CrossFit – Fitness Technology

One of the first elements of CrossFit I found attractive was the elegance of the programming. As a web developer, one of my main job objectives is to take a complex problem and implement a simple and elegant solution that’s accessible to a large user community. The complex problem CrossFit solves is “How to get fit?” A simple question that has spawned an entire industry of gadgets, gyms, ill-informed personal trainers, nutritionists, etc.

CrossFit recognized that the most functional movements, the movements that would answer the question “How to get fit”, have existed for a very long time. Lifting, jumping, running, pulling, pushing, squatting, all of these movements could be completed without any specialized equipment, are things we do every day, and are things that if done repetitively and regularly at a high intensity, will get us fit. And though the CrossFit community has decided that certain equipment is better suited to achieve the highest level of fitness, e.g. wall balls, plyo boxes, bumper plates, etc… all of these things can be substituted with a bag of sand, a tree stump, and some rusty old weights we find at a garage sale, and the same goals can be reached. CrossFit taught us that it’s not the equipment that is the technology, it’s the system. It’s the packaging of all these functional movements into a program that is flexible, easily accessible to a larger community, and allows for an infinite combination of movements. That is the technology, the CrossFit software so to speak.

The mainstream fitness programs looked mostly at building machines that would make exercise easier and more palatable to a population that wasn’t really interested in putting in the hard work to get fit. So you have machines that will isolate every single muscle in your body but not a single one that will work every single one at once, essentially because working out your whole body at once is really hard. The fact is that you can build muscles in 80% of your body with machines, look insanely hot, and not really be that fit because the 20% of your body you’ve ignored is kind of feeble and buckling under the mass of the other 80% you’ve built up. This is what us software developers call bloat, build a too complex system to address a complex problem and as a result you get a really crappy program with a lot of bells and whistles built on a flawed foundation that will fail upon testing.

Beyond the physical limitation of the machines in building fitness is the monotony of the mainstream “globogym” program. The one obstacle to fitness I feel CrossFit addressed better than any other fitness program, beyond the actual movements employed, frequency and duration of exercise, is how it addresses the one overarching impediment to exercise, your brain.

I’ll admit it, my first foray back into exercise after living a pretty stagnant geek life, was to fire up a netflixed dvd of Jillian Michael’s “30 Day Shred.” I did the “30 Day Shred” for a good 90 days and as I continued and repeated the workout I found it harder and harder to get motivated to continue the program. I was literally exercising to a DVD on loop and feeling a little ridiculous too. It doesn’t really motivate a guy to constantly remind him how good he’s going to look in a bikini. After finishing the beginner program, I had two programs that I repeated every other day for 3 months. After sputtering and reducing the frequency of my workouts, i flat out gave it up. And besides the occasional bicep curls on the DVD, I can still say that I see a lot of the same exercises performed in a CrossFit gym that I did in that video. So it wasn’t the exercises that I found objectionable, I just didn’t feel motivated to continue. There were some results, noticeable ones even, but I was bored out of my mind.

CrossFit recognized it’s the competition, the constantly varied programming, the community aspect, all of these things were the missing elements that otherwise worthy fitness programs lacked. And they all helped to address my biggest hurdle in getting fit, my head. I needed variety to keep it interesting, competition to keep me motivated, and I needed the occasional boost of a friend screaming at me to get my workout done.

Use technology to organize, motivate, connect, compete, and communicate but base the actual physical fitness on functional movements we’ve known to be effective for a long time. Leave the machines out of the part where your body actually moves. Simple, elegant, user friendly. I love it.