What are your fitness standards?
Andrew Stemler
An introduction to the CrossFit philosophy. If you need a kick up the ass or a new challenge this may open your mind a little.
Sport is not life. Archives are filled with the failures of sporting super stars to perform in real situations. Nature frequently has no rules, no reps, no sets – and certainly no referees.
But training for sports (including bodybuilding) can be exciting, structured, fun and aesthetically pleasing. However, it does not train you to pull your family from a burning house, or pick up your children and run with them to hospital. An emphasis on specialism produces awesome endurance runners who cannot haul their luggage, and superbly strong men who would collapse after jogging a mile. At Cross-Fit we look for the middle road; unfortunately it’s a hard road. Damn Hard.
Many people embark on fitness regimes that consist of a muddled mix of sports-specific rehabilitation and bodybuilding drills.
If you are injured – you need rehabilitation drills
If you are developing your golf putt – you need sports-specific drills.
If you like posing on a stage wearing fake tan and teeny weenie panties – bodybuilding drills are for you.
Of course, all training should have an aesthetic output- your body should express what it can do. But is there any point in having a Cadillac chassis with a lawn mower engine? (Actually some people think there is: and they are so very special)
We think it is second-rate to embark on a core-conditioning and training regime without a clear idea of what you are going to achieve. Immature goals such as 'reducing my 10k time by four minutes', or 'upping my deadlift by 8%', – while seemingly precise and accurate – are distractingly narrow for the fundamental 'underpinning' training that most people need.
We simply aim to generally prepare you for all types of challenges, by measuring training against three standards.
Crossfit Fitness Standard: ONE
There are ten recognised general physical skills. They are:
1) Endurance (cardio)
2) Endurance (respiratory)
3) Stamina (muscular)
4) Strength
5) Flexibility
6) Power
7) Coordination
8) Agility
9) Balance
10) Accuracy
You are as fit as you are competent in each of these ten skills. A regime only develops fitness if it improves all of these skills.
Improvements in endurance, stamina, strength, and flexibility come about through training -this improves performance through physical changes.
Improvements in coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy come about through practice – which improves the nervous system.
Power and speed are adaptations of both training and practice.
Crossfit Fitness Standard: TWO
We think your training should prepare you for real life. The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks (even unfamiliar ones) combined in infinitely varying combinations. In practice, this encourages you to put aside any prior notions of sets, rest periods, reps, exercises, order of exercises, routines, etc. Nature frequently provides largely unforeseeable challenges; train for that by striving to ‘mix stuff up’. In practise you turn up to training a bit nervous, not knowing what to expect. It helps build will, and bravery.
Crossfit Fitness Standard: THREE
Whoever invented the human body was a bit of a ‘worry puss’– they felt that one energy system just wasn’t safe enough. Rather like the householder who has a real fire place, electric storage heaters and gas central heating. Some would call that greedy, but a cautious person would call it prudent.
The human body has three energy systems.
One for fast reactive movement (diving under car to save your three-year-old toddler), a slower, more extended, but still, a pretty shappy system (for running 350 metres, then diving under a car to save your three-year-old toddler).
Finally, there is the long term ‘trickle’ energy system (the one you use while shoe shopping, running 5k, miles away from any toddlers). For people who have little experience of toddlers, these ‘metabolic engines’ are known as the phosphagen pathway, the glycolytic pathway, and the oxidative pathway. The first, the phosphagen, dominates the highest-powered activities (100 metre sprint), those that last less than about ten seconds.
The second pathway, the glycolytic, dominates moderate-powered activities, those that last up to several minutes (400-800 metre run). The third pathway, the oxidative, dominates low-powered activities, those that last in excess of several minutes (5k run, walking, shopping).
Favoring one or two to the exclusion of the others, and not recognising the impact of excessive training in the oxidative pathway, are arguably the two most common faults in fitness training.
Total fitness – the fitness that Crossfit promotes and develops – requires competency and training in each of these three pathways or engines. Balancing the effects of these three pathways largely determines the how and why of the metabolic conditioning (or ‘cardio’) that we do at Crossfit.
About the Author
Andrew is a little different to most of our team. He is older. He is also very aware of what it is to become More-Athletic. A sedentary chap in 1997, at age 37, he gave up a life devoted to cigarettes (a 100 a day habit) and began getting fit. Since then he has amassed a huge list of certifications, has embarked on a Sports Science Degree and has become London’s first level II CrossFit trainer. He’s a huge advocate of the CrossFit method, but still very much his own man. He is constantly studying and looking to improve coaching standards and is a great addition to the team. Although he does tend to wear a neck scarf that most people think doesn’t suit him. Check out CrossFit London at Crossfitlondonuk.com for more from Andrew and his team.
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