How to Start CrossFit: A Beginner’s Guide,CrossFit is EVERYWHERE these days.You can watch the CrossFit Games, If you have friends or coworkers that enjoy working out, you might have even heard them talking about the newest CrossFit “box” (gym) that just opened up down the street.
You might be wondering, “Hey! What the hell is CrossFit, and is it for me?”
Let’s figure out what CrossFit is, who it’s for, how it works, and if you should join your local CrossFit gym.
What the Hell is CrossFit?
CrossFit is advertised, in four words, as “the sport of fitness.” With constantly varied, high-intensity functional movements, CrossFit is a training philosophy that coaches people of all shapes and sizes to improve their physical well-being and cardiovascular fitness in a hardcore yet accepting and encouraging environment.
Here’s the definition of CrossFit from the official site:
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.
CrossFit contends that a person is as fit as they are proficient in each of ten general physical skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, agility, balance, coordination, and accuracy
Or, in nerd speak – CrossFit is a training program that builds strength and conditioning through extremely varied and challenging workouts. Each day the workout will test a different part of your functional strength or conditioning, not specializing in one particular thing, but rather with the goal of building a body that’s capable of practically anything and everything.
CrossFit is extremely different from a commercial gym…and not just because you won’t find any ellipticals, weight machines (gross), or Zumba classes.
Who is CrossFit for?
According to the CrossFit site, this program “is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs.”
What that means is that every day there is a particular workout prescribed (you’ll often see this written as Rx’ed) for everybody that comes to CrossFit. Rather than having one workout for older women and another for hardcore athletes – there’s ONE workout each day that is completely scalable based on your skill.
Now, although CrossFit can be for everybody, it certainly ISN’T for everybody. In this blogger’s humble opinion, CrossFit is perfect for a few types of people:
- Beginners to weight training
- People looking for support and community
- Fitness fanatics
- Masochists
- Former athletes
Is it dangerous?
In short, yes it can be, for a few reasons…but not as dangerous as you might be led to believe.In the wrong situations, with the wrong coaches, and a person with the wrong attitude, CrossFit can absolutely be very dangerous.
1) During a CrossFit workout, you’re generally told to complete a number of strength training or endurance exercises as fast as possible, or complete as many repetitions as possible in a certain amount of time. For that reason, it’s REALLY easy to sacrifice form in exchange for finishing the workout quicker.
2) CrossFit attracts a certain type of person…namely folks who push themselves so hard they actually do bodily harm. Ask any CrossFitter if they’ve met “Pukey the Clown” and they’ll probably tell you yes. Due to the nature of competition, the motivating atmosphere, and people’s desire to do well, many people in CrossFit often push themselves beyond their personal limitations (which can be a good thing)…but oftentimes they push themselves beyond that.
3) In some extreme cases with a VERY small portion of CrossFitters, an incredibly serious medical condition called rhabdomyolysis can take place. When people push themselves too hard, too much, too fast, their muscle fiber break down and are released into the bloodstream, poisoning the kidneys. At CrossFit, they refer to this as “Uncle Rahbdo,” though it’s not something funny or enjoyable.
What’s a CrossFit class like?
Let’s say you’re interested in joining a CrossFit class…but you don’t know what you’re getting into!Practically every CrossFit gym around the world will let you come in and try out a class for free, so contact your local gyms and find out what dates and time they’re having newbie sessions.
- Introduction class – For people who have never tried CrossFit before. Usually there’s a quick overview, and then a basic body weight movement workout, and then they talk to you about joining. These are usually free.
- On ramp/Elements – If you’re interested in joining the regular CrossFit workout, you’ll most likely be required to go through the On ramp/Elements course. The purpose of these is to teach you the nine foundational movements of CrossFit and all about proper form. No matter how experienced you are, these are valuable and worth the time and money. Even if you think you have perfect form on your squats, deadlifts and/or overhead presses, it’s amazing what can be fixed when you have a trained set of eyes watching you do them.
- Regular classes: This is what you’re probably used to seeing or hearing about. A regular CrossFit class takes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. Everybody starts at the same time, there are instructors walking around helping out and keeping track, and everybody is supporting each other and probably swearing a lot.
- Most CrossFit gyms will split their classes into three or four sections:
Dynamic warm up – not jogging on a treadmill for 5 minutes, but jumps, jumping jacks, jump rope, squats, push ups, lunges, pull ups. Functional movements, stretches, and mobility work that compliment the movements you’ll be doing in the workout that day.
Skill/Strength work: If it’s a strength day, then you’ll work on a pure strength movement (like squats or deadlifts). If it’s not a strength day, then you’ll work on a skill and try to improve, like one-legged squats or muscle ups.
WOD: the workout of the day. This is where you’ll be told to do a certain number of reps of particular exercises as quickly as possible, or you’ll have a set time limit to do as many of a certain exercise as possible.
Cool down and stretching. Either as a group, or you’re allowed to stretch out on your own. This would also be the time for people who pushed too hard to go puke in a trash can and stretch their stomach muscles
How to find a CrossFit Gym?
So, let’s say you’re interested in trying out a CrossFit class or maybe joining a CrossFit gym.First and foremost, you need a gym with competent, experienced coaches. You should be able to see through that particular CrossFit gym’s website.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what you might see from coaches:
CrossFit Level 1 – an ANSI-accredited certification. This means the person went to a weekend long course and passed the exam.
You’re taught the basic movements, how to scale each movements with, but not really much more. There are no specifics on how to deal with injuries, anatomy, etc.
CrossFit Level 2 – This is the next level up from Level 1, and is currently being revised by CrossFit HQ. It involves far more in depth training in coaching
Specialty Seminars – These are one to two day courses on specific topics like gymnastics, Olympic lifting, and running.
The other important thing to check out is PROGRAMING!
CrossFits program can be truly random, and an inexperienced coach can accidentally program back to back workouts that use the same muscle groups in the same way, not giving you enough time to recover. On every CrossFit gym’s website, there’s a blog where they post the workout of the day. Look over this for the gym you want to check out – see what they typically do. If they do high rep cleans three days in a row, they obviously don’t program well. Or if you see every day for a week with heavy shoulders movements, be wary!
Remember, most CrossFits will let you attend one class for free. If you have a few in your area, try out each of them once before making your decision. Go to each of them, and make note of the other members there – are they supportive of each other? Did they introduce themselves and welcome you? Were the coaches nice and hands-on with their advice during the workout?
Can I do it at home?
Every day, CrossFit.com puts out the a workout of the day (or WOD), which can be done at home, in a commercial gym, or in a CrossFit gym.
Every CrossFit gym will put out their own WOD as well, which can be different from the CrossFit.com site – if you happen to find a local CrossFit site that you enjoy but don’t attend fulltime, it’s more than okay to follow their workouts.
The best news about this is the workouts are posted free of charge to anybody that is interested in doing them. There is even a site dedicated to scaling the workout posted on CrossFit.com to account for different abilities. CrossFits are often prohibitively expensive, so if you love CrossFit but are looking to save money, you can follow along at home or in your office gym provided they have the right equipment.
Many times, you’ll run into situations where you can’t complete a particular workout because you don’t have the right equipment – do the best you can with what’s available to you, and keep track of how you made your modification for tracking purposes.
Now, there are a few issues with following CrossFit at home or by yourself in a gym:
- Nobody is checking your form – CrossFit requires many incredibly specific movements, if you start by yourself at home, you’ll never know if you’re doing them wrong and could severely hurt yourself as you increase the amount of weights with which you work.
- Nobody is cheering you on – A HUGE part of CrossFit is the supportive community aspect that comes with each gym. I guarantee you’d finish a workout a few seconds (or minutes) faster if you had 50 people screaming your name and cheering you toward the finish line.
- You probably don’t have all of the equipment – If you’re working out at home, you probably don’t have a full squat rack, bumper plates, kettlebells, medicine balls, and so on….so you’ll often be creating your own workouts that are modified versions of the online versions.
- You will want to buy all of the equipment – The more you do it, the more you’ll want to do it properly. This might not cost as much as an actual box, but it will cost.
- Even with all of these negatives, it could save you a few hundred bucks a month by not joining a gym– just be smart about it.
Try it!