What Is CrossFit?

                                

Lets hear it from CrossFit HQ themselves....

"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 speciality 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 the 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 programmes."

"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 the main site and distinguished themselves in combat, the streets, the ring, stadiums, gyms and homes."

​How popular is it?
CrossFit was co-founded in 2002 by Greg Glassman, a former gymnast, and what started as a low key, grass-roots fitness movement exploded with the help of the internet to become a worldwide fitness methodology. The CrossFit main site is a free resource of fitness workouts posted daily for all who are interested to follow. The CrossFit Journal, an example of which can be downloaded to the right hand side below, is one of the best sources of fitness information on the web. What makes CrossFit so special is that through the community of CrossFitters recording and posting their times and results, real-life data is archived, studied and processed to keep refining the principles that produce the best results. You don't need a lot of fancy, expensive equipment to achieve these results and CrossFit has proved this by producing some of the fittest athletes on the planet who now compete yearly in the CrossFit games in the US. (The inaugural UK Games were held in October last year). There are currently over 6000 CrossFit gyms worldwide and now approximately 130 in the UK. It is rapidly gaining exposure over here and this, I believe, is down to two things: the sense of community in the CrossFit world and because it works!
 

​What makes it so different from all the other types of training?
CrossFit uses no miraculous or revolutionary training methods and doesn't claim too. What it does use is traditional, multi-joint, full body movements that have fallen by the wayside with the advent of shiny new weights machines. Exercises like the Deadlift, Snatch, Push Press and Clean and Jerk all make an appearance when the CrossFitter is ready. CrossFit also utilises your bodyweight and engages your natural strength in exercises like press ups, pull ups, box jumps, and air squats. It gets you running, sprinting, jumping and rowing in short, sharp intervals. Oh and we'd better mention how it sometimes combines all three of these elements into one workout to really kick your system into overdrive!
 

​But why is this so good?
In simple terms our body uses three energy systems; let's call them sprint, medium blast and endurance. The body works differently if you are sprinting 50 meters (Sprint), lifting a set of weights for one or two minutes (medium blast) or rowing a 5km distance on the concept 2 rowers (endurance). To ensure your body is capable of anything you throw at it in real life it is beneficial to excel in all three pathways. For example, a bodybuilder will be very strong and powerful in the 'medium blast' system as most weight sets for a bodybuilder will last 60-90 seconds before a rest period. Get these guys and gals on a 5km row and they'll more than likely find it tough. Conversely a marathon runner will excel in the 'endurance' system but ask them to clean a heavy weight overhead and they might struggle. Specializing in one system is obviously necessary and fine (to some degree) if you are a professional athlete. For a regular, everyday person looking to get truly 'fit' however you need to have the broadest range of stimulus as possible in order to see the best results. Enter CrossFit. We work on ten essential areas that will get you stronger, fitter and faster;  Cardiovascular Endurance, Stamina, Strength, Speed, Accuracy, Agility, Balance, Coordination, Flexibility and Power.
 

​But I'm not fit!
That's perfectly okay. Don't imagine our box to be filled with elite athletes with rippling muscles. It's not. Our members come from all walks of life, young, old, men, women, fit and unfit. It's the spirit of CrossFit that is so important and something that all our members understand. It's not just about the individual with CrossFit. No matter how hard anyone has just worked during a WOD (thats 'workout of the day', don't worry you'll get to know these terms) you will still see the people that finished first encouraging the others that are still going. That's the beauty of it. How many times in your regular gym has someone come up to you and encouraged you to lift one more rep or run another 500m? Probably none huh?

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How Long Does It Take?
The traditional CrossFit class is called the Workout of the Day, or WOD for short. Our WOD classes last one hour. On most occasions this is divided into the following sections:

Warm up and mobilisation
Strength and skill work
Main 'Workout of the Day'                   
Cool down and stretch 

                
We also run specific skill classes to encourage members to hone their skills in a certain area. See the Class Type page for more details.