How Crazy Is CrossFit?

CrossFit, the high-intensity workout program that started, where else? in California, is now making people feel inadequate in cities across the country. Why? Because here, in the (exactly 100) words of CrossFit founder Greg Glassman, is the program’s idea of “world class fitness”: 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.
In this piece about CrossFit in the Boston Globe, Dr. Thomas J. Gill, chief of sports medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, has three words of advice for those who take on the challenges of such high-intensity workouts: “Know your limits.” And in this sidebar to the piece, CrossFit veteran Martine Powers his five bits of advice for those who sign on: go early in the morning; stretch, take care of your hands, write it down afterwards, and when it comes to weights, failure can be a good thing.