About six months ago, I started working out at CrossFit NYC, a CrossFit affiliate in the Flatiron district. I promised myself that I’d give it six months and now that the period is coming up, I’m still enjoying it, and I’m happy I started, but I’m a bit on the fence about continuing for a couple of reasons. Since I said I’d give it six months, I was reluctant to review the program immediately before I saw what sort of results I got.
CrossFit is a general physical conditioning program. It’s not designed to offer sports-specific training, but rather to cover a lot of different “functional movements.” Some workouts involve Olympic Weightlifting and Powerlifting. Some include body weight exercises like pullups and pushups. So many pullups and pushups. So many. Still others involve metabolic conditioning drills built around swings or jumps. The most difficult combine all of these. Workouts are designed to be brief, very intense and to avoid specialization in a single aspect of athleticism. Its weightlifting tends to focus on compound movements like the clean and jerk or big lifts like the squat rather than things like isolated curls. Actually there are no curls and my biceps are just fine. Thanks for asking. The workout centers around warm-ups, skill work, and a programmed workout of the day that everyone does. If you can’t do the workout of the day, or WOD, you scale it down.
In practice, this means sometimes you get case of butt arms that you can’t raise above you head. It also means that if you’re as weak as I was before starting, you develop a lot more physical power than you had before CrossFit. On days you can get your arms above your head.
There are a lot of positive experiences I’ve had working out at CrossFit NYC. The coaching and community are really top-notch. That’s important: the workouts and their individual components can be difficult enough to be dangerous. Having good coaches and a lot of athletes who would qualify as good coaches working out with you helps mitigate some of that risk. If I were looking at another CrossFit affiliate, the quality of coaching would be a very serious concern to me. There are different levels of coaching in CrossFit and from what I’ve heard, it’s almost impossible not to pass the Level 1 instructor certification. Good way to build a community and generate training revenue to support that community, I suppose, but frankly, I’m uncoordinated and sloppy enough when I lift to need better supervision than the coaching you might get from someone who passed by attending. It’s really not you, it’s me. I have to point out that this hasn’t been a problem at CrossFit NYC or at any of the affiliates I’ve visited or worked out with since starting this program, I’ve only seen these complaints about other locations or trainers, second-hand on the net.
Another thing that’s good about the program is that the level of performance that’s expected is beyond what I would program for myself. As an example, I’ve done a couple of workouts recently that called for 100 pullups as part of the work. There’s no way I would even work towards being able to do something like that without a coached program. I’d consider 3 sets of 10 to be heroic. There’s a bit of a flip side to this in that you have to have the common sense to scale some efforts down and for me, personally, I’ve noticed that I tend to convince myself not to against the well-repeated advice of most of the CrossFit NYC coaches to “scale, scale, scale.”
So, the results? I’m a lot stronger overall, than when I began. I can prove it. I’ve lost about 10 pounds, but can still outeat any training program and wasn’t really looking to drop the extra pounds. The conditioning is such that I just did my best half-marathon on maybe one 5 K run a month and two sprint workouts a week. In that sense I’m satisfied and have only the program to thank for the results. On the fitness side, the only thing I really miss is long runs in Central Park.
I also have managed to reinjure my knee in exactly the same way that running damages it, so no luck there. I was originally hoping to do CrossFit to get around running overuse injuries and seem to have just traded that for the reality that a bad knee doing too many squats and push presses also gets injured. This also seems to come down to a scaling and programming question and that’s where I start to wonder generically about some parts of CrossFit’s programming.
One disappointment I had was that the workout wasn’t the easy option that I thought it would be. It would be so nice to join a gym, go in on my lunch break, warm-up, do a 12 minute metabolic conditioning workout, and head out in under a half-hour. That’s what the program appears to allow from the outside. But given the need for coaching, that’s fairly impossible for the staff unless they constantly worked the floor. So, there are only a certain number of classes to attend in the day, and a lot of waiting around for classes to start, getting signed in, warming up with groups, cooling down. It basically ends up being an hour workout, plus the commute and waiting around time. All well and good, but that’s a lot of time to spend on a general physical conditioning program.
This leads me to one negative side-effect of the program: people like it enough that it sometimes gets treated as the be all and end all of fitness and sport. CrossFit is not shy about calling itself an elite program and taking other gyms to task. If you’re spending that much time looking at websites about your workout, hanging around your gym, thinking about your workout, buying products related to your workout, eating the food your workout says you should eat, getting drinks with the people you work out with, writing blog entries about your workout, etc., two things happen.
Firstly, your general physical program suddenly becomes the overall thing that you emphasize at the expense of other sport and activity, be it for for a lack of time or a diminishing interest. This is not a critique of others, it’s happened to me along the way. I should again point out this is a problem that CrossFit NYC is very good about countering — the staff constantly encourages athletes to have CrossFit carry over into other activities and actively seeks out and encourages this. It’s taken me a while to get to the point where I now see it as a tool to help my endurance work, not as a means unto itself.
Secondly, people doing CrossFit seem to push it as the best possible program for everything from lifting to endurance sports to military training at the exclusion of programs which work for other people and in some cases seemingly on not much more than faith in the program and brand. When the debate is just about generic fitness, it’s pretty easy to understand and ignore. People have been arguing about their programs since Ogg first chased Grog around the plains with a club and CrossFit has a lot of strong points to fall back on. It’s easy to go “ok, ok, who cares?” When you hear the occasional CrossFit enthusiast push CrossFit as a solution to poverty, AIDS, war, cancer and myopia in adult clownfish, you’re into eye-rolling territory.
I am exaggerating here a bit… but when you find me wandering down the streets of Santa Cruz wearing nothing but Vibram Five Fingers, Board Shorts and a watch cap, remind me that I was concerned about this at one time and then ask me how my Fran time is coming along.
On the fitness side of things, CrossFit does have a point — done properly it gets people into great shape, possibly the greatest shape of their life. However, it’s not the only thing that might do that. I know a lot of people who are fantastic athletes, no CrossFit in sight. The tendency to propose monolithic solutions combined with people’s tendency to discuss it on the bully pulpit of the Internet can make it sound like a cult at times. Us vs. them comparisions about your gym are all well and good, but there are some very fit and fast thems out there that you should respect and learn from. Given the amount of material CrossFit has absorbed from other disciplines, I’d say that on balance the program itself has done that.
And perhaps in the end, it’s impossible for CrossFit to be the be all and end all of conditioning programs because it isn’t tailored to the individual. Everyone does the same workout of the day. It leaves the responsibility to work on their weakness up to the individual athlete. I’m fairly certain most CrossFitters would argue that’s entirely positive. Perhaps it is, if you understand that process and are treating it as a foundation. A truly elite ahtlete might need a lot more programming and attention to detail.
All of this is turning into a negative critique and it wasn’t meant to be. I really do like the program, results, coaches, athletes and the gym itself. It’s fun. Great, painful fun. I am not an elite athlete, so I’m less worried about programming and personal planning than I am with scaling back on WODs to the point where I don’t screw up my knee. I would definitely recommend the program with the warning that it might not be for everyone, no matter what some people might claim. We’ll see where this goes.
