And Glassman has already expanded his offering beyond the US, to France and Brazil, in response to physician demand, he says. It might also be his legacy. When asked what he hoped might come of the doctor trainings, Glassman was vague. Oz and Gwyneth Paltrow have exploited — he is now setting his sights on the dissatisfied deliverers of health care: the doctors. Glassman is working off a big and dubious assumption about the solution, however.
He presumes obesity and diabetes are self-inflicted and that individuals can make changes — at a time when most researchers would argue these epidemics are driven not by a failure of willpower but rather by our calorie-drenched, obesogenic environment.
Helping people reap the benefits of any exercise also means getting them to do it regularly. Not even Glassman. So whether CrossFit-trained doctors really can be the revolution that vanquishes chronic disease is still very much up for debate. With the explosion of boutique gyms and ultramarathons over the past decade, it can feel like exercise is growing more expensive and more extreme.
CrossFit has led the way. Instead, I found something much milder, much friendlier. The hour-long workout — a rapid-fire series of movements, drawn from weight-building, gymnastics, and calisthenics — definitely veered closer to an Army drill than a hatha yoga class.
But the instructor scaled the routine for people like me who were weaker than average, and looked out for our form in every squat, row, and pullup. There are no studies comparing the long-term health effects of CrossFit to other workouts, but there is a rich literature on high-intensity interval training HIIT — and it does pack in the benefits typically associated with longer exercise sessions. One is cardio-respiratory fitness. A number of meta-analyses have shown that HIIT routines lead to greater gains in VO2 max — the maximum amount of oxygen a person can use during intense exercise — compared with other forms of training.
CrossFit also comes with a heavy dose of resistance training — the lifting, pullups, and pushups that help build muscle. Aerobic exercise promotes greater aerobic fitness.
You need both. With all these benefits come risks. CrossFit can lead to injuries , most frequently in the shoulders, knees, and low back.
But despite its reputation, the injury rate at CrossFit looks a lot like other similar workouts , such as powerlifting or gymnastics. In the class, my instructor was silent on diet, but CrossFit also has a reputation for zealously promoting the paleo and low-carb diets, with particular scorn for refined sugars and carbohydrates.
That reputation was borne out in my conversations with CrossFitters, who claimed that cutting carbs could fix everything from plantar fasciitis to obesity. This feature is what sets it apart from other workout programs that ignore diet, he added. For me, what really set the class apart was the sense of community. Other members, recognizing I was new, repeatedly asked how they could help me and offered tips.
Rather than isolating themselves with headphones like gym-goers normally do, my classmates were communicative, talking, joking, and encouraging one another throughout the workout. There were no mirrors in sight. This matched what scholars who have studied CrossFit have concluded: It is akin to a religion. At the end, I felt strong and uplifted.
Since then, the chain has mushroomed into 15, affiliates in more than countries. CrossFit Inc. Hundreds of aspiring trainers paid a thousand dollars to be certified by Glassman. CrossFit affiliates, by contrast, pay only a yearly fee of three thousand dollars for the right to use the name. To this day, most CrossFit gyms remain simple, utilitarian spaces, without up-sell displays, mirrors, or rows of machines.
The fitness is a Trojan horse. When CrossFit began, few women were doing Olympic lifts at their local gym. The workouts effectively removed the chromosome-based gym division, where women work on cardio machines and men strain under barbells.
Affiliates promoted female athletes, often pitting them against the men of other workout regimens. They mocked the expectation that women who work out should be concerned only with how small they can become.
CrossFit also spawned innumerable businesses, as members started ventures in everything from insurance to nutrition. The Ohio-based gym-equipment manufacturer Rogue Fitness was launched to meet the demands of the new CrossFit gyms; it grew to employ hundreds of people. CrossFit members embraced a narrative of redemption through physical suffering. I heard from many adherents that the daily practice of hard work spilled over into their everyday lives, making them better people, or at least capable of setting goals and achieving them.
But, interspersed with aspirational photos, the company posted sexually suggestive images on Facebook, among them images of a woman with her legs spread while climbing a rope, and a woman who tripped and momentarily had her head in position for a sexual act.
Coaches and gym owners with flair or specialized knowledge became independently famous. Glassman denies this. Until CrossFit, the dominant accreditation body in the fitness industry was the National Strength and Conditioning Association. In , the N. Out of fifty-four people who undertook a CrossFit program for ten weeks, the research claimed, nine had failed to finish, owing to injury. The study quickly spread through the fitness world. Glassman and his community were incredulous, and angry.
In their nearly ten thousand gyms, they had never seen such injury rates. CrossFit sued the N. The discovery process revealed that management at the N. The N. All physical pursuits come with risks. Of my personal obsessions, running has uniquely gruesome statistics. In my experience, these estimates are likely low.
But this does little to diminish the elegance of such a simple and effective mode of exercise. I was injured during my second time in a CrossFit gym. In an off-season effort to regain some foundational strength I had lost after a decade of ultra-endurance racing, I paid to work with a trainer. He began by testing me. Roza has an objective of his own. The competitions, already global, with the top 30 men and 30 women representing 15 countries, serve as an annual, international reminder that the WODs really work.
Building the competitive side of CrossFit, the two think, can also serve as a launching pad for a longer-term goal: pulling more people from different backgrounds into the fold. For the first time, the Games will include adaptive categories for people with disabilities, like the Paralympics. But Roza will face a few business conundrums. The goal is million people in ten years. High-intensity, functional-training gym chains like OrangeTheory and F45, Royse says, are gaining ground on CrossFit by delivering customers a predictable experience in all of their locations.
But taken to the extreme, it ignored many opportunities. Affiliates will be networked so they can swap advice. When running CrossFit Sanitas, he found that mothers bring in the most new members, whereas most CrossFit coaches try to attract amazing athletes. Brazil, for example, saw its number of affiliates rocket by more than 50 percent in , to 1, But all these changes are happening in the context of a pandemic that created a massive ripple in the gym model. More people are now doing CrossFit at home and will be in the future.
And any paid apps would have to offer a better product than what can be found online for free. WODwell, a free searchable database of thousands of CrossFit workouts maintained by the community, for instance, has seen more than double the traffic to its website during the pandemic.
But is a religion a religion without the church? Soon after his trip to the ranch, Roza called on another person. I can hire and have access to a more diverse collection of coaches.
But I need to see the systemic changes. We need to actually see it. This story appeared in the January-February issue of Men's Health. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. How to Eat Like Chris Hemsworth. Cory Richards. Cody Pickens. Men's Health Studio D. Chandler Smith competing at the CrossFit Games.
He placed fifth. Courtesy of Crossfit. Courtesy of Elijah Muhammad. The first CrossFit scholarship event in Atlanta, July Courtesy of CrossFit. Roza with some of his Oracle Data Cloud employees in Brent Lewis Getty Images.
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