Of gym rats and fit men

I'm not being sexist, I could have easily called this post 'Of gym rats and fit women'. This would certainly be true, because I see extremely fit women everyday at my local CrossFit where highly motivated students, policemen, firefighters and general people train, sweat and redefine exercise intensity. However, Of Mice and Men is too good of a work for me to not connect with my title.

If you don't already know, CrossFit is a training philosophy aimed at making you fitter. Now devising a scheme to fit everyone's fitness needs is a pretty ambitious goal because clearly one training regime would not work for everyone, you would think. In a way this is true, but also untrue and I'll explain why. If you are not a highly specialized athlete, then in all likelihood, you would not want to narrow down to a training regime which only improves a few areas of your fitness. Let's say you are a powerlifter, and your only interest is in lifting as much weight as you can in 3 lifts (bench press, deadlift, squat). Obviously, the overall fitness goals for you would lay much more emphasis on increasing the absolute, raw strength rather than reducing the 100m sprint time. Similarly for the 100m sprinter, the amount of weight lifted in the 3 powerlifts is of a lesser concern (if any).

Let's look at it in a different way. Although academics and fitness are two entirely different things, I'll try to draw an analogy. In a typical undergraduate degree, the emphasis is largely on generalization- you're expected to know most of the fundamentals and obtain skills in a variety of areas. Armed with a solid foundation of the undergrad degree, you could pursue a Masters, Phd and a Post Doctorate, aiming for more and more specialization. CrossFit is more akin to the undergrad degree in fitness from a top ranked school. Very rigorous, very demanding but immensely rewarding. The fruits of this degree could be used just as is, or to specialize further in different sports. Just as no undergrad program will promise a high degree of specialization, CrossFit deliberately avoids converting someone into either a runner, strength athlete or a gymnast. However, it tries to achieve a combination of all the aforementioned abilities, and this works for 99.99% of the general population barring a few highly specialized athletes who train differently. However, the net result is fantastic. The training program is so rigorous that it has the potential to permanently transform you from a couch potato to a person with high degree of strength, explosiveness and endurance (Are these not the basic qualities of an 'Athlete'?)

The definition of fitness is itself very vague. In societies where protein deficiency is not an issue, a big beefy muscular individual could be considered very fit (I could be wrong here). However, in third world nations a totally different stereotype exists. I remember very vividly while growing up in India how doing a split was the fastest way to earn peer recognition. Another sure shot way was to be able to finish 20 pull ups. Clearly, there is no universally accepted definition of fitness. One can find a super strong powerlifter unable to perform the split, and one can find a champion splitter unable to put even 100 pounds over his head. So how can one reach a good definition of fitness?

I battled with this for a long time myself, much before I began CrossFitting. I knew instinctively that bodybuilders with big muscles were not the fittest, but I really struggled to rank Olympic weightlifters, sprinters, marathon runners, gymnasts, boxers, karate/MMA fighters, swimmers in their order of fitness. Turns out, this is almost an impossible thing to do. If you look at my list again, all of the mentioned activities are sport specific. Sure, a gymnast can fly though the air, rotate 3 times before landing on one foot and propelling to do the same thing 5 times again, but can he/she outrun a high school level 100m sprinter? Does this mean that the gymnast is less fit than the sprinter or does this mean that the gymnast is better at controlling his/her body than the sprinter? As it turns out in the same vein, comparing a weightlifter to a swimmer is like comparing apples to oranges. Both have their purposes, their challenges and their fitness needs, but they are different.

A good definition for fitness can still be achieved by combining the major sports and finding the basic skills required in each of them. This would effectively form the curriculum of our 'undergraduate program of fitness'. This is precisely what CrossFit has done - it combines aspects of gymnastics, olympic weightlifting and sprinting to create constantly changing workouts. The creator of CrossFit, Greg Glassman defines fitness as a combination of 10 sub skills - cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, agility, balance, coordination, and accuracy. To avoid narrowing down to any one aspect of fitness, the workouts are constantly changed. This has the added benefit that training is fun, unexpected and yields quick results. There are other very interesting aspects of this training program as well, most of them rooted in solid human physiology research. For instance, research has proved that high intensity training for a short time can outweigh endurance gains achieved through long duration moderate intensity training. Most of the workouts are thus designed for 20 minutes or lesser duration.

The results? I joined CrossFit in Jan 2010, I have lost 20 lbs and around 4" in the waist. I feel a lot faster, more agile and stronger. I could not do a single a pull up on the first day, but now I can do 10 advanced kipping style pull ups. My numbers in core lifts have increased. I can deadlift 310 lbs, squat 270lbs and press 110 lbs. I'm on the way to learning better form in the highly technical Snatch and Clean and Jerk Olympic lifts and also shaving off numbers from sprint rows and 400m runs. These results are after the fact that I had been doing strength training on and off for 3 years, and have some background in sports (Cricket and Field Hockey), clearly precluding the lightning fast results which beginners usually achieve when put on a strength program.

In short, I feel fitter.

I must warn though, if you're aspiring to be on the next season of the Jersey Shore, then CrossFit is not for you. Traditional gyms with high volume, low intensity, sacroplasmic hypertrophy oriented workouts, fueled with steroids around a bunch of vane buffoons are your best bet.

Oh, and throw in a Nautilus as well.