http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/cult- ... ossFitCult
This wasn't a late-night infomercial. It was the ardent opinion of my former girlfriend. I had mentioned that I was thinking of trying CrossFit, and Becky, to my surprise, told me she was already a year into it, and that it had given her a "new lease on life" and a "whole new family." On every other subject she sounded like the same levelheaded girl I used to live with. But when she talked about CrossFit, she sounded like a lunatic.
I was oxygen-starved and confused after three rounds, and I still had 10 minutes to go. And I wasn't the only one suffering. Pushups around the room became increasingly bendy, jumps turned wobbly, deadlifts turned ugly.
One of the biggest surprises in this and subsequent classes was the range of body shapes, which didn't seem in any way predictive of who would end up with the highest score. On any given day the doughy endomorph might outpace the cantaloupe-butt Amazon or the wiry guy with the anatomy-chart muscles.
But at the same time, you have to abandon whatever ideas you had about fitness being a linear pursuit toward a measurable goal—whether it's strength, size, or weight loss.
"Fitness" has neither an official meaning nor a governing body, much less agreed-upon checkpoints. But Glassman has his own self-serving definition, and not surprisingly, his system aligns perfectly with it. But if there's one thing every non-CrossFit-affiliated expert I spoke with agrees on, it's this: CrossFit's one-size-fits-all methods are flawed, perhaps dangerously so. "If you're strong and healthy, you'll probably do okay," says Robb Wolf, who opened the first and fourth CrossFit affiliates and later became the brand's nutrition expert before falling out with Glassman. But according to Wolf, if you're prone to injuries or crazily competitive, CrossFit could be a terrible fit for you.
These people are not functionally fit, he says. Instead, they've wedged themselves into a niche and made themselves useless outside of it. I can't disagree. But then again, I don't know anybody who squats 900 pounds or runs a 4-minute mile. Most of the fitness-conscious people I know just want to look better than they do now. Once again, Glassman asserts, the answer is CrossFit. "In the real world, the best physiques belong to people who have functional capacity," he says.
That contradicts my own observations at my local CrossFit gym. If Glassman's brand of functional fitness produces better aesthetic results than the traditional approach does, why did the gelatinous bodies at my gym often outperform those who appeared to be in better shape?
Um, what is stronger, Alex?
I did, however, lose 7 pounds in 90 days. That would've been a great result if I hadn't started at 141 pounds. The last thing I wanted was to end up skinnier. Nobody at my CrossFit gym knew about my weight loss, or cared. At no point was I asked what my goals were. If nothing else, I hoped that all the squats, deadlifts, and Olympic lifts would put some contours onto my tragically flat ass. Alas, my buttocks remained more or less the same.
A month later I bumped into a neighbor who'd joined CrossFit Westside around the same time I did.
"Where have you been?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't go to CrossFit anymore," I answered.
She was slack-jawed, speechless.
"You're still going, I take it?"
"Hell, yeah!" she said. "I'm an instructor now. It's the thing I love most in the world. Well, maybe my husband is first, but CrossFit is a close second, and the gap is getting narrower."
I laughed, but she assured me she wasn't kidding. It's like a cult crossed with a pyramid scheme, and the base is always widening.
