Comments on: “CultFit”

By: Sister Christian

Sister Christian — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:45:40 +0000

People at the top, real performers, carry out their WODs under the most dangerous circumstances. DangerWOD:
http://dangerwod.blogspot.com/2010/12/unknown-and-unknowable.html

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 12 May 2012 12:35:10 +0000

I have been doing Crossfit for 2 months now and I certainly can grasp the point of view you are posting. Yes it has cult like aspects, the way you present the ideas definitely ticked boxes in my head as you described the cult like similarities. I’m not going to say you are wrong, but I don’t think you have everything right. I don’t want to be good at any particular sport, I am doing Crossfit simply to get fit. I am someone that has done many different gym workouts over the years and recently came back to fitness after a 1 year hiatus and I was very out of shape. The crossfit gym is very different to how you have described above. I have felt that safety has been paramount with the learning of any new movement. On many occasions we have been warned that during a workout if they see us doing it wrong they will stop us and make us drop the weight to ensure the exercise is done correctly. What has helped me is the cult like aspect, to be honest with you I have never pushed myself as much as i currently am and I think that’s a good thing, because there was alot more in me than I ever realised. The cult like aspect has brought a great deal of support for my progression. Noone cares if I run the distance slower than them, but they sure congratulate me when I finish. Which is refreshing from other gyms, where you can get looks from the people that are currently in shape and are standing there in front of a mirror with their shirt off wondering if they should punch another syringe. At these gyms you dont get respect until you get back in to shape again. At crossfit you get respect for giving it the best go you could. Its expensive yeah, but not as much as a personal trainer 5 days a week. The exercises I have been exposed to and the scaling to achieve them has been for more helpful than the assistant sitting behind the counter trying to explain an exercise without getting off there arse. I am getting back to my old self much quicker than I ever have done and the parts that are sore should be sore(because I exercised.) I don’t think you can call it a cult, maybe a religion haha. Like all religions you can have your fundamentalists, but the morals of the general religion are in the right place.

By: iHeartCrossfit

iHeartCrossfit — Wed, 02 May 2012 02:28:26 +0000

Scroll to the bottom of this page.
http://www.forgingelitesarcasm.com/2011/08/elite-media-gas-masks-are-the-new-weighted-vests.html
That baby is fucking elite! The guy behind the baby… well?

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:31:48 +0000

This hit the nail on the head. Here are some valuable things I attained from months of CrossFit: a finger fractured in two places, back and joint pain, and severely decreased flexibility. Even better, the head “coach” sexually harassed me. I guess you could say that it changed my life, then. Over $100 a month for physical pain and mild molestation.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:28:01 +0000

Great article. When Greg Glassman starts doing his own program, and gets in shape, then I will consider giving credibility to the program. He admitted in a New York Times article that he is too busy running the business of Crossfit to do Crossfit. What a joke! I do P90X, P90X2, Inanity, Insanity Asylum, etc. At least the trainers of these programs walk the walk and dont just talk the talk like Glassman. Tony Horton is the same age as Glassman and he would put a hurting on Glassman at his own Crossfit games.

By: Chun-the-veggiegrinder

Chun-the-veggiegrinder — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:05:50 +0000

I’ve had similar experience with a Crossfitter as the article above and other posts have mentioned. For example: the Crossfitter said Crossfit was my new family now (which was weird), worked out all the time, spent free time with the team, took photos and videos lifting heavy weights, handstand pushups, and posting them online, etc.. All of this appears to be common and cliche among Crossfitters. Apparently they are preaching “Crossfit is your family now” across the various “boxes” (or gyms if you don’t speak the lingo); that is really fucking weird.

Anyway, I’d like to post or repost a comment by Mike Caviston from http://www.sealswcc.com/forums/. I hate “death dealin, poser-military, bad ass wannabe warriors” and Caviston’s comments below, as well as others on that forum, defeat the wannabe poser. Caviston writes the following:

Re: Crossfit with supplementation vs. PTG

My recommendation to anyone planning to enter the SEAL or SWCC selection pipelines is to steer clear of Crossfit and Crossfit Endurance. Crossfit is not compatible with the Physical Training Guide. This came up on SEALSWCC.com a couple years ago and I dealt with it pretty thoroughly then. My original comments were lost when the forum was last upgraded, but I’m not going to reproduce them here since with a little googling you can find my original comments as well as a lot of discussion by others. My analysis was dissected on message boards on many websites including crossfit.com, irongarmx.net, navyseals.com, and performancemenu.com. I’ll emphasize a few points here and leave it at that.

There is a general perception that Crossfit is popular with SEALs (and Crossfit has worked hard to develop that impression). As a result, a number of wannabes wanting to emulate Team guys get into it. The reality is that some Team guys are into Crossfit, or were at one time (I’ve met plenty of rehabilitated Kool-Aid drinkers). Other guys are into Gym Jones or P90x or kettlebellmania and a variety of other fitness crazes. There are Team guys who are triathletes and “endurance junkies” and guys who are focused heavily on lifting weights and spend an inordinate amount of energy on doing bench and curls. There is no clear training paradigm that defines SEALs. Some current or former SEALs have been pretty active in the Crossfit community, moonlighting as instructors or operating “boxes” or working directly for the parent company – this high visibility helps reinforce the notion that NSW has officially adopted Crossfit, though that is certainly not true. Overall, NSW has been developing strategies for educating Operators and providing them with research-based options for enhancing fitness, minimizing injuries, and increasing career longevity.

When I am critical of Crossfit, remember I am talking specifically about the workouts (“WODs”) posted on crossfit.com. There are plenty of spin-offs and variations used by individuals or independently-operated gyms that are called “Crossfit” but bear no resemblance to the .com workouts and have to be evaluated separately on their own merits. I’ve been confronted by plenty of irate “Crossfitters” who tell me they’ve been “Crossfitting” for years and the program has “worked” for them. None of those so-called “Crossfitters” have ever followed the main page program.

Summarizing some of the reasons I don’t approve of Crossfit as conditioning for BUD/S:
· Lack of specificity for a selection course with defined physical requirements (such as running and swimming endurance)
· General lack of emphasis on endurance
· Lack of structure and progression; arbitrary rep schemes (50 or 100 reps for multiple exercises)
· Emphasis on exercises with high risk-to-benefits ratio (kipping pull-ups, SDHP, GHD sit-ups, muscle ups, handstand push-ups)
· Inappropriate formats for Olympic and power lifts (such as 21+ dead lifts for time)
· Exclusion of useful exercises (leg curls, biceps curls)
· Failure to properly emphasize eccentric contractions
· Lack of rotational and lateral movements
· Illogical or ill-advised combinations of exercises
· Prescribing the same workouts for everybody regardless of ability, experience, or health (the concept of “scaling” is poorly defined and left to the inexperienced individual to determine)
· Too many workouts that blend strength and endurance, reducing the effectiveness of each
· Promotion of fad diets (Zone, Paleo)
· Poor technique (for example, shortened ROM to get more reps for time)

So, I would discourage anyone from doing Crossfit as preparation for BUD/S. But you all are adults and free to make your own choices, as well as live with the consequences.
Mike Caviston
Director of Fitness, NSWCEN

By: DoinDaTRexFlex

DoinDaTRexFlex — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:22:32 +0000

The Crossfit Open is this week. For anyone in doubt about Crossfit being a cult, go and read the My Experience With Crossfit and Bio sections on the atheletes. This section gives Crossfitters the opportunity to testify about how Crossfit has impacted them. Yeah, you will see testimony from these people as if Crossfit was Jesus Fucking Christ – Glory Be To Glassman.

A very common statement: I have had a life changing experience due to CrossFit and or something about their Crossfit family, etc.. Some people even pour the heart out talking about how they met their new husbands or boyfriends, wives or girlfriends.

One comment read: My husband discovered CrossFit about four months before I tried it out. It really was a case of kill him or join the madness. Now I’m hooked, can’t stand a day when I don’t visit my CrossFit family!

Yes sweetheart, you would have lost your husband had you not joined the cult or the family!

There’s pics of guys overhead squating some bitch with their shirts off or girls doing handstands on the Crossfit Open site – pure vanity. Glassman you’re a fucking genius; but like your name implies, most of us who are not deaf, dumb, blind, and born to follow, can see right through this shit. Forging elite fitness? Come on! Maybe it should be forging elite vanity.

By: Xlete

Xlete — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:10:12 +0000

@ Robb – I have to respectfully disagree with you on a few points. Although I may have not been completely clear in my first post about wrestling, what I meant was that wrestling does prepare you for a variety of activities. It conditions your body to lift, sprint, move through a full range of motion, and have full body endurance. Distance running, sprinting, lifting weights and people, explosive hip movements over time, and of course, wrestling skills are an important part of any good wrestling program. Take out the wrestling skills and drills and you have Crossfit.

Crossfit is an organization that makes some strong claims about what Crossfit does. Every affiliate uses “Forging Elite Fitness.” I believe that a good trainer can accomplish these things, whether they are crossfit certified or not. Crossfit claims to be something more, something better… and then they have a bunch of trainers who are not up to par. I have a problem with that.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:27:58 +0000

Lost a family member to Crossfit; the family member claimed that Crossfit was like “[my] new family now.” This “family” or “team” brainwashing to adhere to a six-day workout schedule definitely changed our lives. It’s true, Crossfit will change your life and your friends and family members lives involuntarily. They should consider hiring clinical psychologists to evaluate what is going on with damaged adults at Crossfit affiliates.

The author of this article is right: “This is exercise for vanity not for longevity; this is an ideological struggle for an imagined moment of heroism that will never come.” Crossfit has co-opted a Navy/Marine Corps style of family and fitness without an end goal or purpose. This ends up destroying the individual and the relationships developed prior to Crossfit.

By: Robb B.

Robb B. — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:36:55 +0000

As I read through these responses, It seems that many people have a skewed perception about Crossfit. Crossfit by design is meant to be broad and general. Although it wont make you GREAT at anything, it will however make you GOOD at many things. With any elite athlete, training is dictated by the sport he or she is participating in. Wrestlers orient training around wrestling and things they may encounter on the mat and the same goes for football, baseball, basketball, gymnastics, etc… sport specific athletes = sport specific training. So will crossfit make you a body builder? No it wont… Will it make you a better 3 point shooter in Basketball? Probably not, it will however condition your body to accommodate the possibility of many tasks. This can be seen by its prominent use by military and law enforcement where the demands place on them are dynamic and unknown.
As far as poor random workouts go and crappy trainers, that can be said about any gym, any athletic team, or any certification program. When I was in college there was a saying that went ” What do you call a doctor that graduated at the bottom of his class?”….” You call him a doctor.” In the realm of Crossfit you have good coaches and you have bad coaches. And in gyms you have trainers who care and those who just want your money. So I think by arguing that crossfit trainers are less than adequate is a bit of a moot point. I will say this however, from the stand point of an average Joe, I would rather walk into a crossfit gym with a crappy coach that has some knowledge than to walk into a Huge gym with no coach or trainer and lift on my own with little to no knowledge about training. I know that it was made a point that poor form in crossfit may lead to injury, but what about the average joe who walks into his local globo gym and begins a backsquat that is way to heavy by himself with little to no knowledge? And this happens all the time.

So I think the when it comes to some of the points raised here, I think some are skewed and I think others are applicable to everywhere you go.