Movements - These are the things you need to do everyday .. bend down, pick stuff up, move it overhead, etc. For the most part, these movements involve large muscles that can move heavy loads over long distances. Doing tricep kick-backs with 5 lb. dumbells will never produce the same physiological response as doing dips or push-ups.

Relatively High Intensity - Intensity is where the results are. We push our trainees to do as much work as they are able, but a 65 year old retired banker is probably going to have a different capacity for work than a 25 year old competitive mixed martial artist.

The basic underlying philosophy is that virtually all athletic movement is a function of leg and hip drive (hip flexion and hip extension) and that the power generated from this is transmitted to the extremities through a strong and stable core. We train hip extension to death … then we add weight that must be managed by activating the muscles of the torso and upper body. Pretty simple really.

We combine bodyweight exercises, power lifting and Olympic lifting moves, and short-fast efforts of running, biking or rowing. Most people easily learn these moves, or at least their elements. We modify where we need to in a fashion that lets us preserve the stimulus as best as possible while accommodating the capacity of the individual. We stress proper form and full range of motion.

We are huge fans of using high-intensity short-duration exercise. There is no doubt high-intensity training is great for increasing strength, speed, power, cardiovascular endurance, and stamina. But it has also been shown to greatly improve posture, joint health, sleep, flexibility, blood pressure, bone strength, and fat loss.

If it is so beneficial to do high-intensity exercise, why doesn't everyone do it? Because it is hard, uncomfortable, and brings to people the true meaning of suck! The ability to embrace the suck is what sets CrossFit athletes (we're all considered athletes here) apart from the rest!

Embrace the suck! Reap the rewards!

GPP & Sport.

"Optimal physical competency is a compromise, a balancing act; a compromise between not only conflicting but perfectly antagonistic skills. The manner in which you resolve this conflict defines the quality of your fitness and is the art of exercise prescription." - Greg Glassman

"Develop the capacity of a novice 800-meter track athlete, gymnast, and weightlifter and you’ll be fitter than any world-class runner, gymnast, or weightlifter." - From CrossFit Journal

The Bottom Line on GPP

There's often a great deal of confusion surrounding general physical preparedness (GPP) in general, and CrossFit's brand of GPP in particular. This post is an attempt to stimulate conversation over what GPP is, and hopefully in the process, clear up any misunderstandings over what we do and how we train our athletes.

When defining a word or concept, it's often useful and highly instructive to discuss what something is not before jumping into what it is.

GPP is not training for a set of skills germane only to a particular sport or physical activity. We'd no sooner adopt the training program of a marathon runner than we would a sumo wrestler (both have relatively narrow, highly specific needs for their sport of choice), assuming GPP is the goal of the training program. GPP is not about putting your eggs in one basket and focusing on a single aspect of training, or a single general physical skill such as endurance, stamina, or strength.

GPP, and specifically CrossFit's brand of GPP, is about, quite simply, increasing an athlete's work capacity across broad time and modal domains (thanks to Coach Glassman for coining this phrase). This means that one can do well in any endeavor, whether it's of long duration, short duration, high power, or low power (although what's the point of being good at low-powered activities - they're so boring!), and whether it involves one's own body, external objects (e.g., barbells, dumbbells, and throwing implements), or any combination of these two modalities.

Problems occur, though, when athletes and coaches try and fuse GPP with sport practice. What happens is that both aspects of training suffer. This type of fusion usually results in ill-conceived concepts such as practicing the swing of a (tennis) forehand while using the cable pulley machine. Not only is the use of the cable pulley a colossal waste of the athlete's time, adding little if anything to his off-court strength-and-conditioning base, the carryover to actually hitting a forehand on the tennis court is nonexistent, and can even cause the tennis player's forehand skill to erode.

(As an aside, the reason the scenario above doesn't work for the tennis player is because swinging a tennis racket weighing between 12- and 14-ounces and swinging a cable pulley, which offers significantly more resistance than a tennis racket, cause different neuro-muscular firing patterns; thus there's no carryover and it can actually be detrimental to the development of a forehand.)

It's far better to keep GPP and sport practice separate. Use the GPP program to allow the athlete to become supremely conditioned and, at the same time, free the athlete up to devote more time to practicing his or her sport.

That is, if you're so horny for one sport that you are willing to allow your GPP for all other walks of life to suffer. I'm not. Not anymore.