Casey 1

Zach Casey
Professor Shielding
Writing 103
27 January 2016

I Am Crossfit

Modern society has reached the midst of a catastrophic health crisis. In such a digitally
advanced age, humans have developed more of a dependency upon the use of technology than
ever before, pressing our species even further into a lifestyle of sedentary complacency. Exercise
is no longer a byproduct of our daily lifestyle, but now an artificial practice that we humans must
incorporate into our daily routines just in order to maintain general health. The food we consume
is no longer locally grown and farmed, but now produced in labs or farmed on large scale,
controlled operations. There no longer exists truly fresh, nutritionally dense, and calorically
sound food products. Instead, the food of the today faces mass processes of extreme genetic and
chemical manipulation, alteration, and engineering in order to improve the taste and shelf life of
the products. Instead of offering a wide variety of health benefits and satiating flavor, todays
food only satisfies a guarantee of health complications down the road. To make it worse, the
modern factory farming methods utilize unethical styles of feeding practice that include force
feeding their cattle, not allowing for optimal space or suitable living conditions, and endangers
not only us humans, but the innocent cattle used to feed us. In order to reverse or at least combat
the barrage of side effects that follow from our damaging eating habits, our lack of physical
activity on a day to day basis, and the toxic, polluted air that we breathe, we humans must
embark on a journey of healthy living, starting with Crossfit.

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One third of the U.S population, roughly 79 million people, statistically qualify as labeled
obese individuals. The annual medical costs of these individuals amounts to a staggering $147
billion dollars. Nearly 30 million, or one of roughly eleven people currently living in the United
States of America today suffer from Diabetes. Millions more are unknowingly pre-diabetic,
meaning that they face risk of becoming diagnosed with Diabetes in the near future.
I belong to the fitness community, specifically I label myself as a member of the Crossfit
community. I believe that through calculated nutritional consistency, incorporation of research
based fitness approaches and principles, as well as small, consistent efforts and changes repeated
on a daily basis, that we as a human race can achieve a state of well-being and long term health
and function. Greg Glassman, founder of Crossfit, a style of fitness and overall health, defined
the word fitness as an increased work capacity across broad and modal domains in his short
journal entitled Crossfit when founding Crossfit Inc., a new style of fitness. As the definition
goes, Glassman recommended that all humans exercise regularly, with a relative intensity, using
constantly varied, functional movements. Ultimately, Crossfit is an evidence based fitness
program and nutritional plan for complete wellness.
Being a passionate fitness and health enthusiast, I have investigated various training
programs and modalities through both reading and personal experimentation. Being a member of
the Crossfit community I am held to a certain standard. I am to follow the guidelines of a clean,
drug free, competitive athlete. My specific role does not have a clear definition but I personally
believe that as an active member, aside from paying mandatory membership dues, as any gym
requires, I am to hold myself to the highest standard of excellence, to represent and embody my
group fully, and to help improve the quality of the group that I represent. That being said, I am to
exercise the definition of Crossfit to the best of my abilities, participate freely, and serve as a

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positive role model of my group. Being the healthiest, fittest, and most educated individual
possible certainly pleases this role.
As a blue collar, unconventional method of training, some may look at me as a fitness
outcast due to my part taking in Crossfit. Despite its massive growth over the course of the past
few years, some still debate and negate the positive aspects of CrossFit and deem it unhealthy,
ineffective, or even dangerous. This being said, in some cases I am an outcast to the common,
conventional, commercial style of fitness which embodies a passive approach to health, where
results rarely come about and risks are rarely taken.
That being said, I am a pioneer, an innovator and a thinker and enjoy taking on
challenges, emotionally, intellectually, and physically as well as challenging the status quo. I
wish that in the future some of the negative stereotypes and false allegations will be uplifted
from the name of Crossfit. I do firmly believe that Crossfit has many more advantages and
benefits than downsides but one must also recognize the possible flaws, being an active member.
Despite his declaration that Crossfit follows a certain progression of movement, I believe that
more attention to detail must be placed upon the athletes when learning the principle foundation
courses of the training modality. There exist no qualifications to join Crossfit, one must only be
fully willing to change his or her life for the positive. Personally, my Crossfit journey begun in
order to enhance my abilities on the football field. Crossfit served as an effective, difficult
offseason protocol training system which I could take part in, in order to further my strength,
power output, coordination, athleticism, endurance, and work capacity. My specific role, like
many others, adapts over time. At first I used Crossfit as a means by which to enhance my health
and improve performance in my sport specific abilities. Once my football career ended, I used
Crossfit in order to simply maintain joint, bone, and muscle health as well as a fitness program to

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keep myself in shape. I now have a competitive passion for Crossfit and use it as an anxiety
reducer, social outlet, sport, health regimen, and benefit from it in various ways.
Anyone can join Crossfit as it encompasses universal scalability, meaning that
children, elders, handicapped, military, advanced athletes, and every day people all have options
available to improve and optimize fitness and health. In 2000, Crossfit by definition came about
as constantly varied, functional movements, performed at high intensity. As a training system
and way of life this definition merely states that one can achieve a greater state of health through
variation in training styles and duration, performing functional or biologically sound movements,
natural to the composition of a human and by also applying relative intensity.
A handful of stereotypes exist about the safety of Crossfit. Claims of joint damage,
dangers of overtraining, and high risk of injury satisfy common arguments against the
prescription of modern styled fitness. I do agree that despite the scalable design of the program
that many individuals should go through basic fitness progressions before attempting to learn
advanced movements such as the Olympic lifts but this is hard to advise because the fitness and
nutrition industry, unlike the science field and other established fields, have not been around that
long and do not have a definite set of knowns, or facts but instead theories and guesses as to
what way to eat and workout are the best.
Too often I hear of individuals claiming that Crossfit far exceeds their financial
capabilities for something as simple as a gym membership. One pays much more for a Crossfit
membership because it includes personal programming, one on one coaching, and group fitness
styles that include an environment of like-minded, encouraging individuals who push you to
achieve your personal best. Id much rather spend the money monthly to keep my health in check
than to pay the price of declined health, years of life, and costs of health care later down the road.

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In addition, people tend to take more care of the things that they spend more energy or money
on. For example, if you spend more on your health than you will be more likely to pay close
attention to your health and use that gym membership that you have spent so much on.
Commercial gyms such as a Planet Fitness promote their ten dollar, cheap monthly memberships
in hopes that everyone will purchase a Planet Fitness membership and forget that they even have
it. Gyms like that hope for low activity and high membership whereas Crossfit gyms thrive off of
high memberships with high activity, promoting the well-being of every individual. At Crossfit
gyms brotherhood and family is developed. Real, social conversations exist whereas in
commercial gyms everyone is in their own little world with their earphones in. There is no
encouragement, no relationships. Instead there is awkward silence, intimidating faces, televisions
tempting you to slow down and stop paying attention to the true physical task that you are
aiming to achieve.
In order to technically achieve the status of membership within the Crossfit community,
one must only pay the monthly fee of attending a Crossfit affiliate gym. There is no existing
minimum as to how long or how frequent one must work out. Glassman, the founder of Crossfit
established a set of movements, standards for those movements or exercises and allows each
gym owner to program his own combination of those allowed movements into a WOD, short
for workout of the day. There exist tens of thousands of affiliate gyms whose owners pay a small
affiliation fee to be titled with the trademark as a Crossfit style practiced gym. The owners must
have certain certifications and must pass certain permits of safety and hiring of coaches but much
of the rest, such as gym design and size, is up to the consent of the owners themselves.
I consider any individual who cares enough to research and implement a healthy exercise
routine or meal plan into his or her life to be an intelligent, well-minded individual. Realizing

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that change requires both recognition of a need to change as well as the willingness to take action
is vital. Any individual who takes part in Crossfit realizes that a health revolution is critical to the
survival of our species and has realized that he or she, as a contributor, is furthering the state of
health of his or her own and influencing those around him/her.
Before joining Crossfit, I thought my work ethic was fairly established. Two a day
football practices in near one hundred degree heat, working multiple jobs, and balancing a busy
schedule all taught me values of hard work and character. However when I joined Crossfit I
learned how to push myself both physically and mentally than ever before. Every day I surprise
myself with how much more I am able to achieve, and I find myself doing things I never would
have imagined myself doing a year or two ago. Now entering my fourth year of fitness and
health in Crossfit, I look forward to what new information I will learn, relationships with myself
and others that will develop, and what types of influences I can instill upon others. Through
something as simple as daily, intense exercise, I have developed a family-like bond, and
countless friendships and networks that will last a lifetime.
No matter how funded our health care systems, regardless of how staffed our hospitals,
even with an abundance of information and despite years of quality education, our doctors and
physicians can only do so much to prevent the rapid decline of our health. It instead, it is up to
us. Doctors can fix small problems, but a lifetime of problems will only lead to a miserable
health conditions, disease, and possible early death. It is time to take a revolution against the ill
health decisions of our technology laden society. One cannot expect to live an unhealthy lifestyle
their entire life and when things go south, to simply resort to medical intervention. It doesnt
work like that. Even a fat wallet will not save a fat lifestyle.

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(Myself (Zach) performing a high skill, technical Olympic lift movement known as
the snatch during a competition qualifier workout event in 2015.)

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Works Cited
Newton, David E. "Crossfit." The Gale Encyclopedia of Fitness. Ed. Jacqueline L. Longe. Vol. 1. Detroit:
Gale, 2012. 206-209. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 31 Jan. 2016.
URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE
%7CCX4021200065&v=2.1&u=viva_jmu&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=f886ec4b11e7c877ec7e6235dc0
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