CrossFit’s lucrative and simple business plan
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The main problem, as I see it, is that it's near trivial to get a Coach Level 1 certificate (my mom could do it). This results in a lot of bad coaching, resulting in bad form, resulting in unneeded injuries. You could argue that an easy certificate makes it easier to open up a box. Interesting trade off.
There are plenty of crossfit boxes, although I do not know if this is a majority, that hire real weightlifting coaches.
I can't help but think that much of the hate crossfit gets is just some form of resentment. Barbell training used to be unique, now it's getting more popular, and people feel attacked on a personal level.
All that said, good coaching, especially with big weights, is very important. It's a shame not every crossfit box owner thinks that way. Some of the injuries are bad. https://medium.com/@ericrobertson/crossfits-dirty-little-sec...
Also, the misdirected resentment likely comes from some Crossfit people preaching it like a cult. Just like anything, there's people that take it too far.
With that being said, if the movements are done correctly, I don't see how Crossfit is all that bad
This. As a powerlifter I used to hate everything about crossfit, but now I realize it's a great way to get people away from pseudo body building and into the rack / onto the platform. I think a lot of people find technical lifts like the squat or clean to be very intimidating, but crossfit helps people get over this fear in a group environment. Once this has been accomplished and someone gets comfortable, it's fairly easy to steer them towards olympic lifting or powerlifting.
> More places for me to train, suddenly people understand you why its fun
It's so nice to now be able to travel and not have to worry about being stuck in some crappy commercial gym where people yell at you for using chalk and making noise while deadlifting.
A lot of these people are more or less wasting their time grinding out workouts that have no real rhyme or reason to them when they could be putting all that perspiration into good linear progression and actually increasing their strength and performance.
There's also a pervasive smugness in a lot of these boxes. It almost seems to be part of the workout; thinking you're some kind of superhuman and better than everyone else.
That said, many newbies will make _a lot_ of gains when they start out doing crossfit or any form of barbell training.
He has literally written the textbook [1] on the 5 basic lifts giving a complete anotomical and mechanical breakdown of each that I think the HN crowd would appreciate, which at $10 for the kindle version is worth it at 10x the price. His website [2] and YouTube channel also provide a large amount of free resources for anyone interested in learning about barbell lifting.
I do say, once you have had the experience of 400 pounds loaded on your back, there isn't a muscle in your body, stabilizer or otherwise, that isn't 'activated'. There are not many other movements out there, and none that can be progressively loaded and trained, that will match a back squat to proper depth for engaging more of the body's muscle systems.
We'll have to disagree on the progressive loading and training. For most people there are high impact, safer movements than barbell squats. An example being the kettlebell swing.
Also, according to Nick Curson (coach of UFC Champion Rafael Dos Anjos) on the Joe Rogan podcast, heavy slow weight lifting is counterproductive for most sports [1] [2]
Please take a look at Gus, a woman in her 90s who has recently started to train at Rip's gym and has improved her quality of life such that she no longer requires her walker.
It's hard to hurt yourself if you truly read the book, because if you start with an empty bar and only add small amounts of weight using the proper form (as the book instructs) it's tough to hurt yourself.
If anyone needs some help with barbell form you can drop into the forums where coaches will gladly review a video for you, or if necessary find someone to help you in person.
And before I fall down the rabbit hole of repeating Rip's gospel word for word, what a coach says they do for an elite athlete has little bearing on the general population. Elite athelets are genetic freaks that could be trained in many ways and still achieve their results.
Lifting heavy is not going to slow you down or make you big, it's going to get you strong. Training for strength and practicing your sport of choice will just make you a stronger version of your previous self. If you train and eat like a power lifter you are not going to be able to maintain your 3:30 marathon time, but if you add in properly programmed strength training for the goals you are looking to achieve, it is petty hard to argue that being stronger is worse than being weaker all other things being equal.
Then again, too much strength competes with balance and flexibility.
If you can move through the full range of motion of the movement you are flexible enough.
Being able to squat above your body weight is going to make you a more useful human being than putting your leg behind your head.
I don't think strength is bad, but: you only have so many training hours and you might want to spend some of them on balance or flexibility instead. Further, it's possible to have such a volume of muscle that you cannot achieve certain positions (e.g. trying to touch your elbows together leaves an 8 inch gap). And it's also possible for your muscles to weigh so much that you can't move as gracefully because equilibrium is harder to maintain. That's all I meant. Ask any dancer, yogi, acrobat, gymnast, skier, martial artist, figure skater, etc. Any discipline where you need strength, balance, and flexibility in approximately equal measure, it's possible to overtrain or undertrain any one of them.
Many people are getting insured and have long term damage because of poor form and techniques taught by Cross-fit. Even if this is done by box owners it is up to cross-fit to manage their brand and not certify coaches that aren't ready.
If you want to get in shape, spend the time an learn the proper techniques. There are no short cuts, it takes years and you need to listen to your body. Don't power through pain or it will catch up with you later.
There was no reputation. Almost nobody knew what weightlifting was.
There are now hundreds.
As a sport it's undergoing a second renaissance in the anglosphere. There's no other obvious cause apart from millions of crossfitters taking it up.
That is, http://www.awf.com.au/history/HallOfFame.aspx says that the 1970s were "“the golden years” of the sport" in Australia, and there are many here who were youths in the 1970s.
So when you write "Almost nobody knew what weightlifting was", what population were you considering? If it's predominately those in their 20s ("millenial scale") then you should consider oldmanjay's comment as suggesting there's a bias error in your 'almost nobody.'
While it's not all that indicative, Google ngrams gives an interesting comparison between the use of 'weighlifting' in "British English" at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=weightlifting&... vs "American English" at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=weightlifting&... .
There's a clear drop in British English during the 1980s, which is what I would expect from your first/second renaissance description, but it doesn't exist in the US English chart. So another possibility is that oldmanjay comes from the US.
Also, in attempting to verify your statement concerning the "perhaps three dozen registered weightlifters in WA" I found the 2007 AWF report at http://www.awf.com.au/governance/docs/Annual%20Report%202007... .
Under "Number of Lifters in the Top 10 Male Rankings by State" are 58 from Western Australia, and under "Number of Lifters in the Top 10 Female Rankings by State" are 39 from Western Australia. This sounds like there were easily more than three dozen registered weightlifters in WA. I didn't carefully check to see if there were duplicate names, but a spot examination shows few overlaps. And in any case, these are only the top 10 winners.
How do you know there were "perhaps three dozen registered weightlifters in Western Australia" when the limited evidence I can find suggests there were more than that?
The 70s are definitely before my time.
Going on what I read from those who were adults in the 70s, it seems like the golden era for the anglosphere was the 50s and 60s. By the 1970s the Russians dominated the sport.
> This sounds like there were easily more than three dozen registered weightlifters in WA.
There's a capitation table. 77 registered lifters (~six dozen, I was off by 2x) in the whole of WA in 2007. In 2008 it fell to 68. I can't find more recent numbers, they seem to have stopped publishing the capitation table.
For what it's worth, I competed for five years, during which Crossfit exploded in popularity. They have been a massive shot in the arm for strength sports. It used to be that I'd say I was a weightlifter and people would ask me for tips on bicep curls. Now I have a chance that someone will ask me about my competition total.
That still leaves the possibility that there's a difference between US/Commonwealth practices, that is, that you use 'anglosphere' where perhaps 'Commonwealth' is a more appropriate term?
For another US data point, the gym I went to in ~2005 had a stronger emphasis on weight lifting. http://www.carlandsandras.com/ . It's "Under the direction of Carl Miller, former United States National, Olympic, and World Weightlifting Coach", and one of the men in the first salsa class I went to, back in around 2000, was an amateur weightlifter.
Which means that I, like oldmanjay, find it hard to accept that 'Almost nobody knew what weightlifting was' before 2007.
I dunno, traditional bar bell weightlifting's reputation as some hard thing for which most people casually interested in fitness want a shortcut, which its had AFAICT pretty much as long as I've been alive, seems pretty solidly intact and unthreatened by Cross-Fit.
If Cross-Fit is certifying unready coaches producing a wave of injuries that eventually are going to get notice, the reputation damaged will be Cross-Fit's.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2oknZg-EI8xZFVkemhWMWlkVDg... along with a playground (or a pull up bar and rings) has been all I've ever needed.
Barbell training does require a physical location for obvious reasons. And community might not be helpful for HN introverts, but most people are extroverts.
Certifications are also a good idea for safety reasons: improper lifting is dangerous. However, this is an area where Crossfit is plenty open to criticism: I'm not sure what goes into getting a Crossfit certification, but whatever it is it's just wrong.
I remember my box owners face wince with pain every time someone "dumped" (dropped from height) a nice Olympic weightlifting bar to the ground. Those things have moving parts and are expensive!
I remember my box owners face wince with pain every time someone dropped to the ground. Those bodies have moving parts and are expensive!
True! I remember a physio (who happened to work closely with a box) say that CrossFit is a great way of finding out all these niggles and problems you never knew you had, and then turning them into ailments or injuries, which of course need more treatment and attention.
Thus, when someone leaves/quits the gym, they're not leaving with much of value: the strength they gain isn't specific to any one sport (unless that sport is, "CrossFit" which is also a headscratcher), and the exercises they've learned could have been done for years improperly. That's another recipe for injury.
That's a lot of strange minuses for a gym that's very expensive to belong to.
My comment was a joke, but the problem with injuries due to improper form while lifting is very real. It's not specific to CrossFit, but as I've mentioned, the focus on # reps in a specific amount of time can exasperates that problem.
I myself have no investment in any commercial competitors of CrossFit. I'm a very fit person, but not in any way to CrossFit would measure. What I see personally in a CrossFit physique is a lot of muscle and weight that doesn't do a lot of good in the areas of sport that I practice: running, cycling, and climbing - all of which benefit from a strength to weight ratio that would not be attainable utilizing a CrossFit regime. CrossFit ideas have been attempted to be shoehorned into these things (CrossFit Endurance), but it's seemed as somewhat of a joke, if you're anything close to an elite athlete.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/fashion/thursdaystyles/get...
It is a legitimate question - I'm actually pretty wary of most main stream media outlets - not unlike yourself.
http://www.ivankobarbell.com/press/how_to_bend_an_olympic_ba...
The problem with any gym is scaling. You have limited floorspace = limited number of members = limited revenue. To scale out it seems you need to open more gyms, with high fixed cost for each new location---that is, high marginal cost. This is the model most gym chains have taken.
The genius of the Crossfit business model is it scales without incurring high marginal cost. It does this by using an affiliate model. Affiliates pay a fee to be able to display the Crossfit branch and take on the risk and overhead of the new location. This is basically what fast-food franchises do, and similar to what companies like Uber are doing to achieve scale.
Now it is probably quite difficult to make good money as a Crossfit affiliate, for all the reasons that gyms have difficulty scaling, but Crossfit HQ doesn't have to care about that. There are always more young hopefuls to start a new "box".
(O bars are designed to be dropped. I doubt that is a major issue.)
1. Local outpost of a chain store that doesn't franchise. The manager, like everyone under him, is paid a salary, and whatever money is left over after paying the store expenses goes back to corporate. This model is illustrated by a scene from The Sopranos (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz0uEzRSWXw ) in which the manager of a Starbucks has to break it to the mafia that he can't pay protection money because he doesn't have any discretionary funding.
2. Local franchise. The owner has no salary. Instead, he keeps whatever money is left over after paying the store expenses. This is likely to have several different benefits: the owner may feel like putting in extra time at his store. If the janitor has an emergency, maybe the McDonald's owner will clean the bathrooms himself. Similarly, the owner may take a different view toward cashiers dipping into the till than a salaried manager would. And the owner's pricing decisions are much more informed, and therefore more likely to be correct, than the pricing decisions corporate would make.
So with the distinction I describe, scaling your brand as a franchise rather than a chain boils down to one difference: in a chain your store operators are salaried and you keep all the extra money, whereas in a franchise you are salaried and your store operators keep the extra money (you might take a percentage, or a flat fee up front, or some combination. I don't know). Paying your store operators that much more under the franchise model means you can expect them to do more difficult and demanding work. It's not all about marketing.
Yes these they are designed to be dropped. Your friend should: ensure they have proper bumper plates, ensure they have a proper lifting platform, factor in the cost of replacing the bars when worn out to their cash flow models.
EDIT and like the other guys said actually buy quality branded olympic bars. (Rather than e.g. power lifting bars which will not be intended for dropping.)