Hyperbolic headlines are intensely irritating.
crossfit does make use of some of the principles outlined in the article, yes. but you could say that about almost any workout scheme, including 20lb weights balancing on a bosu ball. there are bound to be some similarities.
crossfit is frenetic, with exercises that vary daily. this routine is advocating a more static set of consistent core exercises.
crossfit mixes up the styles of exercises pretty frequently -- some are strength, some are endurance, some are timed, etc.. again, this routine is more about slow, steady, consistent improvements on a single set of exercises.
crossfit is a single workout track that gets everyone "fit", while this routine is pointing out that you need to approach the exercises differently based on your personal goals.
etc etc.
In Crossfit times and reps matter more than form. Just take a look at some gyms. The exercises and the philosophy behind is awesome, but the practical appliance is far from great.
I believe it's a CrossFit thing.
Based on this claim I assume also that Crossfit invented the barbell, the bumper plate and gravity.
The sudden outburst of anecdotes about how your Crossfit gym rooly trooly emphasises form seems to have come after years of sustained criticism by strength coaches and Olympic weightlifting coaches.
It's as simple as this: nobody -- not me, not you, not your coach, not the pros -- nobody can pump out high rep Oly movements without steady and ultimately dangerous degradation in form. The force plate studies, the EEG studies, the eyeballing of experienced coaches demonstrate over and over and over that it is a flat out stupid idea to do snatches or cleans for reps.
And yet in Crossfit gyms everywhere, this idea of smashing out 20 clean & jerks still keeps getting circulated.
You cannot do this and learn to do the movements precisely enough. You will only train yourselves to do it messily. Under heavy weights you will fuck up and injure yourself.
Given that I love Oly lifting, I don't want people getting injured and then blaming the lifts, when they should be blaming a faulty training technique.
I don't think anyone is saying that it's not possible, it's just much more likely that your average lifter is going to run into injury.
The Olympic lifts require:
1. Precision.
2. Power.
In that order.
The problem is that the motions happen so fast that even at light weights you quickly deplete the central nervous system's ability to provide sharp signals. Ideally the signal conveyed to muscles looks like a square wave. However as repetitions mount, it becomes more and more to resemble noise, leading to sloppy form.
Repetition is the basis of learning, especially for complex movement. If you are doing 20 reps, and 15 of them have degraded form, what will you wind up learning?
And it doesn't help that the emphasis is doing the 20 reps in the minimum time possible, which discourages lifters from taking the time to set themselves in the correct position off the floor.
The weight is almost, but not quite, irrelevant to my main point. My main point is that the body learns what you make it do. If you continue to work through degraded form you will only learn to make the lifts sloppily. As you increase the weight (Crossfit calls this "scaling the workout" as if they were the first to think of changing the weight on the bar), you will only increase your risk of injury.
> Hyperbolic headlines are intensely irritating.
Jason Fried said yesterday: "Something I didn't know when I started writing for Inc: The authors don't write the headlines. The editors write the headlines and subheads."
(from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271625)
Perhaps it's the same at Mens Journal.