Over the past 15 years CrossFit has grown from a main gym in an industrial park in Santa Cruz, CA, with a few affiliated gyms scattered in the state and a few others throughout the country, to the largest commercial fitness movement ever seen. In February 2015, Forbes magazine described CrossFit as having 13,000 gyms, or “boxes,” worldwide, and an estimated value of $4 billion (https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2015/02/25/how-crossfitbecame-a-4-billion-brand/amp/). With such an explosion in popularity, health and fitness professionals need to become familiar with the CrossFit concept.

Directly involved with CrossFit as an affiliate owner, athlete, coach, and trainer, as well as a health care provider (HCP) to CrossFit athletes since 2008, I have seen the positive impact it can have on the health, fitness, and life of those involved. Designing programming, testing athlete fitness over time to monitor change, and observing the good and not so good quality of movement when athletes perform workouts under fatigue and competition have all given me some insights helpful for those who coach CrossFit athletes, treat CrossFitters, or just want ideas for approaching CrossFit training.

In the simplest of terms, CrossFit is a broad and inclusive fitness approach, blending the abilities of gymnasts, Olympic weightlifters, and sprinters. The methodology incorporates constantly varied functional exercises performed at high intensity. CrossFit attempts to prepare the athlete for the unknown and the unknowable—and specializes in not specializing. Although these overarching themes sound grandiose, the brand’s successful growth in number of affiliated gyms, the CrossFit Games, and the approach’s entry into common exercise vernacular—that is, “Do you CrossFit?”—cannot be ignored. Also, it must be acknowledged that participants see improvements in their fitness levels and, furthermore, they enjoy the challenges and rewards of CrossFit.

An understanding of CrossFit, including types of functional movements, fitness parameters, intake approaches, and workout design, will pave the way for the best practices to follow.

CrossFit features nine foundational movements, typically taught to athletes before they join in ongoing classes. Those movements are: air squat, front squat, overhead squat (see Fig. 27.1), shoulder press, push press (see Fig. 27.2), push jerk (see Fig. 27.3), deadlift, sumo deadlift, high pull (see Fig. 27.4), and medicine ball clean. While being taught, each movement is broken down into simple steps.

CrossFit has identified 10 parameters of fitness, namely: endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, speed, power, agility, accuracy, coordination, and balance. Workouts are designed to improve athletes’ fitness levels in each of these parameters.

CrossFit on-ramping takes place in a myriad of approaches, given there is no set requirement around the number of athletes or the number of sessions a gym (or, in CrossFit terms, box) uses for their intake. Some boxes do one-on-one private intakes, some orient small groups of two to six people, and some handle larger groups of up to 10 or 12 new CrossFitters. The challenge for every CrossFit box is teaching
all the different movements an athlete will encounter in their fitness journey. If we consider just the fundamental movements taught in a Level 1 Cross-Fit trainers course, it is unreasonable to expect a new athlete to become comfortable with all nine without several training sessions. When Olympic lifts (snatch and clean and jerk) (see Figs. 27.5 and 27.6) are included, the learning time would need to be extended further. There are other movements athletes would need to become familiar with as they are likely to be included in a box’s workout of the day (WOD) at various points in time. These more advanced movements include: thruster, handstand push-up, wall ball shot, walking lunge (with or without a weight overhead), ring dips, muscle-ups, pull-ups (strict no kip, kipping, and chest to bar), bar muscle, rope climbs, burpees, rowing, and glute hamstring developer (GHD) sit-ups. Not all new athletes would be able to perform all these movements; indeed, many veteran CrossFitters may not do them all. Nevertheless, they would have to learn how to do a scaled version of the movements or substitute movements as they would be exposed to these exercises in the course of their box’s regular programming. Considering this multitude of movements, and the eventual expectation that athletes perform them at high intensity, intake or on-ramping may require up to ten sessions, learning three or four new movements as well as incorporating a workout into each class.

The CrossFit WOD is an expression of how the CrossFit approach to fitness is constantly varied. Athletes in most CrossFit gyms arrive not knowing what their workout will look like that day. Gyms typically develop a different WOD, each and every day. Depending on how a specific box operates, the WOD might be designed by the affiliate owner, the overall gym programmer, or the individual class trainer or coach. Some days, the WOD could be the same as that posted on the CrossFit Inc. website, meaning simply that the box has chosen that workout as its WOD on that particular day. CrossFit workouts tend to be either task-oriented or time-oriented, which are essentially just different ways of approaching the exercises. In the former, athletes are given a certain task or series of tasks to perform, with the workout length determined by the fitness level and capacity of the athlete. In time-oriented workouts, the trainer moves the athletes through a sequence at preset intervals. The workout orientation is dependent on what the athlete is being asked to do. For example, if the workout is based on participants being able to lift their maximum weight load, it would not be timed. Workout complexity ranges from the singlet (one exercise—e.g., a 10K run—makes up the full workout) to doublet, triplet, and chipper (a longer list of varied exercises), depending on what the trainer feels the athletes most need on any given day.

Certain factors must be considered when designing a CrossFit WOD. For example, is it a regular class with athletes of different levels of experience/exposure to CrossFit or is it a beginner class? If the former, a WOD like “Helen”—three rounds of 400 m run, 21 kettlebell swings, and 12 pull-ups—can easily be scaled up or down to provide adequate stimulus for athletes by changing the run length, the kettlebell weight, or type of pull-up or even tweaking the number of repetitions. Some CrossFit boxes will program each day with different athlete capacities in mind, posting, for instance, Beginner, Level 1, and Competitive versions of the same WOD. Other CrossFits boxes will just modify and adapt the workouts on the fly taking into consideration the athletes attending that particular class. A discussion between athlete and trainer often determines the best option for each person for that day.

CrossFit’s success is largely not only due to its methodological approach but also because of the supportive community engendered within the local affiliate gyms. The folks that suffer together grow together. In fact, at many affiliates, members’ lives become intertwined outside of the gym as much as they do at the gym.