What we do

Crossfit trainers both in America and at Crossfit London have been developing this – the world’s most effective fitness system – for over 10 years.

Crossfit is the real thing: highly effective and universally accessible.

The CrossFit prescription for 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.

The world is alight with great Crossfit videos. While some of them are quite American they “sort of ” give you a flavour:

If like us you like to read, try this PDF called What_is_Crossfit?

So what is fitness? (Greg Glassman, Crossfit Journal, June 2003)

Sport is not life. Archives are filled with the failures of sporting super stars to perform in real life situations. Nature frequently has no rules, no reps, no sets – and certainly no referees.

Training for sports (including body building) can be exciting, structured, fun and aesthetically pleasing. However, it does not train you to pull your family from a burning house, or pick up your children and run with them to hospital. An emphasis on specialism produces awesome endurance runners who cannot haul their luggage, and superbly strong strongmen who would collapse after jogging a mile. We look for the middle road; unfortunately it’s a hard road.

Many people embark on fitness regimes that consist of a muddled mix of sports-specific rehabilitation and body building drills. If you are injured – you need rehabilitation drills If you are developing your golf putt – you need sports- specific drills. If you like posing on a stage wearing fake tan and teeny weenie panties – body-building drills are for you.

Of course, all training should have an aesthetic output: your body should express what it can do. Is there any point in having a Cadillac chassis with a lawn mower engine?

We think it’s second-rate to embark on a core-conditioning and training regime without a clear idea of what you are going to achieve.

We simply aim to generally prepare you for all types of challenges, by measuring and designing training against three standards.

Crossfit standards

Crossfit fitness standard 1

There are ten recognised general physical skills. They are:

• Endurance (cardio/respiratory)
• Stamina (the ability to effectively use energy)
• Strength
• Flexibility
• Power
• Speed
• Coordination
• Agility
• Balance
• Accuracy

You are as fit as you are competent in each of these ten skills. A regime only develops fitness if it improves each of these skills.

Crossfit fitness standard 2

We think your training should prepare you for real life. The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks (even unfamiliar ones) combined in infinitely varying combinations. In practice, this encourages you to put aside any prior notions of sets, rest periods, reps, exercises, order of exercises, routines, etc. Nature frequently provides largely unforeseeable challenges; train for that by striving to ‘mix stuff up’. In practise you turn up to training a bit nervous, not knowing what to expect. It helps build will, and bravery.

Crossfit fitness standard 3

The human body has three energy systems. One for fast reactive movement (diving under car to save your three-year-old toddler), a slower, more extended, but still, a pretty snappy system (for running 350 metres, then diving under a car to save your three- year-old toddler). Finally, there is the long term ‘trickle’ energy system (the one you use while shoe shopping miles away from any toddlers)

For people who have little experience of toddlers, these ‘metabolic engines’ are known as the phosphagen pathway, the glycolytic pathway, and the oxidative pathway.

The first, the phosphagen, dominates the highest-powered activities (100 metre sprint), those that last less than about ten seconds.

The second pathway, the glycolytic, dominates moderate-powered activities, those that last up to several minutes (400-800 metre run).

The third pathway, the oxidative, dominates low-powered activities, those that last in excess of several minutes (5k run, walking, shopping).

Total fitness – the fitness that Crossfit promotes and develops – requires competency and training in each of these three pathways or engines. Balancing the effects of these three pathways largely determines the how and why of the metabolic conditioning (or ‘cardio’) that we do at Crossfit. Favoring one or two to the exclusion of the others, and not recognising the impact of excessive training in the oxidative pathway, are arguably the two most common faults in fitness training.

As an overriding principle, Crossfit views the needs of an Olympic athlete and that of our grandparents as differing by degree not kind. One is looking for functional dominance the other for functional competence. Competence and dominance manifest through identical physiological mechanisms.

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