I take my job seriously and therefore make it a daily habit to read articles and subscribe to youtube videos by fitness industry gurus. Everyday I learn something new. One of the things that I am constantly reminded of is that fitness experts rarely agree on anything. Mark Rippetoe and Paul Chek do not agree. Dan John and Mark Sisson do not agree. Elliott Hulse and Naudi Aguilar do not agree. They are all industry experts. All have valuable knowledge to share. But there is not much that they agree on.
The fitness industry is like that. It is a noisy marketplace filled with loudly conflicting opinions. Perhaps that’s why CrossFit stood out. Rather than adding to the noise CrossFit refused to engage in any chest-thumping debate. Instead it quietly (this was years before Reebok, the CrossFit Games or Rich Froning) offered a test: here’s the program, here’s how to measure its’ effectiveness, go ahead and give it a try.
Years before affiliates like our Dunbar Street box opened all around Vancouver folks like me stumbled across the CrossFit website by happenstance because we were following the internet bread crumbs left by other fitness seekers. And here was CrossFit debating nothing. A simple website with a WOD posted daily. No cost. No email sign-up. No strings attached. Follow me and get fit.
A daily workout. Instructions on how to perform the movements. Articles on how to outfit your own home gym on the cheap. I did. I sampled the programming for free in my garage. For three years. And it worked. Better than anything I’d ever encountered before! And I hadn’t paid a penny to CrossFit.
While the rest of the fitness world debated the possible outcomes of launching a spherical object from the earth toward the sky CrossFit came along and tossed the ball. And discovered gravity! You can have any opinion that you want but it is difficult to argue against gravity. It just works. Reliably, predictably. No faith required. Its effects can be tested, measured and replicated. While everyone else was occupied arguing fitness hypotheticals CrossFit was busy making people fit. Strangely, people are still arguing. Maybe they are more interested in the clever sound of their own voices than in actual results.
The CrossFit website is still free. They still post the workout of the day. Now that CrossFit is popular thousands of experts and non-experts alike have opinions to share about it. They are all eager to debate the benefits or detriments of CrossFit training. Everyone is a skeptic. And why not? So was I. But why all the pointless arguing and posing? Why waste the breath? Stop speculating and toss that ball. Put CrossFit to the test.
What have you got to lose? (Except for maybe a poorly informed opinion) https://www.empowereverybody.com/get-started/
Leave A Comment