Call me a hater, I don't mind. CrossFit is the fastest growing trend in the fitness world since the bosu ball. What a mess. I heard it put best by one of the guys in the office when he said "when you train for crossfit, you just train to get better at exercising." This probably excites a lot of people, but from where I stand, you're not really training to be a better athlete. Sure, you may have become more athletic as a result, but primarily, you look better in the mirror and your hobby is making yourself tired. Think about it, apart from the people who want to compete in events, CrossFit training is basically group fitness. Great, anyone who wants to live a healthier more fulfilling life via exercise is okay in my books, but this is why I don't want to call it a sport.
CrossFit people don't train sport-specifically, they're just functional exercise maniacs. Even when competing, it's essentially a contest to see who can perform the prescribed volume in the shortest time. In the field of athletic strength & conditioning, CrossFit fits under the title: General Physical Preparation. This is what we use when athletes come back to training after holidays of drinking beer and working on finger dexterity with the Xbox. It shocks the nervous system and gets you back on track to train for the upcoming season so you don't fall apart the first time you get back under the bar. Now, the argument that takes place between people who train athletes and people who train CrossFitters goes on for days, and it's like the argument between rap enthusiasts and classic rockers. It goes on forever and never really gets anywhere, so yes, here I am spinning my wheels about why I think training athletes is a much more exacting science.
When you're dealing with athletes, you have to address deficiencies not only in strength, power, endurance, flexibility, and core stabilization, but you have to do this in a way that will benefit them when they get on the field, court, or track. This means that we as strength coaches have to train their energy systems in proportion to what takes place during actual competition. This is a spin-off of what you get when you read your ex. phys. textbooks or the NSCA book, or whatever other shred of golden knowledge you've got on hand. Most of the time you'll see graphs that show the trade-off between substrate utilization, shift from anaerobic to aerobic metabolic systems, and that nice long steady-state that we all learned to love. The big thing that separates traditional athletes from CrossFit people is the energy demands of the sport. Think about soccer or basketball or a team sport, there are short duration high-intensity efforts interspersed between long lower intensity efforts. CrossFit is a continual bout of aerobic low intensity madness. Training athletes to increase their energy production capacity and managing their energy expenditure is where the true challenge is. As I mentioned previously in my post about block periodization, the goal is to train the deficient skills to match the others one block at a time. This gives you the product that all coaches are after, the proverbial well-rounded athlete.
To develop this horse of an athlete is tremendously difficult if you don't know what you're doing. My bet is that a CrossFitter in sports (due to their one-track conditioned metabolic systems) would get burned on defense on the basketball court, or get absolutely LIT - UP by a linebacker trying to cut through a hole in the line. Sure, they might be available to play every second of the game, and they may never have to come off the court, but is that any good against a team who manages effort by substituting fresh players onto the field who train with specific physical preparation. Joel Jamieson gave a kick ass presentation on his website that you can check out here. He trains primarily combat athletes, but if you get anything out of the video, you can get a better idea of how this applies to all your athletes, and how you can taylor his recommendations to better prepare the people you're putting into competition.
I digress, to tie it all together CrossFitters are essentially the Jacks of all trades, and the masters of none. These people are not training their energy systems to compete in traditional sports, they may make good 1500m runners, but they certainly are not "athletes" in the sense that we prefer to think of them. They don't bring any component of ability to the table that separates them from the pack come tryout time. What I'm saying here, is if you plan to use CrossFit in training your athletes, use it to get the beer out of their systems after the holidays. Beyond that, check out Joel Jamieson's presentation on www.8weeksout.com and take his advice for rounding up and turning out athletic machines.
-Alex
