[QUOTE=Trunk]
I asked about it here, recently, and didn’t get too much feedback, but I’ve been pretty intrigued by the “CrossFit” technique. It looks like it focuses on full body workout, range of motion, strength, and cardio. And, the workouts aren’t long.
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I’ve been doing Crossfit for a while. It’s my main thing now, actually. I only get about 3 or 4 workouts a week in, so I’m not in such incredible shape as the people usually featured on the site. Even so, the weights I’m lifting are way higher than when I was doing regular old weight lifting and aerobics.
After several months of less ambitious exercises, I did a weight routine called MaxOT for about a year, year and a half when I was getting back in shape. That worked all right for building mass, but I wasn’t progressing all that well in strength. I got stalled for weeks on some exercises, and I couldn’t make progress on my bench for a couple of months.
I found out about Crossfit about a year or so ago and started doing some of the workouts. (I scale the weights to about 80% of the prescribed weight, but my goal is to do unscaled workouts by the end of this year.) After doing mostly Crossfit stuff for about 6–8 weeks, I did my first Crossfit Total workout, which is 3 max lifts: deadlift, back squat, and shoulder press. I also threw in bench press just for fun.
I hadn’t even done any bench press for about a month or more, and I completely shattered my old personal best. I expected improvements in the other three exercises, since you work those lifts or analogs of them in most Crossfit workouts, but, damn, I was shocked when I tried my old max weight for the bench and it felt too light. I kept putting on weight and lifted singles until I got to a new max that was over 15% more than I’d ever done before. My regular workout weights for deadlift, squat, and shoulder press are more than my old max lifts now.
You don’t do all that many long runs, mostly short runs mixed with calisthenics or other lifting. When the long runs did come up, I tried them and found that I could not only do them, but get halfway decent times on them. I’ve since run a few 5 ks. I haven’t run that far since I was in high school. I did my last one in about 23 minutes. When I was doing weights and your usual 60–80% of max heart-rate cardio workouts before, for over a year, the best I could do was about 3 k in 20+ minutes.
So yeah, I’d totally recommend Crossfit if you want to get in great shape. They’re not particularly concerned with aesthetics, the focus is on performance. The varied routines they do help a lot since you never get bored; every day is something different. The workouts can be scaled to fit most levels of fitness. Brand X Martial Arts message board posts scaled workouts. I self-scale, but sometimes use their tiers for guidelines.
The only caveat I have is that it’s not all that newbie friendly in some ways. I’ve done sports where you have to be really conscious of form (gymnastics and springboard diving) and I’d done some weight lifting before, so I didn’t have many problems picking up the Olympic lifting. But even I wish I had a real trainer around to critique me. If you haven’t done O-lifting before, I would HIGHLY recommend seeking out a qualified coach or trainer for a few sessions at the very least. They have tons of videos on the Crossfit site that show proper form and highlight danger spots, but it’s not the same as having someone experienced to help you.
That’s not a show-stopper, though, since there are lots and lots of their workouts that don’t depend on Olympic lifts, and you can learn those lifts relatively safely by yourself if you’re careful and conscientious.
A friend in Austin does CrossFit religiously, I’d ask him to comment but I’m pretty sure his answer would just be “it’s awesome, you should totally do it.”