Ways Crossfit Might Not Be As Healthy As People Believe
Crossfit's Risks Outweigh Its Rewards
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- Cayusa
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One scientific paper on ECPs in the military (extreme conditioning programs, of which Crossfit is one) noted that these programs have a disproportionate risk of injury, especially for novices. Another found that 97 out of 132 respondents suffered an injury at some point while doing Crossfit (9 of them requiring surgery).
But more to the point, yet another paper noted that the measurable improvements from participating in Crossfit seem comparable to improvements from more traditional programs. Which raises the question: why risk an activity prone to overtraining and injury if there's no additional measurable benefit?
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Crossfit's Founder Believes Exercise Science Is Made Up
Greg Glassman, the founder of Crossfit, seems to revel in being controversial. As a personal trainer, he used to make clients climb up a column in the middle of the gym, ignoring repeated efforts to get him to stop until he finally got kicked out of the gym entirely. More recently, he commented that "No successful strength and conditioning program has anywhere ever been derived from scientific principles," and added that anyone claiming to have done so was "guilty of fraud."
This kind of thinking is both patently untrue and outright dangerous, especially when poorly thought out programming can lead to participants suffering kidney failure because someone designed a program by picking exercises out of a hat.
Kipping Pull-Ups Are Worse Than Pointless
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- benwarren
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One of the most recognizable Crossfit exercises is the kipping pull-up, which involves swinging the legs forward to provide momentum that propels the rest of the body from a "down" position into an "up" position. In other words, it eliminates the part of the pull-up that actually requires arm strength and replaces it with… flopping, sort of. This is already silly enough without the added complication that the motion puts undue stress on the front of the shoulder capsule, which leads to a whole host of other problems.
That instability in the shoulders only increases as you get more fatigued.
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One Of Crossfit's Essential Exercises Serves Only To Obliterate Your Shoulders
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- Amber Karnes
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Sumo deadlift high pulls (SDHPs) are one of the nine core movements in Crossfit. They involve pulling a bar off the floor, standing straight, and lifting your forearms to raise the bar in front of your face. This ending position is the exact same super-vulnerable position that physical therapists put you in to test for shoulder impingement, and doing it with a weight in your hands is effectively just asking for injury.
As for whether or not the movement accomplishes anything that other movements can't, coach Patrick McCarty is pretty direct: "The SDHP makes no sense. Zero. It does nothing."
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The GHD Sit-Up Is An Abomination
The GHD in the title of this exercise stands for "glute ham(string) developer," which is a type of bench normally used to—wait for it—develop your glutes and hamstrings. Crossfit has adopted an exercise that uses this machine backwards, essentially an extremely exaggerated sit up that looks more like an interrogation method than an exercise. The problem, as explained by spinal expert Dr. Stuart McGill, is that the spine is simply not capable of repeated extension like this without eventually suffering damage, especially not in conjunction with other spinal stressors in the same workout.
There are alternative exercises that accomplish the exact same thing without risking lifelong back pain.
Doing Olympic Lifts For Time Is A Disaster Waiting to Happen
Many Crossfit programs involve doing as many explosive Olympic lifts as possible in a set time period. The problem is that these explosive movements are technically difficult and only safe to perform when they're not rushed, and rushing them is the entire point of Crossfit. It's like showing off by doing a backfip versus committing to doing a hundred backflips in a row as fast as possible; the former is cool and the latter is begging for injury, because you can't sustain the necessary coordination for that long.
High-rep Olympic lifting is one of the most dangerous things you can do in the gym, especially for inexperienced lifters.
Crossfit Encourages Sloppy Form
Forcing your way through more repetitions in a shorter time doesn't only put you in a potentially dangerous situation, it actively encourages lifting in a counterproductive way. If you're walking around with a thumbtack in one shoe, your whole stride is going to be awkward, because you're adjusting everything to avoid that discomfort; the same thing happens if you're pushing through knee pain and shoulder fatigue just to complete your reps the fastest.
Fitness writer Bryan Krahn explains that he was taught, in so many words, that Crossfit coaches don't even want correct form; they want what they call "Crossfit slop." Lifting the right way is actually deemed inferior to lifting messily. It's part of the ethos.
Crossfit Coaches Are Not Necessarily Qualified To Coach Crossfit
To be clear, this isn't unique to Crossfit; getting certified as a personal trainer is nowhere near as rigorous as becoming, for example, a physical therapist. Physical therapists go to school for years and have doctoral degrees; personal trainers can pass a test and get certified in one day. But Crossfit involves more physically demanding and technically complex movements than the average gymgoer's workout.
Crossfit coach Patrick McCarty himself explains that the two-day-long L1 Certification course in no way prepared him to coach Crossfit, and that it took him years to finally feel that he was coaching effectively.
Crossfit's Own Mascots Make Light Of Serious Self-Injury
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- national museum of american history
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Crossfit doesn't really have an official mascot, but it has two unofficial ones that pretty well summarize the Crossfit ethos. The first is Pukie the Clown, a dizzied clown who has collapsed onto the floor to clutch his chest and vomit, as all rational people aspire to. Pukie is bad enough, but worse is Uncle Rhabdo, another clown, but this time hooked up do a dialysis machine and oozing blood. He also appears to have been eviscerated by the power of Crossfit.
He represents exertional rhabdomyolysis, the condition in which a person pushes strenuous exercise so far beyond the point of fatigue that his muscles break down and he suffers kidney failure. There are multiple risk factors for this condition, but high-intensity exercise and pushing beyond your conditioning are two of the major ones (both of which are pretty much the Crossfit raison d'etre).
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The Olympic Snatch Is Bad For Your Knees, And Your Continued Existence
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- Sum_of_Marc
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If you're not familiar with it, the snatch is the movement most associated with Olympic weightlifting. (The lifter starts out squatting on the ground and explodes upward, using that momentum to lock their arms and finish standing with the bar above their head.) San Diego trainer Jason Bell explains that the snatch isn't only stressful on the knees, but also on the elbows and shoulders (which are, incidentally, three of the most commonly injured joints).
On top of that, it's one of the only lifts that ends with the bar propelled above the lifter's head, and that's exactly where it's going to fall if the lifter hasn't practiced bailing out of the lift safely.
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You May End Up Peeing During Workouts
Crossfit's lionization of maximum effort above all else extends to women urinating during workouts, too. The primary offender here is the double-under, a jump rope exercise that involves whipping the rope beneath the feet twice during one jump. Many of the articles and blog posts on this subject are almost confrontationally proud—of course we pee during workouts, that's how hard they are!—but someone like a pelvic physical therapist is likely to suggest PT alternatives that don't involve suffering through public urination out of some misguided sense of toughness.
