What is CrossFit

CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.

Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.

Is Crossfit for me?

Absolutely! Your needs and the Olympic athlete’s differ by degree not kind. Increased power, strength, cardiovascular and respiratory endurance, flexibility, stamina, coordination, agility, balance, and coordination are each as important to the world’s best athletes as they are to the overweight, the sedentary, the sick, casual athletes, and even the elderly. The amazing truth is that the very same methods that elicit optimal response in the Olympic or professional athlete will optimize the same response in all these populations. Of course, we can’t load your grandmother with the same squatting weight that we’d assign an Olympic skier, but they both need to squat.

If the program works for Olympic Skiers and overweight, sedentary homemakers then it will work for you (Courtesy of CrossFit Inc.)

But, we won’t lie to you, CrossFit is an intense and difficult program. You can expect to breathe, sweat and work harder than you ever have but you can also expect to achieve things you never thought were possible.

What can I expect during a Crossfit workout?

You can expect a general warm-up consisting of joint mobility, basic bodyweight movements, running and jumping rope that will elevate your core temperature, your heart rate, and stimulate your sweat glands, priming the body for exercise. This will then be followed by a more specific and dynamic warm-up that consists of the particular movements and positions that will assist or play into that day’s workout. This two part warm-up is most effective in preparing the mind, body and Central Nervous System for exercise. Following the warm-up our workouts will consist of anything in the range of running, walking, crawling, jumping rope and rowing. The clean & jerk, snatch, squat, deadlift, push-press, bench-press, and power-clean. Jumping, medicine ball throws and catches, pull-ups, dips, push-ups, handstands, presses to handstand, kips, cartwheels, muscle-ups, sit-ups, and holds in an endless variety of drills. We make regular use of the track, ergometers (rowers), Olympic weight sets, rings, parallel bars, free exercise mat, horizontal bar, plyometrics boxes, medicine balls, and jump ropes.

All of these placed into high intensity workouts in random combinations that typically last no longer than 25 minutes, and in some cases, may only last 10 minutes or less (not counting warm-up and instruction, of course).

Our workouts are programmed with the intentions to increase the 10 physiological skills of CrossFit. We believe that as life is unexpected, we must train and prep both our minds and bodies for the unknowns and unknowables that life has to offer. By keeping our workouts constantly varied through functional movements (movements bred into our DNA), we can improve our capacity to perform the given tasks encountered in the outside world. Whether it’s hauling groceries, picking up your child, moving large items from low to high or simply sitting down and standing up, we want to be competent within these daily tasks and more for as long as we live.

But I don’t wanna be an athlete, I just want to tone, I don’t want to get bulky, etc. etc…

Plain and simple, read this: Working out and lifting heavy stuff is scary…not!

Also, a quick point that Mark Rippetoe made in the Crossfit Journal:
“The fact is that aesthetics are best obtained from training for performance. In both architecture and human beauty, form follows function. Always and everywhere, the human body has a certain appearance when it performs at a high level, and depending on the nature of that high-level performance, this appearance is usually regarded as aesthetically pleasing, for reasons that are DNA-level deep. The training through which high-level performance is obtained is the only reliable way to obtain these aesthetics, and the only exceptions to this method of obtaining them are the occasional genetically-gifted freaks—people who look like they train when they were just born lucky. As a general rule, if you want to look like a lean athlete—the standard that most active people strive to emulate—you have to train like an athlete, and most people lack the “sand” for that.”

“Appearance can’t change unless performance does, and the performance changes are what we quantify and what we program. We pretty much know how to improve that, but the industry is based on the fiction that appropriate training proceeds from an assessment of aesthetics. Your appearance when fit is almost entirely a function of your genetics, which are expressed at their best only when your training is at its highest level, and this level is only obtainable from a program based on an improvement in your performance in the gym.” (Behemoth CrossFit)

Videos For Athletes