The CrossFit Versus WannaBeFit series intends to examine popular exercises and exercise beliefs, and contrast them with CrossFit’s standards, methods, exercises and workouts. In the process, I hope to demonstrate the why and how of CrossFit through actual exercises.

I also hope to artfully combine the positive and the negative: for every CrossFit virtue, there may be ten popular mainstream vices that we reject for failing to meet our goals and standards.

The following is a preamble, and anticipated footnotes, to this ambitious series of posts which will compare and contrast CrossFit versus mainstream, globo gym, ‘unexamined’ fitness and training.

1. CrossFit essentials are functionality, intensity and variety. Read more here.
2. CrossFit has not, to my knowledge, invented any exercises. CrossFit adopted the exercises that had demonstrated effectiveness in producing the athletic capacities that are common to all athletic performance and real-life functionality. So when I call exercises “CrossFit Exercises,” I’m not claiming we invented them.

   Rather, CrossFit has adopted them, and in many cases adapted them to accomplish our extraordinary mission: the most effective fitness possible. Our ‘adaptation’ is guided by making them more powerful, more consonant with human physiology; this also makes them safer and more efficient.

3. It was only after a long period of observation and experimentation that the essence of CrossFit was teased out — the functionality, intensity and variety. Likewise the CrossFit definition of Fitness as ‘increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains’. But using these essential criteria to judge the CrossFit exercises, we can see how CrossFit’s adoption and adaptation of exercises is guided.

CrossFit: Rayne Gray performing a snatch on a sunny Saturday morning at CrossFit Litchfield Park.