What Is CrossFit, Actually?

Since its founding in 200o and the opening of the first gym in Santa Cruz, California, USA a year later, CrossFit has gone from a counter-culture fitness fad done in garages, to a global training phenomenon with well over 15,000 affiliated gyms.

CrossFit is both a way of training and a competitive sport that incorporates strength training, mobility exercises, high-intensity workouts and a balanced diet plan.

The Training Methodology

As a way to train and improve your fitness, it is guided by a set of five principles designed by founder and former CEO, Greg Glassman. They are:

1. Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.
2. Practice and train major lifts: deadlift, clean, squat, presses, clean and jerk, and snatch.
3. Master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits and holds.
4. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense.
5. Regularly learn and play new sports.

Will CrossFit Help You Lose Weight?

Yes, but with the usual caveat - if you regularly burn more calories in any activity than you consume, you will lose weight. The varied and intense nature or CrossFit will help you land on the desired side of that inescapable equation.

People who combined CrossFit and the keto diet significantly decreased weight, body fat percentage and fat mass

How Much Muscle Can You Build with CrossFit?

According to American strength training coach Mark Rippetoe, "CrossFit has provided more people with access to barbells and the motivation to lift them than any other single factor in the past hundred years."

How to Choose the Right CrossFit Gym for You

Firstly, you need to choose the right CrossFit box, and that can be a little more complicated than it seems. Because CrossFit is a community not just a gym, you’ll find it hard to make a decision about whether a box is right for you by just looking it up online. The internet has given us many wonderful things, but the ability to know what a community of CrossFitters is actually like isn’t one of them, yet, so to pick the correct box you actually need to visit it, speak to the owners, and maybe even other members of the gym.

Training CrossFit at Home

If it doesn’t sound like the box is for you, there’s still no reason to miss out. You can train CrossFit the old-fashioned way and do it at home, with minimal equipment, but this option comes with its own risks, so if you’re new to the training programme you may want to graduate to working from home, rather than beginning your CrossFit training there.

The Biggest Misconception about CrossFit is…

peaking on the Nike Trained podcast, three-time CrossFit games champion, Mat Fraser said the biggest misconception about CrossFit is that you have to be at his level to give it a go. This is plain wrong. “You can scale it for any ability,” said Fraser. “I think that’s a big thing to make known.”

CrossFit can be done with just your bodyweight, or with lighter weights, so everyone is able to do something right from their very first class. “It's not necessarily a place where you have to be of a decent level of fitness before you come," says Schouten. "We tailor the sessions, so just because the programme is written on the board, doesn't mean we expect that person to come in the first time and complete the whole thing. They might not complete all of the work and they'll get done what they can, and it depends on the individual, so the coach will generally go through and try and prescribe something that's suitable for them on the day, whether it's their first session or they've been here for three, six or nine months. The more someone comes, the more the coaches will know the level that they're at."