A Gold Star For Crossfit

Crossfit – GASP – the corporate workout machine that takes in recreational athletes and spits out bradycardic Olympic lifters. But between you, me, and everyone else that stumbles upon this blog, I actually like crossfit. I know, I just insulted crossfit and then said I liked it; it’s complicated. I like certain aspects of crossfit like its community, but I loathe others like its disregard for periodization. I could write a book on what I would do to change crossfit, but I won’t. Crossfit will stay Crossfit until it dies. Besides, I’m writing this post to embolden an aspect of crossfit that I love, not to admonish it.

America is the land of the cheeseburger and the home of the bulimic. Statistically, 24.6 million women have suffered from some form of eating disorder in their lifetime. Even worse, the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reports that over one half of teenage girls and 25 percent of college age women practice unsafe dieting techniques. Shockingly, women that compete in sports are 11 percent more likely to have an eating disorder.

While reading these statistics I wondered, “Why are these women doing this to themselves?” I believe there is a happy medium between starvation and gluttony. Our culture iseither punishing skinny women, or it’s throwing pictures of 3 percent body fatfemale models everywhere. I’m confused. I feel like we’re all confused.

Recently, a good blogpost circled the web with this picture attached.

This picture says it all. Both women are competing at high level athletics, doing the same workouts, but looking totally different. People’s bodies react differently. If either of these women took the stereotypical approach, they’d look at the other and wish to have her body. This is where crossfit earns its worth – at least to me.

Yes, the people of crossfit are normally very lean, but they aren’t light. That is to say, most women that I train care more about the numbers on the scale than the image in their mirror. Crossfit doesn’t care about that. The culture of crossfit says, “Who cares what you weigh, what’s your Fran time?”

Crossfit has slapped anorexia so hard in the face that women want to look more muscular. And we know that muscle weighs more than fat. The way I see it, crossfit has created a club that openly encourages people to be built a bit more “athletic.”

I know from second hand experience that most women don’t want to look “athletic.” I don’t mean what fitness magazines portray as athletic. I mean actually athletic. This means having bigger thighs and hamstrings, and stronger shoulders and arms. Yet crossfit has turned this into a goal. It’s revolutionary.

If I was to award crossfit for one thing, it would be for improving the body image problem of modern American women. I’m pulling a gold star from America and giving it to crossfit; they’ve earned it.