What is CrossFit?
CrossFit is a form of high-intensity interval training that incorporates Strength and Conditioning through functional movements, Olympic lifting and Gymnastics.
These “functional” movements are movements that you will often use in your everyday life like squatting, pulling, pushing, carrying, hinging and lunging. As your strength improves you will not only notice everyday movements become easier, but your other training and sports will improve as well.
These functional movements are often performed at a high intensity like a H.I.I.T workout to improve your metabolic conditioning. The H.I.I.T aspect of CrossFit gives the benefits of better aerobic capacity and stamina so you can do more in less time, plus it burns a lot of calories.
CrossFit also incorporates a few more elements than your usual H.I.IT Functional training by also including Olympic Lifting and elements of Gymnastics.
Olympic Lifting helps to not only improve your strength, but it also enhances coordination and protects against injury by lifting the weight with muscle groups rather than isolated muscle – as it strengthens all the muscles that you would use in functional movements such as stabilising muscles.
Gymnastics elements are not only fun, but they help to strengthen your body’s core strength, reflexes, balance and improves the flexibility of muscle groups – helping to prevent injury.
This idea is that it is a full rounded workout where you will increase your endurance, strength, balance and all the pieces in between to help you get there.
The idea of the workout:
CrossFit is often referred to as a sport, and participants are athletes. With this, although often the workouts are performed solo, it is a team environment where no one packs up until everyone is done, and everyone is there to push each other further, and cheer you on.
The workouts are also different everyday, from the movements, to the focus of how to do it – such as some may be focused on how fast you get a set workout done, some be focused on calories burned, some may be as many rounds or reps you can complete. This keeps everyday interesting to not only focus on improving your strength and endurance and skills – but also the strategy of how to complete the workout based on what will be “scored”.
Every workout has a measurement that will be “scored”. This not only creates a little in-house competition to keep you motivated like sports do, but it also helps you to see how you are improving over time.
