I am the owner of a CrossFit gym and have been for nearly a decade now. In this article I outline some of my thoughts on both the positive and negative aspects of CrossFit. Programme was born out of my frustration with some aspects of the CrossFit training style.

The Good

A Valiant Ideal

The idea of building elite fitness is a phenomenal one and one that we should all strive towards, on our own path. The mix of strength, cardiovascular ability and mobility that is involved in performing CrossFit workouts is why it is so effective at building health — much more so than just running, just powerlifting or other less technically complex and athletic hybrid pursuits like hyrox. If we take an example workout that an elite Crossfitter would be able to perform with excellent movement virtuosity that includes snatching, ring muscle ups and running (see Metcon below) then we get an idea of how diversified Crossfit is and how successful it is at moving us towards the three pillars of physical health, strength, cardiovascular ability and mobility. The idea that an individual can perform a perfect snatch and then perform multiple repetitions of strict ring muscle-ups and then run a mile in under six minutes is really what it means to be an exceptionally athletic and healthy individual. This valiant ideal is what draws people towards CrossFit and is why it is such an effective training style for a large variety of individuals. The ideal of CrossFit is an amazing one, and moving people towards this will make them healthier individuals.

MetCon

3 Rounds for Time

3 Snatch @bodyweight

5 Strict Ring Muscle-Ups

1 Mile Run

Community

The community aspect of CrossFit is phenomenal. It is what builds consistency in people who are trying to solve the problem of being a healthy individual in the 21st century. It is a rare person that is able to exercise on a regular basis for years on end. CrossFit makes this possible through building strong communities. This is an absolutely crucial part of the training regime — suffering through hard sessions together.

Gamification

Trying to get better at CrossFit is addictive. There are multiple elements and it makes it like you are trying to level up in a video game. For a lot of people, this is an addictive feeling. It encourages people to train four or five times a week. When this training is done in a sustainable way, this is an amazing thing. Getting people who didn’t exercise before to move their bodies four times a week is a huge achievement, something that most other training regimes wouldn’t even come close to.

Fun

Crossfit is fun. I am not going to try and make this point more complex that it needs to be. I love running for example, but running is always running, one foot in front of the other again and again. Crossfit changes all the time, its novel and exciting (yes, this creates issues but we will look at that later). This is such an important point, if you don’t find something fun then it will never stick for the long term unless you are a very specific type of individual.

Intensity

Crossfit and training in a group in general allows people to push much further than they typically would. CrossFit provides a very potent stimulus, something that pre Crossfit was not done on a regular basis by the typical gym goer. This stimulus is extremely beneficial when it is done at the correct frequency.

Universally Scalable

The idea that physical training is for everyone is a really important one and one that all gyms should put emphasis on. CrossFit has always put emphasis on this, and it is an amazing thing that all gyms should continue to do. Moving for health is for everyone, and the training style you provide needs to reflect this.

The Bad

Wasting Training Economy

The biggest problem I have with CrossFit is the issue of training economy. Training economy is how much time an individual has per day or week to put into their physical training. We are lucky if our members come into the gym 3 hours a week. When we have three hours to provide a service that is going to drastically improve someone’s health and I am going to spend an hour of those three hours teaching them how to do a snatch and butterfly pull-ups, I am far so from using their time in the most effective way possible. This may mean that I do not move them towards their health goals fast enough and they drop off, leaving the gym and not maintaining a positive movement practice.

Intensity Before Skill Learning

Intensity is earned — it is learnt through skill learning, building a foundation and then using that foundation to perform intense tasks. In CrossFit, the culture is built around intensity. Someone who has never squatted can find themselves performing wall balls or thrusters in their first session for high number of repetitions. This culture exposes a lot of individuals to injuries as there has been no foundation built. In an ideal world, an individual would be able to squat with good form before loading that squat or using the squat in a mixed modal training session.

Too Intense Too Often

High Intensity Functional Movement Across Broad Time and Modal Domains. This is what CrossFit is. It is high-intensity interval training and that is what people want on a daily basis. They want that amazing feeling of pushing exceptionally hard on a task on a daily basis. They want it because it’s fun, it’s gratifying and it creates social cohesion. That is not possible to do on a daily basis when you have a normal life. Pushing this hard all the time isn’t even effective for elite athletes, let alone recreational ones.

Intensity Addiction

The feeling after pushing your body to its limits is phenomenal. It hooks us and is what makes Crossfit addictive. It makes us feel as if we are truly moving forward towards our health goals. This feeling of elation leads to wanting all of our training to feel like a test. This addiction to intensity makes other forms of training seem boring and ineffective. This sort of intensity should only be reached once per week, maximum twice per week, for people with full lives who are not attempting to be athletes. This addiction to intensity encourages people to only train at a high intensity, making them unable slow down and develop other aspect of fitness other than their VO2 max.

Cardiovascular Development

When we review cardiovascular training for sports that require phenomenal cardiovascular capabilities, none of them put so much emphasis on high-intensity cardiovascular training. Running, cycling, swimming — all of which create endurance and cardiovascular capability — all put huge amounts of emphasis on both tempo and low-intensity cardiovascular activities. Yet CrossFit and CrossFitters are typically just there to red line. This is not an intelligent way to train; there needs to be systematic and sustained development of the cardiovascular system that CrossFit simply doesn’t provide. This is especially negative for individuals who are seriously out of shape. These people have not earned the right to perform high-intensity intervals.

Creating A Dragon You Cannot Slay

The valiant ideal that I outlined above makes people feel bad about themselves. They cannot understand why they cannot perform a pull-up while others can perform sets of 5 ring muscle-ups. It would be like putting a high school maths class in the same lecture room as university mathematics — the goal is the same, to get better at maths, but genetic differences and training age make individuals feel as if they are bad and as if they shouldn’t even bother trying. It is hard not to compare ourselves to others, to what we see on social media. I would say around 2-5% of people could perform the MetCon I put at the top of the article even if they trained diligently for multiple years. We need to create cultures where people have realistic goals of what they will be able to perform. When you feel as if you will not be able to slay the dragon you have chosen to take on, it is extremely demotivating.

Too Much Complexity, Too Soon

If someone cannot perform a squat, why would I try and teach them to snatch? If someone cannot perform a strict pull-up, why would I teach them to perform a kipping pull-up or even worse a bar muscle up? Too much intensity too soon lacks logic. CrossFit encourages people to be pushed into the deep end. People get bored with the basics and want to perform the ‘sexy’ stuff too fast.

Unknown and Unknowable

Coming back to mathematics — imagine if you were trying to teach someone maths and every week they showed up to their lesson and you changed the subject in an attempt to try and shock them or trick them into learning. You would likely be the worst teacher in your school. When one trains physically to improve their strength, cardiovascular ability and mobility, they will be able to face unknown and unknowable tasks, but this is by no means a way of organising training on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis.

The Ugly

Dangerous Situations

I was once at a CrossFit competition where I witnessed a very dangerous situation — an individual being screamed at to move faster while completing an overhead squat that he had no capacity to perform in terms of strength or mobility. These situations typically occur at competitions but also in Crossfit gyms on a daily basis. These dangerous situations showcase the very worst aspect of CrossFit: pushing people to do things which they are not physically capable of doing in a safe way. If someone cannot perform an overhead squat due to mobility restrictions, why on earth would we make this individual perform an overhead squat with load and under cardiovascular fatigue? There is literally no incentive. This is the truly ugly part of CrossFit.

Training Addiction

As a gym owner, we see many individuals dealing with their emotional problems through sport. They spend multiple hours at the gym on a daily basis, they train through emotional issues as if it were going to solve them, and they cling to their physical performance as if it were their saving grace. Their performance becomes increasingly important, as does their training volume. We have seen this cycle again and again, and CrossFit and the fitness industry in general encourages this kind of behaviour. Training addiction is by no means just a problem in CrossFit but in amateur sports in general. This can get pretty ugly, and it often leads to individuals leaving the gym as they turn something that was a positive part of their life into a burden that was just another weight on their shoulders.

Unsustainable Training

Too much intensity too often leads to unsustainable training. Unsustainable training leads to cessation of practice, resulting in going back to square one and not moving your body on a regular basis. When you are a gym that tries to provide intensity on a daily basis, you are not fostering a culture of sustainable training — you are getting people hooked on a dopamine hit that comes from high-intensity interval training in a way that prevents them from building a sustainable movement practice.

Drastic Changing of Social Circles

A sometimes negative aspect of the community aspect is when people reject their old social circles as they cultivate their CrossFit identity. It is normal to have strong passions around the way we move — it’s a very positive thing. That doesn’t mean that all your previous social acquaintances should be dropped because you have started a new sport.

A Criticism of The Health and Fitness Industry

CrossFit has its problems, like most training styles — none are perfect. The health and fitness industry hasn’t provided a substantially better solution to the problem of group classes. Personal training and trainers who coach athletes can criticise CrossFit all they like, but why don’t they try and provide a solution to the problem of group classes that are both fun enough to create engagement and also solve some of the problems I outlined about the training style.

P.S. I have never seen anyone get injured from doing burpees — making people fragile makes them fragile. Intensity and difficulty have their place in physical training, even if that place is by no means on a daily basis.