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Comment by inglondon | Hacker News Reader

I can't verify the quality of these studies but it seems that injury rates per 1000 active hours of crossfit at 0.27 - 0.74 [1] are significantly lower than more common sports such as running at 2.9 - 4.4 and basketball at 6.3 - 12.9 [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6201188/ [2] http://bionics.seas.ucla.edu/education/Rowing/Injury_2004_01...

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Importantly, the study "assumes" that participants performed a "maximum number of hours per week" rather than measuring the actual hours per week. Because they "assume" the amount of time spent exercising, their injuries per 1000 hours metric is simply wrong.

Specifically, this study conflicts with several other studies that found significantly higher rates of injury (and which this study acknowledges), including 2 studies which found a 20% rate of injury and 50% rate of injury for Crossfit athletes, respectively, using controlled observational samples rather than the self-reported, self-selected sample of this study.

Anecdotally, I don't know any current Crossfitters without overuse injuries--including those who go to the "safe" gyms. I also know a larger number of former Crossfitters, all of whom stopped because of injury.

>this study conflicts with several other studies that found significantly higher rates of injury

Can you provide a citation?

The fundamentals of Crossfit are entirely sound. A warmup followed by some subset of bodyweight exercises, calisthenics, rowing, running, climbing, and (olympic) weightlifting is a completely reasonable fitness regimen. Being sensible is a matter of leveling the workout to your own particular circumstances: age and overall fitness being the two biggest factors.

But yeah I've also seen the videos on youtube of people doing heavy barbell back squats on a bosu ball and similar, to use the technical term, stupid shit that will get you hurt.

Mark Rippetoe has one of the better criticisms of CrossFit: it's just an exercise program, not a training program. Proof is that the athletes that compete in and win the Crossfit games don't actually do Crossfit to prepare, they have specific training regimens for those games.

Being sensible is not having a WoD one size fits all. It oversimplifies too much IMO.

People, specially who are new, haven’t gotten serious injuries, or just don’t understand how exercise can get you high, tend to fall in the WoD trap from my observations.

There have been a great mindset change with CrossFit in terms of sharing good knowledge, welcoming new members no matter their level and mixing everyone together but still everyday seems to be race day in CrossFit.

I completely agree. Any Crossfit gym where the coach doesn't enthusiastically support scaling down from the "Rx" is one nobody should go to. As I've said elsewhere in this thread I don't do Crossfit (I'm lazy and I hate cardio so I powerlift), but I know many people that do and their coaches have been entirely supportive of proper scaling to ability, with an eye toward progression of course.

Last I checked there wasn’t CrossFit for basketball. You should compare apples to apples. How does it stack up against (trained) non-CrossFit weight training?

Judging by how those idiots abuse gym equipment I’d expect poorly, but prove me wrong.

I power-lifted. I got injured. Many of us did.

It's much higher. Even the studies show it: https://www.strengthandconditioningresearch.com/wp-content/u...

https://www.strengthandconditioningresearch.com/2014/07/08/i...

Powerlifting is definitely not the same as general CrossFit and is pretty obviously a dangerous sport. I would guess that based on the amount of jerking and twisting I see in CrossFitters doing powerlifting that the injury rate would be higher still within that specific discipline. Again, all speculation on my part.

I’m thinking an intense workout with good form and control vs. a standard CrossFit workout.

> I’m thinking an intense workout with good form and control vs. a standard CrossFit workout

A standard CrossFit without is done with good form and control.

Most CrossFit gyms aim for good form and control. All workouts can be scaled, if you can't lift a certain weight, or perform a certain movement you scale it down to a weight or movement you can do comfortably.

For instance, if you were asked to perform a workout which required handstand push-ups and you couldn't do them, you could scale to a box and do a more triangular movement, or you could grab some dumbbells and push-press. If a movement said 100kg deadlift and you can only comfortably deadlift 40kg then you would use 40kg instead.

Most coaches will talk through this and if you have questions, they'll mostly be happy to answer. Of course there are some coaches out there which aren't doing their job correctly, but most of them are really good at what they do.

Crossfit now aims for good form and control.

That wasn't true several years ago during the Uncle Rhabdo phase, and Crossfit only changed its tune because of the overwhelming bad press about injury rates. Back then, it was about doing exercises as fast and as many times as possible.

and as any other transition, it takes time to incorporate. A lot of gyms and coaches I still see those days know/care very little about proper form and exercise individualization, periodization to make it safer.

Since you have such specific demands for a study that will satisfy your prejudices, I think you should find it yourself instead of demanding other, more resourceful and open minded people find it for you.

Powerlifting is probably the most dangerous weight lifting discipline, because of the bench press[1]. Almost all of these are due to lifting alone, without a spotter, and without proper safety mechanisms (like a rack with crossbars). This seems to be a downvote happy thread, but this needs to be said: Don't bench without a spotter or safety gear. Ever!

[1] https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2003/05001/U_S__...

I don't bench that often, but I do it without a spotter or safety gear. I use normal grip (not the thumbless "suicide" grip), never go to failure, do medium-low weight/medium-high reps (8-12), and most importantly, I don't lock the weights, so worst comes to worst, I can always just tilt the bar and drop the weights...

If the worst comes to worst, push the bar down to your belly. You have saved your neck this way, giving yourself the chance to tilt the bar in a controlled manner after a breath. If you are already failing, tilting the bar might be too much without more O2

Sure, but "failure" isn't "dropping the bar on your throat"... that would be catastrophic failure that shouldn't really happen (and not even a spotter could save you). When I lift, "failure" is usually just "can't lift the bar to the top" so there's more than enough strength to lower it a bit to tilt it...

I always had both of those things (and a coach).

My personal injury was a pinched sciatic nerve brought on by a session of improper deadlifting. I made the mistake of rushing through a workout near when I was lifting my heaviest. Took about 3 months for the pain to go away.

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