Crossfit For Athletes

Crossfit works. I will be the first to tell you that crossfit is one heck of a workout and that it gets people “in shape.” With that said, it is not made for athletes, in fact it could be more detrimental for athletes than beneficial. There are tons of reasons as to why crossfit is a bad choice for athletes, as opposed to conventional training; in this short piece I will try to bring to light some of the main ones.

            First, I would like to touch on what every athlete needs in order to compete at the highest level. These attributes include: strength, power, speed, endurance, work capacity/low level fitness, coordination, kinesthetic sense, etc. Strength is defined as the maximum amount of weight that can be lifted, usually trained in reps of 1-3, sometimes 1-5. Power is work divided by time, so basically it is how fast you can move a load; max power is usually reached on rep 2 and diminishes by rep 3. Speed is the maximum velocity attainable at a short moment (usually no longer than 6 seconds.) Work capacity is being able to repeat bouts of some type of movement (lifting or movement.)

            The primary reason involves the overall idea of crossfit. Crossfit involves many lifts, such as: cleans, jerks, snatches, plyometrics, squats, deadlifts. Those six cornerstone movements that I just listed are usually referred to as the principal strength and power lifts/exercises. As I explained prior, strength and power movements are best trained as maximum efforts, usually lasting 1-5 reps. In crossfit however, these same movements are done in sets of 15-20 and sometime for max reps in an allotted time. So, how does that build strength and power? It doesn’t, instead it builds work capacity. Now, as an athlete would you rather build work capacity forcing up reps of a strength/power movement, or on the field running plays/drills? That answer is simple, unless you are training to be a crossfit champion, then your work capacity needs to be done on field in sport specific training.

            Along the same lines as the training goals I explained comes the precision that these lifts are performed. Most of the main strength/power movements need to be preformed with about 95% perfect form, in order to get the proper benefits. I always tell my athletes that I care more about how the weight is lifted than how much or how many times a weight can lifted. In the crossfit setting this notion is completely reversed and all emphasis is put on more reps, more weight, go, go, go! When weight and reps is the goal, form is going to suffer greatly.

            When you combine my two previous thoughts, you get one of the most important reasons as to why athletes do not need crossfit, and that is chance of injury. Every crossfit competitor I know has had a barrage of injuries, and that is only in the present, I cannot fathom the level of their injuries 10 years down the road. When the human body is put through the sessions of crossfit over and over it gets beat down and is not allowed to recover. After all, we get stronger/faster/more powerfull/etc. when we recover from the training we do, not while we are beating ourselves down. In crossfit there is no programmed progression and no modes to allow recovery and super compensation (recovering to a level higher than you started.) It doesn’t take long for this to catch up and cause injury. Our single most important goal as an athletic performance coach is to put a better athlete on the field; coach crossfit can’t put a better athlete on the field if they are injured.

            There are many more reasons why crossfit is not meant for athletes. Most of which are more in depth and involve program design and also the human brain and how it reacts to various types of training. These that I have covered here are the simplest and hopefully most persuasive.