Revival Strongman, The Back Squat, and The Crossfit White Papers…goodies from the World Wide Web.

Hello folks!

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged but I’ve been really busy lately.  However, even though I have been MIA, I have still been perusing around the internet and boy, have there been quite a few “juicy” articles and videos this past week.

The first one was the video that Crossfit Revival posted on their strongman competition. See below

Here’s my 2 cents.At first I was literally appalled.  My thought process went like this

- what the heck are these people doing?

- are they trying to clean and jerk a fat bar?  That’s not right…

- ouch, that bar almost landed on that girl’s head.

- these people better stop goofing around, somebody’s going to get hurt.

People went crazy.  Everybody was reposting this on facebook bashing the video.  I did the same.  Then I started reading the comments and some experts in the field, particularly those familiar with strongman exercises, intelligently noted that although it was not a video that showed perfect technique of the lift.  These people were in a strongman lifting competition and just like a powerlifting or weightlifting competition, people are going to have misses.  There’s nothing wrong with that and apparently nobody got injured, thank god.

Now, here’s my thing.  If you are a trainer and you teach fitness classes.  You always need to have a reason for what you’re teaching your clients.  If you go to a weekend strongman seminar and learn some new exercises and think that it would be cool to teach your class a new exercise that you just learned but aren’t that experienced to teach, well then we have a problem.  If your client’s goal is to lose some weight and look better, then there is no need to teach them such a technical lift that requires so much time to learn.  So I think that people should calm down when it comes to this video.  Nobody got injured or hurt and they were hosting a competition, they weren’t just goofing around for fun.

Mike Boyle demonstrating the Rear Foot elevated split squat.  A great exercise, but so is the Back Squat!

Now on to another topic, I’ve always been a fan of Mike Boyle, I have two of his books, and I like his thoughts on programming and his mobility drills.  But he has always had a strong stance against the Back squat and I’ve always been puzzled as to why.  I mean the back squat is what most people in the field claim to be the “king of all exercises” and I would not disagree with that.  HERE is an article by OPT to counter Coach Boyle’s recommendations.  Enjoy.

I agree with everything in the article but still have utmost respect for Coach Boyle as a strength coach.  Please think critically and don’t believe everything you hear from “experts in the field.”

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, and add what is uniquely your own.” – Bruce Lee

The third piece that I want to share with you is this article titled the White Papers which is a timeline of Crossfit detailing certain incidents, claims, and events around the sport and training paradigm.  Now, this is obviously a one sided, biased paper but nonetheless very interesting to read.  Now when I first got into Crossfit back in 2008.  I drank the kool-aid…hard.  I was watching video after video of this fat, balding man (later known to be Greg Glassman) speak so eloquently on the topic of fitness.  He sounded so convincing in everything he said, that I thought everything he said must be true! Body language and conviction speaks volumes in communication, my friend.

This guy sucks at deadlifting and thinks he can beat up Greg Everett.

But when Crossfit really jumped the shark for me was November 20, 2009 at the Black Box Summit and the whole thing that transpired that weekend which led to the firing of Robb Wolf and the de-affiliation of Crossfit Norcal and Catalyst Athletics.  It seemed like anything bad said about Crossfit was going to be erased from history.  Now, I thought that Crossfit was all about a open forum for everything to speak their mind.  But it doesn’t appear so.  Ever since then, I’ve really stopped spending my time on the Crossfit.com website cause I think Tony Budding doesn’t know how to program and Dave Castro is a douche.  Really, the only think I still like about Crossfit is the Crossfit Games. I think the Games are such a spectacle and I look forward to it every year.  I think Crossfit (The sport of fitness) as a Sport is inevitable and great but the .com/mainsite programming is not for the masses.  They really missed the ball when they could’ve shifted the movement of Crossfit towards the masses instead of making it a super elitist fitness program that is only appropriate for the 1% of 1%.

Last think I should mention is that the paper is quite biased against Crossfit Endurance noting only Brian MacKenzie’s failures and omitting his successes.  That definitely does not tell the whole story and requires more critical thinking and background research.