Every
fitness program should be measured in some capacity by their functionality
towards your specific sport and everyday life.
Humans were asked to run, jump, climb, and lift objects all for
survival. These tasks have eluded us as
modern society has become obsessed with convenience. We drive cars everywhere, we can do almost
everything from our computers and cell-phones.
After all this, we go to the gym and watch t.v. while jogging on a
treadmill. Then we use machines that
have little to no carry-over into our everyday life. Your fitness regimen should be making
everyday life easier or making you better at your particular sport. If neither of these apply to you it’s time to
rethink your training approach.
I was guilty of
doing the Globo-Gym routine for years.
Looking back I realized how little functionality this type of training
gave me. I had little to no flexibility
and my cardio was almost non-existent. I found myself struggling to do other activities that involved larger amounts of cardio and realized people
who didn’t work out nearly as much as I did had a higher work capacity. This made me feel like my training hadn’t
paid off at all. I wanted my training to
make me better outside the gym, and now was faced with the reality that my
current routine wasn’t getting the job done.
I asked myself, "What do I do now?" Everything I had done training wise hadn’t
done much to my overall fitness.
Eventually I
stumbled into Crossfit and haven’t looked back since. Crossfit is a very broad approach to fitness its
mere definition is “constantly varied functional movements performed at high
intensity”. Greg Glassman the founder of
Crossfit was the first person to measure fitness in a tangible way. You get to test it with every single
workout. The ten components of Crossfit
are accuracy, agility, balance, cardiovascular endurance, coordination,
flexibility, power, stamina, speed, and strength. If your fitness approaches all ten components
you are going to greatly increase your overall fitness.
Crossfit
isn’t perfect, but it has done a great deal in teaching people how to train to
be truly fit. The main training focus of
Crossfit is using functional movements and not isolating muscle groups. Human movement has become so poor and grossly
neglected. It is such a basic and
beneficial way too train yet very few look at it that way. Now there are naysayers, nitpickers, and
keyboard rangers (those people who leave negative comments on Youtube with no merit
or knowledge) who think Crossfit is a joke.
There are some in the “fitness world” that claim Crossfit is too
dangerous and shouldn't be trained by everyday people. This is nonsense look of course there is a
chance for injury, but that’s the same with any sport or intense physical
activity. The human body is an amazing
machine that is primed to perform complex and difficult physical activities. Now if you've sat on the couch for the last
10 years and walked into a box and did a workout your chances for injury are
extremely high. You need to work into
Crossfit or your other fitness endeavors slowly and learn to move
properly. If you can’t even squat
correctly with just your bodyweight, you have no business performing a squat
with hundreds of pounds on a barbell. This
is why you spend lots of time going through progressions and building up the
tolerance to handle those movements. The
capacity to do a muscle-up isn’t built by swinging on the rings over and over again until you get on top of them. There are prerequisites that should be mastered first such as strict ring rows,
dips, pull-ups, and proper hollow-body position. The great thing about Crossfit is it can take
a different meaning for every individual and gives you the outlet to achieve
your highest physical and mental potential.