CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.
Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.
The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs.
The needs of Olympic athletes and our grandparents differ by degree not kind. Our terrorist hunters, skiers, mountain bike riders and housewives have found their best fitness from the same regimen.
Thousands of athletes worldwide have followed our workouts posted daily on this site and The aims, prescription, methodology, implementation,
and adaptations of CrossFit are collectively and
individually unique, defining of CrossFit, and instrumental
in our program’s successes in diverse applications.
Aims
From the beginning, the aim of CrossFit has been to
forge a broad, general, and inclusive fitness. We sought
to build a program that would best prepare trainees
for any physical contingency—prepare them not only
for the unknown but for the unknowable. Looking at
all sport and physical tasks collectively, we asked what
physical skills and adaptations would most universally
lend themselves to performance advantage. Capacity
culled from the intersection of all sports demands would
quite logically lend itself well to all sport. In sum, our
specialty is not specializing. The second issue (“What is
Fitness?”) of the CrossFit Journal details this perspective.
Prescription
The CrossFit prescription is “constantly varied, highintensity,
functional movement.” Functional movements
are universal motor recruitment patterns; they are
performed in a wave of contraction from core to
extremity; and they are compound movements—i.e.,
they are multi-joint. They are natural, effective, and
efficient locomotors of body and external objects. But
no aspect of functional movements is more important
than their capacity to move large loads over long
distances, and to do so quickly. Collectively, these three
attributes (load, distance, and speed) uniquely qualify
functional movements for the production of high power. Intensity is defined exactly as power, and intensity is the independent variable most commonly associated with maximizing favorable adaptation to exercise. Recognizing that the breadth and depth of a program’s stimulus will determine the breadth and depth of the adaptation it elicits, our prescription of functionality and intensity is constantly varied. We believe that preparation for random physical challenges—i.e., unknown and unknowable events—is at odds with fixed, predictable, and routine regimens.
Methodology
The methodology that drives CrossFit is entirely empirical. We believe that meaningful statements about safety, efficacy, and efficiency, the three most important and interdependent facets of any fitness program, can be supported only by measurable, observable, repeatable facts, i.e., data. We call this approach “evidence-based fitness.” The CrossFit methodology depends on full disclosure of methods, results, and criticisms, and we’ve employed the Internet (and various intranets) to support these values. Our charter is open source, making co-developers out of participating coaches, athletes, and trainers through a spontaneous and collaborative online community. CrossFit is empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed.
Implementation
In implementation, CrossFit is, quite simply, a sport—the “sport of fitness.” We’ve learned that harnessing the natural camaraderie, competition, and fun of sport or game yields an intensity that cannot be matched by other means. The late Col. Jeff Cooper observed that “the fear of sporting failure is worse than the fear of death.” It is our observation that men will die for points. Using whiteboards as scoreboards, keeping accurate scores and records, running a clock, and precisely defining the rules and standards for performance, we not only motivate unprecedented output but derive both relative and absolute metrics at every workout; this data has important value well beyond motivation.
Adaptations
Our commitment to evidence-based fitness, publicly posting performance data, co-developing our program in collaboration with other coaches, and our open-source charter in general has well positioned us to garner important lessons from our program—to learn precisely and accurately, that is, about the adaptations elicited by CrossFit programming. What we’ve discovered is that CrossFit increases work capacity across broad time and modal domains. This is a discovery of great import and has come to motivate our programming and refocus our efforts. This far-reaching increase in work capacity supports our initially stated aims of building a broad, general, and inclusive fitness program. It also explains the wide variety of sport demands met by CrossFit as evidenced by our deep penetration among diverse sports and endeavors. We’ve come to see increased work capacity as the holy grail of performance improvement and all other common metrics like VO2 max, lactate threshold, body composition, and even strength and flexibility as being correlates—derivatives, even. We’d not trade improvements in any other fitness metric for a decrease in work capacity.
Conclusions
The modest start of publicly posting our daily workouts on the Internet beginning six years ago has evolved into a community where human performance is measured and publicly recorded against multiple, diverse, and fixed workloads. CrossFit is an open-source engine where inputs from any quarter can be publicly given to demonstrate fitness and fitness programming, and where coaches, trainers, and athletes can collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.
