Summary: In this week's episode, you'll get an overview of Crossfit, some of the history of Crossfit, the differences between the Corporate Headquarters and Affiliate Gyms and a 5 Step System for being successful at Crossfit. All About Crossfit Olympic athletes and our grandparents both need to fulfill their potentials for cardiorespiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, speed, power, coordination, accuracy, balance, and agility. One is looking for functional dominance the other for functional competence. -Greg Glassman, founder of Crossfit I first became aware of Crossfit in about 2006. I had just completed the original Owen McKibbin workout and was looking for something new. For those of you who don't know who Owen Mckibbin is, he's one of the top male fitness models in the world and was on the over of Men's Health a record 19 times. He's also the author of The Men’s Health Cover Model Workout, Body Sculpting Secrets of the World’s Top Fitness Model. So - I had just finished Owen's workout and was looking for an alternative and I cam across Crossfit.com. I watched a couple of videos of women doing a workout called "Nasty Girls" where they were doing full body pullups on Olympic rings and Overhead snatches in a time based workout. I was blown away. The website also posted a new workout every day so I decided to jump in and started incorporating some of the workouts in-between my cardio training. It was a little bit confusing at first because Crossfitters have their own language and culture and it was a challenge to figure things out without experiencing them first hand. There were only a handful of Crossfit affiliate gyms at the time and none of them were close to me, so I was this lone guy in a corporate gym doing these strange workouts that combined barbell movements like snatches, squats and power cleans with high intensity interval training. I did find an area on the Crossfit site that gave modified versions of the barbell movements that I was not as familiar with, but it was really hard to keep up without someone to show me proper form for the barbell movements that were part of the core of the workouts, so what I eventually ended up doing was creating a list of all the non-barbell movements and creating my own series of workouts from them. Fast forward six years and there are now half a dozen Crossfit Gyms (called Crossfit Boxes) within 20 minutes of my house. I was little reluctant to sign up because there have been some stories in the press about how Crossfit is unsafe due to using heavy weights, but a co-worker of mine who is a Level-One Crossfit Coach finally convinced me to go try out a couple of classes with a Coach he knows and I got a lot of value from the class and the training. Later on in the podcast, I'm going to give you 5 tips for being successful at Crossfit, but first I want to go over a little Crossfit History and terminology and some p rominent people within the Crossfit Community so you have a good framework before you walk into your first class. The Brand Crossfit was founded by and Lauren Glassman in 2000. The first gym was in Santa Cruz, CA and the first Affilate Gym is in Seattle. There were 13 affiliated gyms in 2005 and today there are over 5,500 and growing quickly. Greg is a former gymnast who created the Crossfit system in the early 1990s to help professional athletes and law enforcement. In it's simplest form, CrossFit is a Strength and Conditioning Brand which combines weightlifting, sprinting, gymnastics, power lifting, kettle bell training, plyometics, rowing, and medicine ball training. Today, the headquarters for Crossfit Brand performs several major functions: Maintains Crossfit.com and posts an Official Workout of the Day every Day. Oversees Coach Training Publishes the Crossfit journal Franchises Affiliates Produces the Official Crossfit Games to find the fittest man and woman in the world. Currently sponsored by Reebok.
