The Midnight Hour

If you are one of my readers who is interested in fitness, I challenge you to take a look at the Facebook group I have started called “Crossfit Huntsville.” I intend to use it to promote Crossfit in my area and share ideas with local fitness enthusiasts.

What is Crossfit? First, throw out any ideas you might have about fitness that involves “Globo Gym” style weight-lifting exercises.  The Crossfit workout of the day (WOD) never reads anything like “Back and Biceps” or “Chest and Triceps.”  While the WOD will seem cryptic at first (the “exercises and demos” section of the website will explain what each exercise involves,  complete with a video demo) one quickly learns that Crossfit WODs are both shorter than normal lifting sessions (usually 25-35 minutes) and much more intense.  Furthermore, it’s sometimes difficult to place exactly which part of your body is exhausted after a Crossfit WOD.  Sometimes you simply feel like you were beaten with an ax handle.  Sometimes it’s painfully obvious (pun intended) what you worked.  However, without exception I always feel like I have accomplished much more after a Crossfit workout than if I had done traditional weight-lifting.  For a long time I have been mixing weight-lifting and cardio.  However, I’ve never mixed it in quite this way.

Here are a few quotes that I think define Crossfit:

“There are ten recognized general physical skills. They are cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. You are as fit as you are competent in each of these ten skills. A regimen develops fitness to the extent that it improves each of these ten skills.”

-Crossfit Journal, Oct 2002

“… fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks, tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations. In practice this encourages the athlete to disinvest in any set notions of sets, rest periods, reps, exercises, order of exercises, routines, periodization, etc. Nature frequently provides largely unforeseeable challenges; train for that by striving to keep the training stimulus broad and constantly varied. ”

-Crossfit Journal, Oct 2002

World Class Fitness in 100 Words:

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.”

-Crossfit Website

The Crossfit website, linked here, is extremely informative and can teach you all you care to learn. You can also download a free issue of the Crossfit Journal here that addresses the question, “What is fitness?” It also contains most basic tenets of the Crossfit program. This is a very simple and brief introduction to Crossit, but if you are interested after reading this then I urge you to check out their website, and if you have further interest, join my Facebook group where a friend and I have been posting our individual workouts of the day.  Crossfit has been extremely beneficial to me, and based on my individual results and level of fitness I find it far superior to either traditional weight-lifting or endurance training, both of which I have previously been somewhat successful with.