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Comment by davidtyleryork | Hacker News Reader

At Betable, four of us do CrossFit. It's not sadistic as the title says, though I'm sure that can depend on the gym. The one in SOMA is pretty supportive and accommodating, probably because they deal with a lot of startup engineers :)

Anyway, was struck me about CrossFit and really any group exercise routine is how much more it makes you tax your own body. When you're at the gym, you don't push yourself. You run comfortably fast on the treadmill, lift a comfortable amount of weight, and do it at a comfortable pace. Group exercise is great for breaking you out of that habit and making you push your limits. It's too easy to pretend that 45 minutes at the gym, 15 of which is "cardio" and 15 of which is "cooldown", is going to change anything.

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I was a crossfitter for about 2 years at the South Bay Crossfit gym (Jason Khalipa's).

My big takeaway from that was that olympic lifting is much more fun and rewarding than CF for me. (Note to HN pedants: for me.) The only problem is that it's hard to find a big box with a barbell, let alone two or three.

This article has fired me up again.

Go to the sports palace in south sf. The guy who wrote the Olympic lifting book mentioned in the article coaches there.

Huh, that's interesting. I go to a CrossFit affiliate that actually focusses pretty intently on olympic lifts. Each one hour session includes 20 minutes of practicing a specific lift. The two - olympic lifting and CrossFit - have become so intertwined in my mind that it's difficult to imagine one without the other.

I've been doing Crossfit for about five years, at multiple facilities. The really good CF facilities, including Crossfit Southie in Boston where I currently go, place a huge emphasis on powerlifting and olympic movements. Take a look at the Crossfit Games workouts (http://games.crossfit.com/), and you'll see snatches and deadlifts everywhere.

The problem with Crossfit is that it is an affiliated brand. Every CF facility pays about $5,000 per year to use the Crossfit brand, but each facility is independently owned and operated, and so the programming at each facility is usually unique. There exist a number of questionable facilities, especially out in California where the concentration of gyms is much higher.

The Crossfit affiliates need to start doing some quality control. As I've watch the program expand over the past half-decade, I've been excited at how many people the gyms have helped, but dismayed at how the trainers at some facilities don't share the same love or ability for the basic lifts.

Yeah that's the point I was trying to make. CF turned me onto Olympic lifting and after awhile, I just really learned to love Oly lifting but lose my devotion to CF.

I'm doing Crossfit for about 1.5 years and sometimes it's pretty tough. E.g., last week there was a workout that I was 100% sure I won't be able to finish, though eventually I did even though it took me 20 mins more than more fit people, and I had to scale down couple of parts from prescribed. But thinking back about it, I constantly realize there's no way I'd push myself so hard if I weren't on Crossfit program. And that's probably why previous years of "exercising" here and there did very little for me, but with Crossfit I am feeling real progress. I am still very far from where I want to be, but at least I am feeling some movement towards the goal. And while Crossfit can be very tough sometimes, right on the border of "are you kidding me? you want me to do what how many times?", it usually works out pretty well.

"...how much more it makes you tax your own body. When you're at the gym, you don't push yourself."

Says who? This seems like a false premise to me.

I think he meant that, if you're not careful, you'll lapse into going through the motions without pushing yourself. In other words, you need to push yourself. And he says being in a group will help you actually push yourself.

Personal experience (his and mine). Same basic principle explains why people work together in offices instead of at home: peer pressure prevents you from slacking. And personal trainers take this up yet another level, because it's a lot harder to give up when somebody's in your face telling you that he knows you can do one more rep.

And yes, of course there are people who can put in supremely productive 9-to-5 days at the home office and/or whip themselves mercilessly in solo workouts. But they're a minority.

A really good way to counter this, at least for me, is to keep track of your progress in a notebook or on your phone. It helps a lot to be able to say "oh, I was able to do 2 more reps than average this time" or "Hmm, I've been on this weight for a couple of months, maybe I should go up." Plus it's a good motivator -- it's a lot easier to go the the gym when you can see how much progress you've made.

A roommate of mine (former D1 track athlete) loved to do CrossFit solely because the group atmosphere forced him way beyond his boundaries. The first 4 times in a row that he went, he pushed himself so hard that he threw up. He could not stop raving about how it got him back into such relatively good shape so fast.

Which CrossFit gym in SOMA are you referring to? (Mine is awesome, too. Just wondering if it's the same one.)

Not the OP but worked out at United Barbell and they are phenomenal. I am no longer convinced that CrossFit is the right thing for me to keep doing so I stopped it and replaced it by running 5+ miles and doing the big 3, but it definitely is the best thing that ever happened to me fitness wise.

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