The Ultimate Resource Guide to CrossFit!

The importance of physical fitness can’t be emphasized enough in a society threatening to lean towards a sedentary lifestyle. CrossFit promises to deliver fitness that is by design, broad, general, inclusive and incorporate paraphernalia of thrilling activities, such as Combat, survival, sports and life rewards to realize your aspirations of competent physical robustness. CrossFitis the rage! Watch their sports on ESPN or flick through a glossy magazine; it’s hard not to get inspired.

If ultimate fitness is your goal, Crossfit is the unparalleled key!

What is CrossFit?

The ambition of Crossfit is best summed up in 4 words, “The sport of Fitness”! It is more than gleaning coveted curves but is a training philosophy that instills in people of all sizes and shapes the hardcore skills to enhance their physical wellbeing and cardiovascular fitness in a highly fostering and encouraging ambience. These routines run the gamut from extremely difficult to utterly vicious and borderline insane but nonetheless highly rewarding.

Crossfit contends that a person is deemed “fit” so long as they are proficient in ten general physical skills; they being stamina, strength, cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, coordination, power, balance, agility, flexibility, speed and accuracy. A crossfit regimen aims to develop competence in each of these core skills.

Crossfit has maintained its position as the primary strength and conditioning program for tactical operations teams, police academies, champion martial arts, military special operations unit and thousands of elite professional athletes worldwide! These athletes have distinguished themselves in the streets, stadiums, gyms, combat and rings but the redeeming quality of crossfit is its universal scalability, making it just right for any committed individual, regardless of prior experience.

If you have inhibitions about what you are getting in to, here is everything you need to help you along the way in realizing your fitness goals.

Getting Started

Don’t let the thought of hefty weights and high intensity lifts scare you away from a Crossfit Workout. Rest assured, all crossfit workouts are diligently scalable to each person’s fitness ability and not all routines require you to assume the barbell-and-burpee heavy WODs or be insanely fit.  As the Crossfit level 1 fitness trainer Nick Lobotsky says “The greatest thing about crossfit is that it can work for anyone. We have everyone from ex-football players to grandmothers who come in”.

Entering a CrossFit box can be daunting- rather nerve wrecking to be honest. Don’t be intimidated by the seemingly inhuman cross fitters because anyone with a motivation and drive for improvement can get started with simple and less-intensive WODs, progressing to harder ones. Here’s a list of excellent resources, elucidating on CrossFit workouts for beginners:

• 12 Crossfit Workouts Anyone Can do
• 5 Beginner-Friendly Crossfit Workouts
• A Beginner’s Guide to Crossfit
• Beginner Crossfit WODs
• Crossfit for Beginners

Movement Mechanics

The most indispensable element of Crossfit is the ability to follow through their mechanics, which refers to the proper techniques to move through their core movements. Moving yourself in the most accurate positioning, guarantees effectiveness, efficiency and safety of the crossfit routines.

While people associate movement mechanics with only the safety of the routine, a sound technique also enhances the affects of the movements, manifolds. No matter if you are a diehard CrossFit athlete or just into working out at the gym it’s easy to fall prey to the fundamental error of progressing too quickly. Proper movement allows a trainer to lift more weight and perform repetitions faster without wearing out. More work in a lesser times means a greater average power, and a higher power promises greater intensity.

Olympics Weight Lifting

Crossfit training greatly emphasizes on incorporating the Olympic weightlifting in its daily programs. As Archie Dresler says in his book on weightlifting; “The mere practice of the Olympic lifts teaches an athlete how to apply large amounts of force. Part of the extraordinary abilities of an Olympic lifter arises out of his having learned how to effectively activate more of his muscle fibers more rapidly than others who aren’t trained to do so. This becomes extremely important for athletes who need to remain at lower body weights for athletic purposes but need to learn how to apply greater force”.

The snatch, clean & jerk and their derivative lifts deserve their due in terms of technique development in order to deliver the expected training effects and crossfit enables its trainer to do just that.

Gymnastics

Gymnastics is the corner stone of crossfit. Developed by Coach Jeff Tucker, The crossfit gymnastics training teaches trainers about basic gymnastics movements, which helps athletes progress and augment their natural physical preparedness. When a new skill is introduced to a trainer, the coach should consider if the trainee is strong enough. Gymnastics is a sport built around, perfectionism, technical mastery, and hundreds of hours in training to develop skills and enhance cardiovascular endurance, speed, stamina, efficiency, flexibility, power, agility, strength, coordination and balance. Gymnasts are renowned to be well rounded athletes, because of their alertness and awareness of their own body and comprehensive knowledge of mechanics. By drilling the athletes with proper mechanics and mobility in Gymnastics, peak performance could be expected for longer durations of time in Cross fit training.

Skills transferred from Gymnastics could go far towards enhancing those in running, weightlifting and all other sports. In addition, Gymnastics tend to augment strength without using external weights. Body weight movements are considered to be gymnastics in crossfit training and uses various props, such as short parallel bars, dip bars, still rings, the floor, pull up bars, climbing ropes and other paraphernalia to aid in gymnastic training. If you want to improve your performance in the crossfit routine, you need to incorporate gymnastic training in to your WOD.

Endurance, Rowing and Running

The Crossfit endurance program is an unparalleled sports program, diligently designed to augment performance, fitness and endurance in sports and is seamlessly integrated with weightlifting, gymnastic movements, mobility based support and Olympic lifts. Crafted to improve strength and speed, the two mainstays of performance, along with perseveration of lean tissue, reducing recovering time and alleviating injury risks are the main goal of endurance training. The use of CrossFit workouts—with their myriad health and athletic benefits—allows a runner to obtain equal if not greater performance results while simultaneously decreasing the chance of injury.

For runners with faulty mechanics and improper balances, the heart of endurance training is to correct these underlying problems by incorporating functional strength-stamina workouts, so that the muscles and connective tissues are treated with longetivity in mind. By increasing the variation of movement and engaging in a variety of movement patterns, a runner creates a wider foundation of athleticism from which to count on. Endurance training also counters the damage that distance running does to mobility and averts “duck feet”, “heel striking” and “valgus knee patterns” from creeping in to the strides of professional runners. In addition, preservation of the lean muscle mass by revving up the body’s fat burning mechanism, that the routine renders, is a major benefit.

Endurance training is also beneficial for rowing athletes and rowing exercises are a crucial element of crossfit training. Rowing is a low impact exercise that is the safest form of cardio, and can be performed at high endurance levels by just about anyone. Since most people don’t have access to outdoor rowing, crossfit training incorporates the use of heavy rowing machinery. Since, your legs, glutes, abdominals, back, shoulders, and arms are all being worked out, a rowing machine helps augment muscle mass, most important in sports.

Cross Fit Kids

Contrary to popular belief, Crossfit for kids is not simply a scaled down version of its more intensive counterpart, but a comprehensive routine geared towards kids, or adolescents, and their special developmental needs. The idea behind CrossFit Kids, says co-founder Jeff Martin, is to pair fitness and fun as a part of principal strength and conditioning programs to develop Gross Motor Skills, endurance, stamina, agility, flexibility, co-ordination, balance, strength, accuracy & speed. For parents aspiring to see their kids getting strong, grow in to healthy habits and avert the common childhoods nuisance of obesity and lethargy, crossfit kids is the go-to routine.

The crossfit kids program inculcates in kids the core concepts of crossfit, identify the primary points of performance of the foundational movements, teach them to perform the foundational movements safely, Differentiate between sound and unsound movement mechanics and apply these guidelines safely and effectively to develop competency. To make the kids enjoy their gathering, each session constitutes a few minutes of warm-up, work on basic athletic movement or gymnastic skill, a routine WOD and a lot of games. Each routine works towards progressing the strength training of your child and imbuing confidence and a high self-esteem.

Crossfit Football

CrossFit Football and Power Athlete HQ are programs developed by John Welbourn, former NFL offensive lineman. The program aims to instill the maintenance of posture and position, in power athletes, through barbell and Olympic movements, strength and conditioning training, and body awareness and sprint training. The programs focus upon the demands of a football athlete such as agility, power, strength and speed to educate CrossFit Coaches, and other individuals, on how to utilize CrossFit to train sport specific athletes. While the routines simulate those of a regular CrossFit regime, they incorporate specialized movements fit for experienced CrossFit athletes.

Recognizing the pressures and demands placed on football athletes, these programs simulate an environment, and replicating the stresses a player faces on the field, to improve stress conditioning. By combining high intensity movements with a comprehensive strength and speed program, the result is a training program that is unparalleled in the industry.