Competetive olympic weightlifter here. Crossfit still gets a lot of hate, as comments below show. That's undeserved. They create a lot of attention for barbell training where there previously was none. That's fantastic. More places for me to train, suddenly people understand you why its fun and there's a whole market opening up of quality and affordable gear (iron too) that previously wasn't even an option. There's crossfit boxes organizing WL competitions with actual WL rules because they think its cooler. There's even crossfit boxes with strongman and powerlifting equipment. Crossfit pulled strength training out of its niche and is starting to overule the rediculous, overcommercial rotten fitness industry as it is now. It's a new fitness concept _with actual results_.
The main problem, as I see it, is that it's near trivial to get a Coach Level 1 certificate (my mom could do it). This results in a lot of bad coaching, resulting in bad form, resulting in unneeded injuries. You could argue that an easy certificate makes it easier to open up a box. Interesting trade off.
There are plenty of crossfit boxes, although I do not know if this is a majority, that hire real weightlifting coaches.
I can't help but think that much of the hate crossfit gets is just some form of resentment. Barbell training used to be unique, now it's getting more popular, and people feel attacked on a personal level.
I think you nailed the biggest actual issue with Crossfit. Bad coaching teaching bad form. My physical therapist wife cringes whenever she sees Crossfit in action.
Also, the misdirected resentment likely comes from some Crossfit people preaching it like a cult. Just like anything, there's people that take it too far.
With that being said, if the movements are done correctly, I don't see how Crossfit is all that bad
> They create a lot of attention for barbell training where there previously was none.
This. As a powerlifter I used to hate everything about crossfit, but now I realize it's a great way to get people away from pseudo body building and into the rack / onto the platform. I think a lot of people find technical lifts like the squat or clean to be very intimidating, but crossfit helps people get over this fear in a group environment. Once this has been accomplished and someone gets comfortable, it's fairly easy to steer them towards olympic lifting or powerlifting.
> More places for me to train, suddenly people understand you why its fun
It's so nice to now be able to travel and not have to worry about being stuck in some crappy commercial gym where people yell at you for using chalk and making noise while deadlifting.
That is exactly what happened to me. I was an avid runner who joined a friend in Crossfit. Ended up loving squats and got into powerlifting. I now workout at an old 1000 year old powerlifting gym, but I never would be here without crossfit.
The main issue I take with crossfit is the programming. Bad coaching and a prevalence of speed and reps over form is one set of problems but perhaps greater is the intrinsic lack of good solid progression in the workouts.
A lot of these people are more or less wasting their time grinding out workouts that have no real rhyme or reason to them when they could be putting all that perspiration into good linear progression and actually increasing their strength and performance.
There's also a pervasive smugness in a lot of these boxes. It almost seems to be part of the workout; thinking you're some kind of superhuman and better than everyone else.
I disagree. There are plenty of coaches that get programming wrong in any sport. If they do programming themselves without any knowledge on the topic, ofcourse it's going to be problematic. And that happens in WL and other strength sports just as much.
That said, many newbies will make _a lot_ of gains when they start out doing crossfit or any form of barbell training.
As others have said, the best thing CrossFit has done is introduce people to the barbell, and more importantly, Mark Rippetoe. Rip was the barbell SME for CrossFit in the early years and while they parted ways, a lot of CrossFitters still find Rip when they want to get more serious about training strength.
He has literally written the textbook [1] on the 5 basic lifts giving a complete anotomical and mechanical breakdown of each that I think the HN crowd would appreciate, which at $10 for the kindle version is worth it at 10x the price. His website [2] and YouTube channel also provide a large amount of free resources for anyone interested in learning about barbell lifting.
Rippetoe is all about gaining weight and putting on muscle. Probably not practical for most people. I'd also be hesitant to teach yourself both how to deadlift and squat - I hurt myself doing both after reading Rippetoe, despite the detailed instructions.
Also, according to Nick Curson (coach of UFC Champion Rafael Dos Anjos) on the Joe Rogan podcast, heavy slow weight lifting is counterproductive for most sports [1] [2]
Rippetoe is all about being strong, because being strong is better than being weak. For the average dude starting to lift, that will likely involve gaining weight and adding muscle. This is, however, not the be all and end all of what he is talking about.
Please take a look at Gus, a woman in her 90s who has recently started to train at Rip's gym and has improved her quality of life such that she no longer requires her walker.
It's hard to hurt yourself if you truly read the book, because if you start with an empty bar and only add small amounts of weight using the proper form (as the book instructs) it's tough to hurt yourself.
If anyone needs some help with barbell form you can drop into the forums where coaches will gladly review a video for you, or if necessary find someone to help you in person.
And before I fall down the rabbit hole of repeating Rip's gospel word for word, what a coach says they do for an elite athlete has little bearing on the general population. Elite athelets are genetic freaks that could be trained in many ways and still achieve their results.
Lifting heavy is not going to slow you down or make you big, it's going to get you strong. Training for strength and practicing your sport of choice will just make you a stronger version of your previous self. If you train and eat like a power lifter you are not going to be able to maintain your 3:30 marathon time, but if you add in properly programmed strength training for the goals you are looking to achieve, it is petty hard to argue that being stronger is worse than being weaker all other things being equal.
Hey, don't worry about down votes, it's only internet points.
I don't think strength is bad, but: you only have so many training hours and you might want to spend some of them on balance or flexibility instead. Further, it's possible to have such a volume of muscle that you cannot achieve certain positions (e.g. trying to touch your elbows together leaves an 8 inch gap). And it's also possible for your muscles to weigh so much that you can't move as gracefully because equilibrium is harder to maintain. That's all I meant. Ask any dancer, yogi, acrobat, gymnast, skier, martial artist, figure skater, etc. Any discipline where you need strength, balance, and flexibility in approximately equal measure, it's possible to overtrain or undertrain any one of them.
True, I misspoke, and thanks for the link. But Curson's stuff has made me rethink the practicality of heavy, slow lifting. He does think that it will slow you down.
I second Mr. Rippetoe's work. Starting Strength is a great book for those learning to lift. The technical detail he goes into is lost on a lot of people, but I really enjoyed how thorough he was.
It's lifting not the barbell that is the great thing. Outside of lifting the barbell is an abused piece of equipment in men's fitness. Barbell presses and squats have long been the staple of men's fitness. The first contributes to many shoulder injury and the later to lower back injuries. Then there is also the psychology of our desire to slide on huge plates. As well as lifting, our rediscover of bells and balls and movements that activate our "stabilizer muscles" and more systens is the best thing.
There is absolutely nothing inherently dangerous or injury prone in lifting a barbell. It is the second part, the desire to slide on huge plates that gets people in trouble. One could say the same thing about someone who decides they are going to run a marathon, slide on their 5 year old Nikes, and heel strike their way to a knee replacement.
I do say, once you have had the experience of 400 pounds loaded on your back, there isn't a muscle in your body, stabilizer or otherwise, that isn't 'activated'. There are not many other movements out there, and none that can be progressively loaded and trained, that will match a back squat to proper depth for engaging more of the body's muscle systems.
A barbell bench press is not ergonomic. Keeping your hands at a fixed distance throughout the movement is not ergonomic.
We'll have to disagree on the progressive loading and training. For most people there are high impact, safer movements than barbell squats. An example being the kettlebell swing.
Cross-fit and its boxes is doing a lot of damage to the reputation of traditional bar bell training by emphasizing weight and reps over form and technique.
Many people are getting insured and have long term damage because of poor form and techniques taught by Cross-fit. Even if this is done by box owners it is up to cross-fit to manage their brand and not certify coaches that aren't ready.
If you want to get in shape, spend the time an learn the proper techniques. There are no short cuts, it takes years and you need to listen to your body. Don't power through pain or it will catch up with you later.
> Cross-fit and its boxes is doing a lot of damage to the reputation of traditional bar bell training by emphasizing weight and reps over form and technique.
I dunno, traditional bar bell weightlifting's reputation as some hard thing for which most people casually interested in fitness want a shortcut, which its had AFAICT pretty much as long as I've been alive, seems pretty solidly intact and unthreatened by Cross-Fit.
If Cross-Fit is certifying unready coaches producing a wave of injuries that eventually are going to get notice, the reputation damaged will be Cross-Fit's.
Is this a serious common modern belief? Weightlifting was exceedingly popular in my youth, which by millenial scale was ancient history but in actual real terms was in living memory.
The account name "oldmanjay" suggests to me that the "exceedingly popular in my youth" refers to the first "renaissance in the anglosphere".
That is, http://www.awf.com.au/history/HallOfFame.aspx says that the 1970s were "“the golden years” of the sport" in Australia, and there are many here who were youths in the 1970s.
So when you write "Almost nobody knew what weightlifting was", what population were you considering? If it's predominately those in their 20s ("millenial scale") then you should consider oldmanjay's comment as suggesting there's a bias error in your 'almost nobody.'
There's a clear drop in British English during the 1980s, which is what I would expect from your first/second renaissance description, but it doesn't exist in the US English chart. So another possibility is that oldmanjay comes from the US.
Under "Number of Lifters in the Top 10 Male Rankings by State" are 58 from Western Australia, and under "Number of Lifters in the Top 10 Female Rankings by State" are 39 from Western Australia. This sounds like there were easily more than three dozen registered weightlifters in WA. I didn't carefully check to see if there were duplicate names, but a spot examination shows few overlaps. And in any case, these are only the top 10 winners.
How do you know there were "perhaps three dozen registered weightlifters in Western Australia" when the limited evidence I can find suggests there were more than that?
> there are many here who were youths in the 1970s.
The 70s are definitely before my time.
Going on what I read from those who were adults in the 70s, it seems like the golden era for the anglosphere was the 50s and 60s. By the 1970s the Russians dominated the sport.
> This sounds like there were easily more than three dozen registered weightlifters in WA.
There's a capitation table. 77 registered lifters (~six dozen, I was off by 2x) in the whole of WA in 2007. In 2008 it fell to 68. I can't find more recent numbers, they seem to have stopped publishing the capitation table.
For what it's worth, I competed for five years, during which Crossfit exploded in popularity. They have been a massive shot in the arm for strength sports. It used to be that I'd say I was a weightlifter and people would ask me for tips on bicep curls. Now I have a chance that someone will ask me about my competition total.
Thanks for the explanation of the PDF. I've never heard of the term 'capitation table'.
That still leaves the possibility that there's a difference between US/Commonwealth practices, that is, that you use 'anglosphere' where perhaps 'Commonwealth' is a more appropriate term?
For another US data point, the gym I went to in ~2005 had a stronger emphasis on weight lifting. http://www.carlandsandras.com/ . It's "Under the direction of Carl Miller, former United States National, Olympic, and World Weightlifting Coach", and one of the men in the first salsa class I went to, back in around 2000, was an amateur weightlifter.
Which means that I, like oldmanjay, find it hard to accept that 'Almost nobody knew what weightlifting was' before 2007.
Well, yes. (I thought were were discussing possible sources of those differences, rather than leaving it with a "just", but I also recognize that at this point it's the sort of pointless research that easily distracts me.)
Special training, community, certifications and needing a physical location are all part of a very inelegant solution to a straight forward problem. The whole thing (imo) is ridiculous racket.
That's great for you, but let's be clear here: bodyweight training isn't going to get you results as quickly as barbell training. I say this with no malevolence: I do bodyweight training all the time. Bodyweight training is perfect maintenance exercise when you're already in good shape because you can do it anywhere with minimal equipment. But if you aren't in good shape, it's going to take years to get the results from body weight training that you'd get from barbell training in months.
Barbell training does require a physical location for obvious reasons. And community might not be helpful for HN introverts, but most people are extroverts.
Certifications are also a good idea for safety reasons: improper lifting is dangerous. However, this is an area where Crossfit is plenty open to criticism: I'm not sure what goes into getting a Crossfit certification, but whatever it is it's just wrong.
You have to have strength to weight ratio far greater than the average westerner (remember that statistically half the population is female) to make serious use of pull up bars and rings.
CrossFit equipment tends to get wear and tear much faster than a regular gym.
I remember my box owners face wince with pain every time someone "dumped" (dropped from height) a nice Olympic weightlifting bar to the ground. Those things have moving parts and are expensive!
Olympic bars are designed to be dropped as part of their normal usage. People's shoulders and backs are not designed to absorb the force of lowering the bar from overhead after a snatch or clean and jerk.
Just watch a video of an olypmic weightlifting competition or training session (there's plenty on youtube). You'll see these bars being dropped -- in fact you'll basically never see them lowered under control after a snatch or clean and jerk.
Yes these they are designed to be dropped. Your friend should: ensure they have proper bumper plates, ensure they have a proper lifting platform, factor in the cost of replacing the bars when worn out to their cash flow models.
EDIT and like the other guys said actually buy quality branded olympic bars. (Rather than e.g. power lifting bars which will not be intended for dropping.)
Didn't read the whole article (too many clickthroughs) but I'm fairly familiar with the Crossfit model.
The problem with any gym is scaling. You have limited floorspace = limited number of members = limited revenue. To scale out it seems you need to open more gyms, with high fixed cost for each new location---that is, high marginal cost. This is the model most gym chains have taken.
The genius of the Crossfit business model is it scales without incurring high marginal cost. It does this by using an affiliate model. Affiliates pay a fee to be able to display the Crossfit branch and take on the risk and overhead of the new location. This is basically what fast-food franchises do, and similar to what companies like Uber are doing to achieve scale.
Now it is probably quite difficult to make good money as a Crossfit affiliate, for all the reasons that gyms have difficulty scaling, but Crossfit HQ doesn't have to care about that. There are always more young hopefuls to start a new "box".
(O bars are designed to be dropped. I doubt that is a major issue.)
I don't understand how franchising is supposed to solve the problem of "serving more customers means having to rent (or buy) more land". The franchisee still needs just as much land to serve his customers; the fee you can charge him has to take that into account. How does this make scaling any cheaper?
I thought the point of the franchise model was that your franchisees, instead of you, keep any surplus money that they generate, giving them much stronger incentives to succeed under your brand. Compare:
1. Local outpost of a chain store that doesn't franchise. The manager, like everyone under him, is paid a salary, and whatever money is left over after paying the store expenses goes back to corporate. This model is illustrated by a scene from The Sopranos (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz0uEzRSWXw ) in which the manager of a Starbucks has to break it to the mafia that he can't pay protection money because he doesn't have any discretionary funding.
2. Local franchise. The owner has no salary. Instead, he keeps whatever money is left over after paying the store expenses. This is likely to have several different benefits: the owner may feel like putting in extra time at his store. If the janitor has an emergency, maybe the McDonald's owner will clean the bathrooms himself. Similarly, the owner may take a different view toward cashiers dipping into the till than a salaried manager would. And the owner's pricing decisions are much more informed, and therefore more likely to be correct, than the pricing decisions corporate would make.
So with the distinction I describe, scaling your brand as a franchise rather than a chain boils down to one difference: in a chain your store operators are salaried and you keep all the extra money, whereas in a franchise you are salaried and your store operators keep the extra money (you might take a percentage, or a flat fee up front, or some combination. I don't know). Paying your store operators that much more under the franchise model means you can expect them to do more difficult and demanding work. It's not all about marketing.
> CrossFit people tend to get wear and tear much faster than at a regular gym.
True! I remember a physio (who happened to work closely with a box) say that CrossFit is a great way of finding out all these niggles and problems you never knew you had, and then turning them into ailments or injuries, which of course need more treatment and attention.
Outside as a legitimate source of anything is a joke. That publication is the National Enquirer of the outdoor sports world. As far as the 'CrossFit causes more injuries' meme (which incidentally has been promoted by people with a vested interest in CrossFit competitors,) is there any data to support the allegations? Outside is the same publication that declared Manaslu too dangerous for commercial expeditions and promotes a wide range of falsehoods and distortions about Everest. If their track record on mountaineering coverage is any indicator, their CrossFit articles are likely equally biased and inaccurate.
As the article mentions, when you try to do as many reps of say an Olympic lift in a certain amount of time - like the squat, it's very easy to undermine proper form, which is what leads to injuries in CrossFit. Since Crossfit is gaining popularity, a lot of these types of lifts are introduced and learned within a Crossfit gym, so there's little time to be acquainted with the proper way to do the lift.
Thus, when someone leaves/quits the gym, they're not leaving with much of value: the strength they gain isn't specific to any one sport (unless that sport is, "CrossFit" which is also a headscratcher), and the exercises they've learned could have been done for years improperly. That's another recipe for injury.
That's a lot of strange minuses for a gym that's very expensive to belong to.
My comment was a joke, but the problem with injuries due to improper form while lifting is very real. It's not specific to CrossFit, but as I've mentioned, the focus on # reps in a specific amount of time can exasperates that problem.
I myself have no investment in any commercial competitors of CrossFit. I'm a very fit person, but not in any way to CrossFit would measure. What I see personally in a CrossFit physique is a lot of muscle and weight that doesn't do a lot of good in the areas of sport that I practice: running, cycling, and climbing - all of which benefit from a strength to weight ratio that would not be attainable utilizing a CrossFit regime. CrossFit ideas have been attempted to be shoehorned into these things (CrossFit Endurance), but it's seemed as somewhat of a joke, if you're anything close to an elite athlete.
I think you'll find that actually the bar will not bend in any way if it's dropped onto the ground with weight on. You won't bend or damage a bar unless it's dropped onto supports on a rack, and if you're doing Crossfit, it's highly likely you're dropping it on the floor, so this isn't an issue.
I would recommend ELEIKO, they cost ten times more, but will also hold for fifty years. If you can come over old ELEIKO bars and discs, it will be a bargain!
The main problem, as I see it, is that it's near trivial to get a Coach Level 1 certificate (my mom could do it). This results in a lot of bad coaching, resulting in bad form, resulting in unneeded injuries. You could argue that an easy certificate makes it easier to open up a box. Interesting trade off.
There are plenty of crossfit boxes, although I do not know if this is a majority, that hire real weightlifting coaches.
I can't help but think that much of the hate crossfit gets is just some form of resentment. Barbell training used to be unique, now it's getting more popular, and people feel attacked on a personal level.
All that said, good coaching, especially with big weights, is very important. It's a shame not every crossfit box owner thinks that way. Some of the injuries are bad. https://medium.com/@ericrobertson/crossfits-dirty-little-sec...