Crossfit—you hear about it from your friends, on TV, from your favorite celebrities. You might have come across a Crossfit gym near your place.
You see CrossFit themed shoes, you see CrossFit on ESPN.
Which makes you wonder:
“What is CrossFit? And Is it right for me?”
What is CrossFit?
CrossFit is often advertised as a fitness sport that involves varied, high-intensity functional movements. CrossFit encourages people of all shapes and sizes to improve their health and fitness in an intense but accepting and positive environment.
In simple terms, CrossFit is a training program focused on building strength and conditioning your body through various challenging workouts.
You’ll be doing a different workout each day, and each workout will test a different part of your functional strength or conditioning. This means that instead of focusing on one particular thing, CrossFit aims to build a body that’s capable of virtually anything and everything.
Who Should Do CrossFit?
Anyone can do CrossFit, whatever age or level of fitness. You can modify the program so that anyone can become fitter and healthier. Whoever you are, you can perform a version of the workout.
What this means is there is a specific workout prescribed for everybody that comes to CrossFit. For example, instead of having one workout for older adults and another for hardcore athletes, there’s only one workout each day that is completely scalable according to your skill.
Is CrossFit safe?
Any sport or exercise can be dangerous if done the wrong way. In the wrong situation or with the wrong coaches, and for people with the wrong attitude, CrossFit can be dangerous. But, otherwise this training program is practically safe.
Look for credentialed trainers that provide detailed instructions and coaching to help you move as safely and efficiently as possible. Trainers will help you modify and scale movements so as not to risk injury by pushing you beyond your limits.
If you have concerns about the safety of CrossFit, this is mostly a matter of an individual’s issue rather than the training program’s system as a whole. If you push yourself too hard and too far, you could end up in serious danger.
CrossFit Is For Everyone!
Below is a list of reasons you should try CrossFit!
1. Makes fitness fun!
When was the last time you got excited about exercising? Maybe never, right? For most people, exercising in general is a chore that they’d rather not do, but is necessary. For some, on the other hand, exercising is a great stress-reliever and makes them feel good. Maybe you like working out, but on average most Americans are not getting enough physical activity into their day. CrossFit’s consistently varied, short workouts make exercising fun. Wouldn’t people get better results and reach their fitness goals better if working out became something they wanted to do, rather than had to do?
2. Makes you healthy
CrossFit is “The Sport of Fitness” and so it makes sense to treat everyone who does it as an athlete. As an athlete, you are constantly training to improve your game. Most athletes are in top shape because they take their nutrition seriously. If we apply this kind of mentality within ourselves, fitness won’t be our only goal but wellness as well!
3. Practical and applicable
CrossFit core movements mimic those that we see and use in daily life. For instance, sitting down and standing up (squatting), picking up things from the ground (deadlifting), and putting things on a shelf (standing press).
4. Always new and different
CrossFit exercises are constantly varied which results to little adaptation of stress and creates well-balanced fitness. Doing the same routine again and again brings about a training adaptation. And so, don’t let your routine be just that—a routine.
5. A feeling of community and a sense of teamwork
Pushing yourself beyond your fitness limit is always more challenging when you work alone compared to when you work with a group of friends. CrossFit brings together people who have the same goal in mind: get fit! Working together in a group motivates you to work hard and get equal or even better results than them!
6. Everything is measurable
Weight, girth measurement, gains, and fitness progress—all of them can be measured! Everything is quantifiable in CrossFit. This is why CrossFit has benchmark Workouts of the Day (WODs) that let you test your fitness to improve on the results.
7. Balanced fitness
CrossFit is a mixed training program that aims to improve people’s endurance, stamina, power, strength, agility, speed, flexibility, balance, coordination, and accuracy.
8. Gets you working towards your next goal
CrossFit teaches you to perform plenty of coordinated movements, which may end up super frustrating for beginners. You may try one exercise and find yourself failing at it. You might feel it’s impossible and that you’ll never get it. Just like the famous saying goes, “try and try until you succeed,” so keep trying until you eventually do it right. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll feel amazing. It’s like you’ve accomplished a major feat. After accomplishing one feat, you’ll have to move on to the next goal and then on to the next!
9. It’s necessary
Everyone needs fitness and everyone needs to be healthy and this is where CrossFit comes in. It promotes functional fitness and consistent high-intensity exercises to get you in your best shape!
10. It’s life-changing
You probably have heard a lot of people say how this type of training is unlike any other they have ever done before. Some may even tell you how CrossFit has truly impacted their lives in ways they never could have imagined.
CrossFit is not just about fitness. It’s about building bonds between people. When you join a CrossFit community, you create friendships, strengthen family bonds and form a true fitness community.
