Crossfit: The Beginnings

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A quick Wikipedia search defines Crossfit as "a strength and conditioning program designed to help people gain a broad and general fitness. CrossFit programming concentrates on constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity to achieve overall physical fitness, so people are prepared for any physical challenge." I heard of Crossfit from a friend I worked with at GoodLife when I first started.

I remember my first reaction was "woah, that's intense". Since then the idea of it has simmered in my psyche and it has finally peaked my interest enough to give it a go. After doing a lot of research on how to actually perform some of the movements I decided to do a baseline testing of sorts to give me a benchmark to measure progress against.

I found this baseline test at LearnCrossfit's website. It sounded pretty simple and I figured it would be no problem. Wow was I wrong. So here's the details of the work out:

Complete all rounds back to back as fast as you can for time.

Round 1
Run 400m
21 pushups (women from knees, men from toes)
21 squats (As to grass aka A2G if possible)
5 burpees (chest has to touch floor at bottom)

Round 2
Run 400m
15 pushups
15 squats
5 burpees

Round 3
Run 400m
9 pushups
9 squats
5 burpees

My time was 17:10.25. I don't have anyone to compare against so I have no idea how good that is but I can tell you right now my face was bright red at the end of it and I had to lay down on the floor for about 10 minutes to recover. Talk about intense!

It took me 10 days to get the courage (and time) to do my second workout. Not knowing how to do clean and jerks, snatches, etc I had to find a WOD (workout of the day) that suited my skill level. This past Saturday I finally found one called "Fight Gone Bad" that Tannaya had posted on the Crossfit Halifax website and figured I might as well give it a go. Because I wasn't in a Crossfit gym I had to make some modifications but here is the outline that I did:

3 rounds - 1 minute per exercise plus 1 minute rest between rounds

                                                       Round 1     Round 2     Round 3
Wall ball (15lbs)                                20               18               17
Sumo deadlift high-pull (20kg)         14               12               12
Box jump (5 risers)                            13               14               15
Push press (15kg)                               12               10               11
Jog (length of groupex room)              7                 7                 7

Crossfit is a sport so you do get a score for each WOD. Since I couldn't do rowing (measured in calories burned) as per the original WOD I decided to just use the distance I ran. My score would be 189. According to WodHub this is a pretty low score. Plus I had to take extra breaks when my breathing got too heavy. Needless to say, Crossfit has kicked.my.butt the two times I've tried it. I plan on keeping it up as much as I can now that I don't have a gym membership and I'll be updating here as I go along.

If you have any questions about Crossfit just leave a comment and I'll answer to the best of my ability. It isn't a normal work out and it's not super duper popular yet so I'm trying to spread the word about it as much as I can.

Oh, and if you want to get an idea of what the fight gone bad workout is like just watch the below video.