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Posted on: September 8, 2011

A Little Of This, A Little Of That

How to get fit with CrossFit, one of the hottest multidimensional workouts

By Jeff Schnaufer
CTW Features

Where can you find firefighters, senior citizens and teenagers exercising together to improve their quality of life?

CrossFit is a burgeoning strength and conditioning program that utilizes functional movements from weightlifting to gymnastics even as it transcends age, gender and socioeconomic boundaries.

“My youngest current client is 13 and my oldest is 66,” says Danielle Mulford, who owns CrossFit Santa Cruz in California. “Many are middle aged working people with families, some are non athletes and some have competitive athletics backgrounds. Some of our members are college or high school level competitive athletes wanting to get help with their sport conditioning, a few are fire fighters and police officers.”

“CrossFit is an approach to fitness that is broad, general and inclusive,” says Tony Budding, director of media and content for Washington, D.C.-based CrossFit Inc. “CrossFit is not a specific exercise program. It’s a system that maximizes fitness. All CrossFit exercises are functional movements. Functional movements are the natural, essential, ubiquitous movements of life. Outside the gym, we move our bodies and move external objects in three-dimensional space. “ So in CrossFit, participants move their bodies and external objects in three-dimensional space.

“CrossFit’s aim is to increase an individual’s work capacity over broad time and modal domains, regardless of their starting point. Everyone needs to know how - and practice how - to pick things up, get in and out of a chair without using their hands, and put things away on the top shelf,” Mulford says. “Children, elderly, middle aged, well conditioned, couch potato, elite athlete, and novice trainee can all do CrossFit as the workouts can be modified and scaled for fitness level and physical limitations.”

What comprises a CrossFit workout?

“It’s constantly varied in the sense that we feel routine is the enemy,” says Tim Thackrey, owner and trainer at CrossFit North Hollywood in California.

“That means running, jumping, throwing, moving the way your body was meant to move. We do lots of Olympic lifts (clean & jerk, snatch) dead lifts, tons of pull-ups, gymnastic rings, medicine balls, kettle bells, barbells. Just no machines. We don’t use machines.”

These movements are done for either a set amount of repetitions as quickly as can be done safely, Thackrey says. Or they are done for a set amount of time with the goal being how many repetitions or rounds can be completed. Other days participants try to see how much they can lift.

“Our workouts are short, mostly under 20 minutes, many between 5-10, some even less than that,” Thackrey says. “But if you do it right, in that 10 minutes you’ll not only have completed more work than you used to do in two hours at a regular gym, you won’t be able to do another workout that day.”

Thackrey was drawn to CrossFit after he left the US National Taekwondo Team. One “normal gym routine” later, he was starting to think he would never work out again. Then, Thackrey says, he tried a workout from the online site and “got through about half of it before I was crushed. Crushed and extremely happy. I’ve never worked out a different way since.”

Soldiers, police and firefighters have been attracted to CrossFit exercises, which help prepare anyone for the unexpected.

“(CrossFit) enables you to actually do things when it counts, not just look like you can do something when it counts,” Thackrey says. “Add this with constant variance, and you’re creating someone who can pretty much handle anything you throw at them.”

Increased muscle mass, decreased body fat, improved metabolic conditioning, improved bone density, greater strength, power, flexibility, and endurance are all benefits attributed to CrossFit, Budding says.

“But perhaps more importantly, the skills and competencies developed in functional movement translate to almost all activities in life. Indeed, there is a marked improvement in the quality of life,” Budding says. “Learning how to move your body and external objects in the most efficient, effective and safe manner is just as important for the office worker as for the soldier.”