What is CrossFit?
The official definition of CrossFit is as follows:
“Constantly varied, functional movements, performed at high intensity.”
That doesn’t mean too much to the average person, so let’s break that down!
Constantly varied
Your body is designed to move. We have one of the most broad ranges of motion of any animal in terms of number of joints and accessible ranges in those joints. As such, we need a broad range of movements to be done to keep us happy and healthy. CrossFit includes one of the most broad ranges of exercises and patterns of any fitness program out there. We also want to vary the reps and time domains we use, to create a well rounded fitness.
Functional Movements
This one can be a bit of a tall order, as defining function for different people varies as much as they do. However, generally speaking, we prioritise compound movements. This is movements that require more than 1 joint to move at once. Consider a bicep curl (1 joint) vs a pull up (2-3 joints). Single joint movements have their place, but if you’re tight on time like most of us are, you will get a much better training effect from training a few compound movements, hitting lot’s of muscles, than a few isolation movements and only a few muscles.
High Intensity
You need to push your body to make it change and adapt. Doing everything at a 3/10 effort doesn’t lead to much improvement. That being said, we also don’t want to be pushing MAX intensity every day. A solid place for most sessions is between a 6 and an 8/10. Which means we are close to our limit, but not actually failing reps, or lying in a complete heap at the end.
This is probably the biggest area that people struggle with, and one I will cover in another post in much more detail.
What does it actually look like?
Crossfit generally consists of 3 elements:
Weighted movements IE back squats, Cleans, Wallballs
Bodyweight movements IE Pull ups, Sit ups, muscle ups
Conditioning movements IE Running, rowing, biking
That’a all very nice, but let’s give some tangible workout examples:
Monday:
Back squat 5x5 @70%+
Workout - 5 rounds of 10 Thrusters + 20 calorie row
Tuesday:
30 minute AMRAP
600m run
15 Wallballs
10 Burpees
Wednesday:
Strict pull ups 4x4-6
Ring push ups 4x4-6
Workout - 15 minute AMRAP
12 Box jumps
15 Dumbbell snatches
18 Sit ups
Here you can see that we do dedicated strength work with a movement like a back squat. We work on gymnastics skills like pull ups and push ups. And we do varying lengths of mixed work including workouts that are under 10 minutes, to 30+ minutes.
All of our workouts are scalable. Knees are hurting? We can change that back squat to a deadlift. Can’t do a pull up? We have ring rows, rack pull ups and banded pull ups to build the strength to get there. Struggle doing loads of sit ups? We can reduce the sets from 15 to 8.
Hopefully this gives you a clearer idea of what CrossFit is. The best way to understand it? Come and join some classes!