There are many clear and obvious benefits to CrossFit® such as the improvements in fitness, confidence, health and movement that it causes.
There is much empirical evidence to back up these claims. These are all well documented.
This article seeks to uncover and highlight the lesser known and more idiosyncratic positives that CrossFit® causes, both as a force in the fitness industry and on a communal and individual level.
CrossFit® Promotes Function over Aesthetics
One of the central principles of CrossFit® is that function comes first. What you can do comes first. The way that this method of training and eating makes your body look comes second. Function is always the top priority.
This is good for many reasons.
It makes Progress Objective
If an athlete’s goal is simply to “look better” then this goal is vague, limited by self-perception and difficult to measure and track.
How would you do this?
One option is that the athlete could take before and after photos to measure aesthetic progress but ultimately it still comes down to personal opinion.
Another more scientific way would be to or measure parameters such as fat loss or muscle gain. These are often hard to measure accurately without more sophisticated apparatus and difficult to make part of an everyday routine.
Additionally, there is no end goal, or clear milestones along the way. This makes it harder to stay motivated and keep training.
From my experience more people training for looks simply rely on the former method.
With CrossFit® all emphasis is on the numbers. It’s all about objective facts.
- Has your Back Squat 1 rep max gone up?
- What new skills have you learnt?
- How many double unders can you now do unbroken?
- Have you now managed your first Box Jump?
- Have you improved that milestone WOD since the last time you tried it?
The list is endless.
This makes progress easy to track and measure. It removes shifting personal ideas of self-image as a guiding force for determining whether progress has been made or not. This is great because its easy to be honest with yourself and impossible to cheat.
CrossFit® celebrates both the small milestones and the bigger long-term goals
Every new WOD is a new challenge that you must overcome. Every additional movement you learn is a symbolic representation of your body becoming stronger and more skillful.
The ancillary benefit here is that your body will naturally change as you train and get better.
For example, when you get stronger you can lift more weight than before. Simple enough concept.
Additionally, during this ongoing process your body adapts itself to become physically capable and mentally confident enough to successfully move the heavier weights that you are lifting. Your entire physiology changes as a result. Aesthetically you look better as well without that being the primary intention.
Aesthetics naturally follow function.
If you eat intelligently, rest properly, improve your endurance, enhance your strength, learn new skills and get better at metcons, then your body will start to look better than before.
As you objectively become a better athlete, the aesthetics of you’re your body will be a reflection of this better, stronger, faster, fitter version of you.
The truth is that many people want both.
They want to get fitter, stronger, healthier and look better at the same time. There is no wrong motivation for training. Training to look better is totally fine. However, placing function first gives you the best of both worlds.
CrossFit pays male and female athletes equally
When it comes to equality what really matters is pragmatic action.
Rhetoric is important but without subsequent action and measurable results it is next to meaningless.
In 2018 Iceland made it illegal to pay women less then men for the same job position.
No other country in the world (as of the publishing date of this article) has been able to match that so far in terms of pragmatic action.
So where does CrossFit® fit in?
The CrossFit® Games offers completely equal pay-outs for winning events and final leaderboard positions. It offers the same prize money for male and female athletes placing top 3 in Open workouts and/or winning WODs.
The CrossFit® Games are the most widely publicised event in the CrossFit calendar. This demonstrates a financial commitment towards equality.
It is simple, a practical example of practicing what you preach.
CrossFit® Creates a Safe Place for Competition and Encourages the Benefits it brings
It is very difficult not to compare yourselves to others around you.
We are all aware of the advice that we should avoid doing this too much, and it is good advice, but it is practically impossible to adhere to 100% of the time.
If you (like me) have a fairly strong competitive streak then CrossFit® is a perfect environment to exercise this character trait and blow off steam.
To use this trait to compete against your old self and improve is a liberating and motivating feeling.
To compete against others can be fun and motivating, and it can help you to significantly raise your own game when those athletes are better than you.
Competing constantly against people that are better than you will make you stronger, fitter, faster and keep you on your toes. It will keep you out of your comfort zone and help you to get better. It can be tremendously positive if you keep the right mindset and a certain degree of humility.
Competing all the time against people that are weaker and less fit than you fuels the ego and makes you weaker as well. When you’re the biggest fish in the pond, it’s time to find a new place to swim.
CrossFit® gives us a measurable, objective way to see how our fitness and health is improving, it shows us exactly how our competitive energies can be channelled into the hugely positive pursuit of bettering our health and fitness.
Being competitive is not a bad thing in itself. Being competitive against yourself is an incredible way to push and motivate yourself to do better, to be better and to find out that you are capable of much more than you initially thought.
But being competitive in a sick, irritating way at the wrong times can be completely tedious at best and wreck relationships or friendships at worse. Ever tried playing a “fun” board game with someone that is hypercompetitive and loses? Not much fun at all right.
Or take toxic masculinity, another boring display of immaturity and misdirected competitive drive.
Additionally, competitiveness can destroy self-esteem if someone chooses to only base their self-worth on the way in which they measure up against other people.
CrossFit® has designed a training system and designed spaces to focus competitive energy and use it to charge and sharpen the collective health of the entire global community, and the personal fitness and mindset of the individuals that make up this collective.
It teaches us a valuable way to use competitive drive to become fitter individuals and better people.
CrossFit® Demands and Develops Accountability
“Don’t be upset by the results you don’t have from the work you didn’t do.” Renaissance Periodization
It is not easy to truly accept full responsibility for the actions (and consequences) of events in our own lives.
Once we do, then we can make serious progress. We stop blaming others for our own failures. We can lead. We find ways to improve, make practical plans and move forward. We become better people. We become better athletes. We become psychologically stronger.
This is an old concept. It has been discussed and defined by many people through the ages, from Marcus Aurelius and John Paul Satre (Existentialism) to Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership), with the general consensus that accepting accountability and responsibility for your own life will give you the power to ascribe personal meaning, control it to a greater degree and shape it yourself.
So how is this difficult skill is encouraged and developed by CrossFit®?
It is easy to deflect personal responsibility. Hard to seek out and accept responsibility. Let’s look at some practical examples. Take the following statement:
a) “I missed that lift because I wasn’t wearing my proper weightlifting shoes”
It is common enough and has a ring of truth because weightlifting shoes do make a difference.
Top pros wear them for meets, all the elite CrossFit® athletes use them for max lift attempts and lifting ladder events etc. As these statements are true so you could shrug it off and blame the shoes and that attitude could be logically justified.
However, consider a different way to describe the same event.
b) “I missed that lift because I wasn’t strong enough and my technique could be better”
This is a much harder pill to swallow but this is what accountability sounds like.
Version b creates room for improvement.
How can I get stronger? How can I improve my technique? You are accountable and accept that there is room for improvement and make plans to do so.
Version a allows the lifter to blame the shoes and get on with their day. It wasn’t my fault, I didn’t have my special shoes etc.
Here the issue of improvement is deferred. “I’ll be good again when I get my proper shoes”.
When it comes to the previous two statements, which ones do you think Mat Fraser or Tia-Clair Toomey-Orr would use? Do you think they would blame their shoes? Or find ways to keep improving instead? You already know the answer. They would take responsibility and own the missed lift.
CrossFit® trains this concept of taking responsibility because it gives you regular feedback about your physical abilities. It forces you to confront and evaluate your physical and mental fitness levels. You must expose, accept and work on your weaknesses.
There is nowhere to hide, your score is what it is, displayed up there on the whiteboard for everyone to see. You own each score. You created each score and whatever it is, is totally fine. Just make sure you own it, accept it and use it use it to keep improving.
CrossFit® Trains you to Handle the Hardships of life
“What matters is how well you walk through the fire.” Charles Bukowski
CrossFit® makes you do hard things on a daily basis. This in turn makes you into a tougher and more resilient human, both physically and mentally.
Life is full of hardship and difficult events that need to be navigated, processed and overcome.
CrossFit® makes us more comfortable operating outside of our comfort zones, both physically and mentally, on a regular basis. Most people do not deliberately practice this in their everyday lives.
This attitude of meeting new challenges head on, especially when they are difficult and uncomfortable breeds resilience. Resilience makes difficult life events easier to manage. It is not everything, often other methods are needed as well, but it is important.
CrossFit® demonstrates the importance of being able, when necessary, to stick your head up, your chest out and keep going, however hard it gets, until the job is done.
Every difficult WOD that you completed has made you a bit tougher, slightly more resilient and added a notch to your overall confidence. Whether you know it or not.
CrossFit® has been highly influential on the entire fitness scene
The CrossFit® methodology has changed the way that many people outside of CrossFit® choose to train.
Walk into many commercial gyms nowadays and you will find a “Functional” area. This is the effect of the CrossFit® training methodology seeping into mainstream fitness.
Let’s look at other examples. Functional Fitness and Functional Bodybuilding also have roots in CrossFit®. They have both appropriated the elevated importance of “functionality” that CrossFit® championed into their respective training styles.
Not everyone wants to sign up to a CrossFit® Box and only do CrossFit® all the time and that’s completely fine.
But it is great to see some of the most positive aspects of the CrossFit® training methodology influence other methods and forms of training.
Training for function first prioritises health, movement, strength endurance, mobility, balance, skill and coordination over aesthetics. This is fundamentally good, whether it takes place in a Box, a park or a Globo-gym.
This is not an original process.
Without the Beatles you wouldn’t have Oasis.
In painting, Courbet opened the door for Cezanne, who in turn made progress that Picasso and Braque built upon in order to revolutionise painting as an artform.
CrossFit® steals movements and principles from powerlifting, gymnastics, running, strong (wo)man, calisthenics and many other sports that have been around for much longer than it has.
In turn, it has given back with the results of its methodology, tested by millions of hours of hard training. It has had a profound and inextricable effect on the development and history of fitness and training.
CrossFit Redefines Individual Horizons and Personal Expectations
We all have many subconscious ideas about what we are capable of achieving and who we are capable of being. Many of these hold us back.
There are numerous psychological influences that help to shape these forces such as upbringing, culture, family, personal experience and education.
These personal ideas of who we are and who we should be are often limiting. CrossFit® helps to unravel these knots and allows us to redefine these limitations for ourselves.
So how does that work?
Think of that feeling when you see a really tough WOD on the whiteboard. Anxiety? Nerves? Excitement?
How about the courage to give it a go?
Every WOD you have ever tried has been a new challenge, and as a result has expanded your experience. Every WOD has, to a small degree, redefined what you previously may have been unable to do.
Think about the last time you learnt a new movement in CrossFit®. Whether it was a box jump or a muscle up, what matters is its relative value to you.
Every time you learn some new movement or log a better time it is an objective sign of you getting better, fitter, stronger, faster and more skilful. You are redefining your individual horizons. You are expanding your personal expectations of what is possible for you.
It is easy to see how this is metaphorically and practically applicable to other aspects of your life.
If everyone around you expects you to work some deadbeat job, and you expect yourself to work some deadbeat job, then you will probably work some deadbeat job.
However, if you apply the same principles you have learnt from CrossFit® then you can change that.
CrossFit® teaches us to aim higher and redefine our personal limitations. It also teaches us that to do it requires more than words and a plan, it requires effort.
With the mindset that CrossFit® cultivates you can take on new professional challenges, earn new qualifications, acquire experience, put in extra hours practicing and refining new skills.
As a result, you will become more confident, intelligent, experienced and willing to try new things. You will be more motivated to secure a better, more enjoyable and meaningful job. You will redefine what you believe you are capable of doing, being and achieving.
The Undervalued Benefits of CrossFit®
CrossFit® has many benefits beyond the obvious improvements to physical health that it creates.
These in turn have tremendous transformative potential, both on an individual, personal level and on a macro, communal and societal level.
Whether you love it or hate it, there is no doubting the massive global impact that CrossFit® has created.
image sources
- Josh-Bridges: WODSHOTS
