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 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Seriously, how have they not been sued

The primary reason is because, in any fitness facility, you sign stuff before doing anything. That's been standard since the modern idea of gyms went public in the 1800s iirc.

You go inside the place with the intention of stressing your body purposely so that it grows in response to deal with that stress. There's huge risk of injury there, CrossFit is no different except that it increases the chances which I guess doesn't change the 'concept' of what you're doing in a normal gym.

Kind of hard to articulate, I suppose. I think that given enough time the recent CrossFit trend will end with litigation somehow. It's going to be outlawed or at least restricted in some way. I know too many people who have been hurt while doing it (my cousin most recently. Poor girl) - nothing major like you'd expect seeing those .gifs, but it does indeed happen and something will give on the CF thing eventually.

When that happens, I'll be like:



Also, FETHIN LOL AT THE DANCING TREES.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Seriously, how have they not been sued

Because the danger involved in crossfit has been massively, massively overblown. After like six years of it, the only time I've seen a real, genuine acute injury was when an older guy slipped off a pullup bar and fell on his back. You'll get the occasional overuse injury, and I've had my fair share, but that has nothing to do with crossfit and everything to do with people pushing themselves a little bit too hard without proper nutrition and rest. I overtrained a lot more doing other things as compared to when I primarily do crossfit.

Of course, there are always narrow-minded people who live inside their little box and instead of trying to understand why those other guys are doing this weird workout, they make fun of it because it's different and looks funny. Half the time they just see some random video of someone who doesn't know what they're doing trying "crossfit", regardless of whether or not that it's something a good crossfit gym will do, and assume that all crossfit gyms are incompetent. Whatever, their loss.

 DarkLink wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Seriously, how have they not been sued

Because the danger involved in crossfit has been massively, massively overblown. After like six years of it, the only time I've seen a real, genuine acute injury was when an older guy slipped off a pullup bar and fell on his back. You'll get the occasional overuse injury, and I've had my fair share, but that has nothing to do with crossfit and everything to do with people pushing themselves a little bit too hard without proper nutrition and rest. I overtrained a lot more doing other things as compared to when I primarily do crossfit.

Of course, there are always narrow-minded people who live inside their little box and instead of trying to understand why those other guys are doing this weird workout, they make fun of it because it's different and looks funny. Half the time they just see some random video of someone who doesn't know what they're doing trying "crossfit", regardless of whether or not that it's something a good crossfit gym will do, and assume that all crossfit gyms are incompetent. Whatever, their loss.

You can't deny the danger CF programming puts people in. You even admit to hurting yourself while doing it. Your 'fair share'? I know guys who have been lifting for 30 years who haven't sustained a single injury because they don't do dumb things in the gym. I've been lifting 4 years now and not once have I hurt myself, and I've done a full-body transformation.

Peer-reviewed study, sampling CrossFitters in a questionnaire:
Source: http://romanoroberts.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The_nature_and_prevalence_of_injury_during.97557.pdf

The nature and prevalence of injury during CrossFit training.

Over the collection period there were 132 responses
with no responses discarded due to
incomplete completion of the questionnaire.
Within the group 97 (73.5%) participants had sustai
ned an injury that had prevented them
from working, training or competing. A total of 186
injuries were reported in our cohort.
Nine participants (7.0%) had sustained an injury th
at required surgical intervention. No
reports of rhabdomyolysis were reported. The most
common injury locations (Figure 2)
were shoulder, spine followed by arm/elbow.

The high prevalence of shoulder injuries (31.8%) ac
counting for 25.8% of total injuries is
higher than those previously reported for elite and
competitive Olympic weightlifters

So they're exposing fitness DILETTANTES to elite-level risks, with worse form to satisfy the programming. In other words, if you do CrossFit, statistically you are more likely to get injured than you are to get fit.

 DarkLink wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Seriously, how have they not been sued

Because the danger involved in crossfit has been massively, massively overblown. After like six years of it, the only time I've seen a real, genuine acute injury was when an older guy slipped off a pullup bar and fell on his back. You'll get the occasional overuse injury, and I've had my fair share, but that has nothing to do with crossfit and everything to do with people pushing themselves a little bit too hard without proper nutrition and rest. I overtrained a lot more doing other things as compared to when I primarily do crossfit.

Of course, there are always narrow-minded people who live inside their little box and instead of trying to understand why those other guys are doing this weird workout, they make fun of it because it's different and looks funny. Half the time they just see some random video of someone who doesn't know what they're doing trying "crossfit", regardless of whether or not that it's something a good crossfit gym will do, and assume that all crossfit gyms are incompetent. Whatever, their loss.

Let me ask you something... All those competitors you see at the "Cross Fit Games" (yeah, i know right... it's fething pants on head stupid), do you know how many of them actually do CrossFit, aside from the "games" ?? None of them do. Seriously. Most of them post their exact workouts, and how they train, and the one resounding thing is that basically none of them actually do Cross Fit.

When I was a much younger lad, our football coaches always told us players to find out what our favorite player did, and emulate them. This applies to just about anything athletically... Want to look like a bodybuilder? Do what Arnold did, Do what Jay Cutler and Ronnie Coleman did. Want to be a wide receiver? Do what Jerry Rice did, etc. If you want to be a top CF athlete, you don't do CF???




And it's not that I've a narrow view point that I hate CF, it's because I'm near constantly reading articles and new things from the fitness/muscle world. A buddy of mine's wife got into CF, and was regaling me with her "awesome workouts" (including her mandatory instagram photos), and let me tell you... Deadlifts should NEVER, EVER, EVER be done to time. They most definitely should NEVER be done two days in a row, without some serious recovery time afterwards (like, close to a week). Instead, she is doing deadlifts to time, AND doing them 2, sometimes 3 times a week, often on consecutive days. And her mandatory pictures? She seriously looks like death warmed over, that is how grey her skin was. I'm sorry, but you should, have MORE color in your skin tone after a workout, not less.

There are a few, very few mind, positives to CF.... You can take someone who has never done any meaningful exercise and get them into working out shape in a couple of weeks. But honestly, that's where most people SHOULD stop. Don't just blindly follow some leader in a building because he/she says the workout is good for you. Do your own research. Look up exercises, how they're supposed to be done, WHY they are done the way most people do them, etc. IMO, the reason why CF has become so popular, is because people don't want to be educated, and instead want to treat fitness like it's some kind of silly game where they can just compete with the person next to them. And while competition is good, it isn't always good.

PrehistoricUFO, you might want to read your own study:

Injury rates with CrossFit training are similar to that reported in the literature for sports such as Olympic weight-lifting, power-lifting and gymnastics and lower than competitive contact sports such as rugby union and rugby league.

Crossfit is basically a mash-up of olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, and gymnastics, with a few little twists thrown in. It makes sense that injury rates would be on par with those experienced weightlifting, powerlifting, and gymnastics.

You can't deny the danger CF programming puts people in.

If by danger you mean similar injury rates to comparable sports and exercise programs, sure. If you work out, pick up heavy objects, push the limits of your body, and so on, you run the risk of injuring yourself in some way. Having a good coach and a good sense of the difference between pain and injury helps a lot, but sometimes accidents happen.

You even admit to hurting yourself while doing it. Your 'fair share'? I know guys who have been lifting for 30 years who haven't sustained a single injury because they don't do dumb things in the gym.

I've only ever had two serious injuries, and neither were the fault of the workout I was doing at the time. Wrestling way back in high school, I twisted my ankle pretty badly when it got hyper-extended while we were practicing take-downs. Years later in college, I was rappelling and in a freak little accident, my ankle landed in a crevice in the rock face and twisted badly enough to break my fibula.

For more minor injuries, I tweaked my knee doing overhead squads (which I'll note I was working on in a traditional higher weight, low rep strength workout as opposed to crossfit). I'd just returned from Marine OCS, and after 2-3 months of no sleep, crappy nutrition, and constant exhaustion my body was pretty beaten up. I'd lost a lot of flexibility, and pushed for a little too much weight. When I was training to go to OCS, I was doing literally hundreds of pullups a week (if you ever want to join the Marines, all you need to do is learn to run really fast and do pullups for days, and everything else will fall into place). Eventually, I got climber's elbow, a form of tendonitis, that took a couple months of doing absolutely no upper-body workouts to clear up.

Like I said, accidents happen, and you should know the difference between pain and injury (meaning that you should know your limits and when to stop pushing through the pain of a workout).

I've been lifting 4 years now and not once have I hurt myself, and I've done a full-body transformation.

That's great, but does your total transformation come with spiked hair and a spot on Jersey Shores? If your profile pic is anything to go by, you must be banging snookie and spending the rest of your time hitting the club.

In other words, if you do CrossFit, statistically you are more likely to get injured than you are to get fit.

If you're going to make statistical claims, do it with a larger sample size. It's mathmatically impossible, for a number of reasons, to draw a reliable conclusion about the couple of million people worldwide doing crossfit. Read up on statistical significant, it might help you understand a bit better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance

As I've noted before, the coach and athletes in question matter. A poor coach or an overzealous athlete creates an artificially high risk of injury. The study appears to focus on participants at a single crossfit gym, following the main site workouts. If they happened to pick a poorly coached gym, that's going to skew the results quite a bit (see the statistical significance article). They also don't do much to describe the severity of the injuries, beyond noting that they were enough to cause the athlete to skip a workout and that there were nine that required some form of surgery. They don't mention if it was just a bit of shoulder pain, or if someone dropped a weight and broke a bone, or go into very much detail. There's a significant difference between taking a week or two off because of a bit of shoulder pain and taking several month's break.

Of particular note to me:

The large focus upon metabolic conditioning and apparently random workouts, with a lack of focus upon strength workouts may have a bearing on injury rates and patterns. Certainly taking the workouts form the central CrossFit HQ website for the month of April in the past three years only three, five and three days over the month were allocated to strength with nineteen, sixteen and nineteen to metabolic conditioning. Without a firm strength basis we believe performing the heavy weight, high rep metabolic conditioning workouts so regularly risks injury.

Very few crossfit gyms actually do the main site programming. They usually do their own programming, or take it from one of the bigger, more successful gyms (CF Invictus is a common one). Of the gyms that I've seen and gone to, they universally perform strength training on a daily basis. The 'standard' crossfit workout is to warm up, do a strength portion, do a crossfit workout, cool down. I, and every crossfit coach I've ever met, would 100% agree that just tossing a bunch of weight on the bar and throwing it around without having the strength training to back it up is a recipe for disaster. Every crossfit gym I've ever been to stressed that if you don't have the base strength to perform a given workout, they would work with you to tailor it to meet your needs. Of course the athlete needs to admit any weaknesses they have, but if the gym in this study does a poor job at scaling workouts then it's not a good crossfit gym, nor representative of the norm within crossfit.

Now, the study finds an injury rate of 3.1 injuries per 1000 hours trained. The average athlete trained 5.3 hours per week, meaning that over the course of 3 and a half years, you might suffer about 3 injuries. As the study appears to include more minor injuries such as pulled muscles (again, it's hard to tell as they don't go into much detail regarding the severity of the injury), I find that both believable and reasonable. A pulled muscle is not a big deal so long as you take the time to properly recover from it.

If zero risk is your acceptable level while working out, then I agree, you shouldn't be doing crossfit. Or olympic weightlifting, or powerlifting, or soccer, basketball, long distance running, or just about any physical activity. But if all you're doing is dropping by the gym to pump out a few curls for the girls, you're also not going to get performance results. It's not particularly difficult to look athletic, a good diet, a bit of bodybuilding, and a genetic predisposition doesn't hurt. I can't tell you how many times I've crushed athletes in workouts who -looked- fit, and I'm far from the most athletic crossfitter I know. Of the athletes I've met who I can legitimately say knew what they were talking about (such as my gym's current olympic lifting coach, who's clean and jerked right around 400lbs in competition before), I've yet to meet one who disliked crossfit. Some of them had minor quibbles about specific details, some of them liked it but preferred their training methods, some of them who laughed and said "I'm not tough enough for crossfit", but none who simply straight up said that crossfit was, as a whole, a bad program. Conversely, I've yet to meet someone who talked gak about crossfit who has actually impressed me with their knowledge of physical fitness and athletic training. I can think of a few pro athletes/coaches (Mike Rippetoe comes to mind) who don't like Greg Glassman and/or the people in Crossfit HQ, because they have a couple of polarizing individuals up top, but when individuals like Bill Starr or Kendrick Farris are cool with crossfit training methodology, I'm not going to have second thoughts when a random guy on the internet says crossfit is the worst thing ever.

 DarkLink wrote:
GIGANTIC WALL OF TEXT SNIPPED

Dude, they market CF to people WITH ZERO EXPERIENCE DOING ANY OF THE STUFF THEY DO THERE. That's the whole problem with it! You're missing it completely. If people have to skip work, it's probably serious, too.

Why mention Jersey Shore btw? I've never seen a single episode. No need to take personal shots at my appearance.

edits - Also, we can go on forever arguing about CF vs. Classic programming, it's been going on since it was designed and no one goes anywhere with it. I guess we will just agree to disagree, and not keep this going. It's just gonna get the thread locked.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

Let me ask you something... All those competitors you see at the "Cross Fit Games" (yeah, i know right... it's fething pants on head stupid), do you know how many of them actually do CrossFit, aside from the "games" ?? None of them do. Seriously. Most of them post their exact workouts, and how they train, and the one resounding thing is that basically none of them actually do Cross Fit.

Really? Because that's very much not what I've seen. I mean, if you're saying that they don't do crossfit main site workouts, sure. They do other stuff. One of the fundamental ideas behind crossfit is that it's a baseline, and from there you build up to whatever sport you're interested in. I mean, here's a day in the life of Rich Froning: http://www.allthingsgym.com/rich-froning-training-days/. It's certainly not a mainsite crossfit workout, but those workouts are all similar things to what I've done at crossfit gyms over the years. The main difference is that Froning is stronger and does a lot more volume than I do.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

When I was a much younger lad, our football coaches always told us players to find out what our favorite player did, and emulate them. This applies to just about anything athletically... Want to look like a bodybuilder? Do what Arnold did, Do what Jay Cutler and Ronnie Coleman did. Want to be a wide receiver? Do what Jerry Rice did, etc. If you want to be a top CF athlete, you don't do CF???

Crossfit methodology has actually shifted a lot over the years. When I first did crossfit, most workouts were under 10 minutes. Now, your standard workout, as I mentioned above, has a full strength portion, mobility work, warm ups and cool downs, and the metcons are generally structured differently. It's all because crossfit is still very new, and as more and more talented athletes come in from various sports, they bring their knowledge and experience with them and it evolves.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

And it's not that I've a narrow view point that I hate CF, it's because I'm near constantly reading articles and new things from the fitness/muscle world. A buddy of mine's wife got into CF, and was regaling me with her "awesome workouts" (including her mandatory instagram photos), and let me tell you... Deadlifts should NEVER, EVER, EVER be done to time. They most definitely should NEVER be done two days in a row, without some serious recovery time afterwards (like, close to a week). Instead, she is doing deadlifts to time, AND doing them 2, sometimes 3 times a week, often on consecutive days.

There's no arbitrary law of physics that designates that you can't or shouldn't do any strength exercise for time or reps. God did not step down from heaven and decree that thou shalt not perform more than 5x5 deadlifts a workout. It's not necessarily optimal for putting pounds on your 1RM, but that's not necessarily the core goal of crossfit, and physical fitness is not determined purely by your max deadlift. Doing high volume will still make you stronger, done properly, but it's more of a focus on endurance and conditioning than pure strength. Heck, there are plenty of high rep workouts from non-crossfit venues: http://www.t-nation.com/training/185-rep-squat-workout

Now, if you're saying that doing it for time leads to bad form which leads to injury, then yes, you should not be compromising your form during your workout. Take this video of Froning doing 30 snatches at 225 for time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Qw3e9UPOU

During that workout, performing just about the most complex, dynamic, and difficult weightlifting move there is, he never once loses good form. He never compromises his lower back, he never catches with his shoulders in a bad position, etc.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

There are a few, very few mind, positives to CF.... You can take someone who has never done any meaningful exercise and get them into working out shape in a couple of weeks. But honestly, that's where most people SHOULD stop. Don't just blindly follow some leader in a building because he/she says the workout is good for you. Do your own research. Look up exercises, how they're supposed to be done, WHY they are done the way most people do them, etc. IMO, the reason why CF has become so popular, is because people don't want to be educated, and instead want to treat fitness like it's some kind of silly game where they can just compete with the person next to them. And while competition is good, it isn't always good.

I'm not sure why you seem to be singling out crossfit in particular for this criticism. I've seen too many people who don't know what they're doing fumbling around a globogym to take any claims that crossfit is somehow inherently inferior to everything else out there seriously. Every crossfit gym I've gone to has been filled with people who enjoy working to physically improve. Some of them were good athletes, some of them weren't, but they were getting in better shape, with a coach to keep an eye on their form and teach them things they didn't know. Meanwhile, the bros at 24 hour fitness are doing curls on one arm while texting with the other and checking out the ladies on the treadmill. Are you going to get the best athletes ever just because it's crossfit? No, your pool of athletes is drawn from average people who don't have the time or drive to become the next gold metalist. That doesn't mean that crossfit is somehow a bad program to get them up and moving and in shape.

I've done crossfit for a long time at a lot of different gyms, and I've only ever seen people improve themselves through it. Why do you care so much that they decided to do this via crossfit as opposed to, say, running or cycling or weightlifting or yoga or zumba and so on? They're all perfectly good methods of improving your physical fitness. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses and quirks. I do crossfit because 1) I like picking up heavy stuff, and 2) I've spent so much time running and doing military style PT and the like that not having a cardio/metabolic conditioning portion would be weird. I happen to hate pure running, so crossfit fills the gap extremely well.

You also seem to think that within crossfit, the competition portion is like, super-serious. It's really not. People try and get PR's, and they'll push each other through workouts, but I've yet to see anyone so desperate to beat someone else that they did something stupid. Usually, they'll just chat with the other person after the workout and be like "wow, I tried to keep up but you just powered through". Half the fun of crossfit is the friends you make working out together.


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 PrehistoricUFO wrote:

 DarkLink wrote:
GIGANTIC WALL OF TEXT SNIPPED

Dude, they market CF to people WITH ZERO EXPERIENCE DOING ANY OF THE STUFF THEY DO THERE. That's the whole problem with it! You're missing it completely.

So... people with no experience working out should never work out?

We get new people at the gym I go to pretty frequently. When they first come in, the trainer makes sure to go over each of the movements with them so they're performing each one safely, and the trainer will question them about their fitness level. If they haven't done crossfit or something equiavlent (say, football or rugby), they'll scale back the workout as appropriate. Lighter weight, lower reps, easier movements, etc, all depending on the individual's fitness level. My first workout at Crossfit Inferno, the coach told me to keep the weight for the bear complex under 95lbs, even though I'd been doing crossfit for a few years at that point. Only after watching me do a few rounds did he realize I knew what I was doing and let me go up to heavier weights.

I'm absolutely sure there are crappy crossfit gyms out there, who have dangerous training and poor coaching. There are a lot of very good crossfit gyms out there as well. And of all the gyms I've gone to, visited, or researched, I've only ran into one I didn't like, and it was more because their workouts were so scaled back for an older audience that it created a weird culture and the trainers were, well, kinda weird. I don't really know how else to put it. It wasn't dangerous there, but it wasn't a great gym in my opinion.

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:

If people have to skip work, it's probably serious, too.

The study doesn't specify that the injury required them to skip work. It states that if the injury prevented any of the following: working, training, competing, it qualified. Besides, if you're a construction worker and twist your ankle, you might be off the job for a week despite it being a minor injury. And the injuries were with regards to "any period of time". Depending on how they phrased the question, if I skipped the gym because my back was feeling stiff after a heavy deadlift workout, that could potentially qualify as an injury.

Oh, and I missed something on my first read-through. The methodology used in the study was to post a questionnaire on 10 crossfit forums. That explains the references to crossfit mainsite, from what I've seen the majority of forum users in crossfit seem to be people who work out on their own.

Online questionnaires are far from useless, but you have to be very careful how you phrase the questions, and there is significant potential for bias in the sampling. Granted, it's a reality in studies like these that you can't really just whip out a thousand athletes to perform randomized double-blind studies on injury rates, but it does mean you have to be careful about the conclusions you draw. That's a subtly of statistics that seems lost on most people.

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:

Why mention Jersey Shore btw? I've never seen a single episode. No need to take personal shots at my appearance.

If you're going to fire shots:




In all seriousness, if what you're doing is working for you then that's awesome. But if you're going to be rude over something as stupid as the workout program I happen to prefer after trying a bunch of different stuff, I'll respond in kind. Especially since misuse of statistics in arguments is a pet peeve of mine.

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:

edits - Also, we can go on forever arguing about CF vs. Classic programming, it's been going on since it was designed and no one goes anywhere with it. I guess we will just agree to disagree, and not keep this going. It's just gonna get the thread locked.

I like arguing over pointless stuff.

Before I moved to where I live now, I was doing a bunch of research, and calling up gyms. I was specifically looking for a powerlifting/bodybuilding type gym (there's pretty much one, the one I'm going to)

In that research, I discovered a bit of a pattern. Many of the CF gyms (stop calling them boxes!) are led by someone who spent a weekend or two getting "certified" by the CF company, to run CF.

Contrast this to what I have available to me, if/when I hire a trainer specifically. The gym I go to is owned by an NPC competition bodybuilder with over a decade lifting experience, on top of a college degree in physical training/personal training/kinesiology.


Is this a universal thing? No, I'm not saying that. There are certainly going to be plenty of places where you can get that kind of expertise and experience. But, in my area, that expertise isn't there.

Ultimately, it comes down to you. If CF is "right" for you, then more power to you. It isn't right for me, and I seriously wish other CFers would leave me the hell alone, I don't want to join their cult. I would just caution those who are looking into these sorts of things, and tell them to look at the credentials of the people they are looking to for advice. And that goes for the Globogym types as well.

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:

Yeah, you can blame me all you like for not getting up and doing something. That's real good.

I'm not blaming you, specifically, I'm blaming what it seems like you represent.

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:

How do you think I felt walking into a gym full of yolked dudes when I was 268 lbs? What matters is that you've resolved to stop your current lifestyle and improve every day following. That person is permanently left behind. If you care what other people think inside the gym, then you've already failed.

Probably like I felt as a doughy 14 year old who knew nothing about exercise. I only stuck with it because there were people at the gym who were willing to help me learn without intimidating, and self-aggrandizing, rhetoric.

That said, your point about indifference to the opinions of others has some merit, though allowing that to blind you to criticism is foolish.


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 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
It certainly isn't helped any by it... It's on much the same token as I think that CrossFit is ruining fitness as a whole.

Oh, God. I could go on about my hatred for branded fitness programs for days. CrossFit is the most egregious example, but things like TRX are pretty bad too as they force trainers and gyms to pursue needless certifications in order to stay competitive.

 DarkLink wrote:
... an extremely well thought out post...

Dude, don't bother. You will not get through to him. It's a forum, which means we all blissfully ignore normal point and counter point of typical discourse exchange.

The guy actually claimed that gym injuries were only due to attempting beyond capacity, and safety "never not once" i believe is the phrase (honestly i don't care enough to go back and quote it).


Which right there should tell you what you're up against. That claim, let alone all the other nonsense, is a 1++ Blissful Ignorance ward save.

So in the end: eat less calories more often and burn more in regular exercise than you eat??
We are talking about step one: remove the lard off your body.
Reach goal: Get some muscle in places that looks good.

Interesting fact: Chin-ups I found I can do easier after I lost 50 pounds of lard... do exercise that makes sense at your muscle / weight ratio for safety.
I do not imagine our more buff friends find attaching 50 lbs to themselves to do chin-ups is fun... just more reps.

 Talizvar wrote:
So in the end: eat less calories more often and burn more in regular exercise than you eat??

In the end, this is all there is to it. Really it doesn't even have to be "Exercise" as people tend to think of it. You can stay almost perfectly sedentary and still lose weight assuming your eat few enough calories.

The human body obeys the laws of physics, it doesn't run on free energy, doesn't create free energy and can't shunt energy out of existence. You put in more food than you use, the excess energy gets stored. You use more energy than you put in, your stored energy gets used. There's no magic. There's no secrets, no shortcuts, no special cheats, no traps, no gotchas, no surprises.

Certainly there are some fuzzy edges around what kinds of food your body is most efficient at using, or converting to fat but this is largely marginal. For the most part the body is amazingly efficient at using anything it can digest. The same is true for exercise too the body is mostly pretty efficient at any work it can actually do.

 Chongara wrote:

 Talizvar wrote:
So in the end: eat less calories more often and burn more in regular exercise than you eat??

In the end, this is all there is to it. Really it doesn't even have to be "Exercise" as people tend to think of it. You can stay almost perfectly sedentary and still lose weight assuming your eat few enough calories.

Want to lose weight? Gain muscles.

When I was loosing weight, the only exercise I added to my life was walking a mile a day. The rest was just watching calorie intake. Don’t think you need to hit the gym and pump iron to drop pounds. Although it’s probably not a bad idea.

You could try the twinkle diet, one twinkle every four hours for a month. Just twinkies and water


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Although, I have noticed an undesirable affect, I'm sleepy a lot more since I started exercising. Same with my body builder roommate.
Although stress is gone pretty much for me, finals don't mean a whole lot in stress anymore

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
You could try the twinkle diet, one twinkle every four hours for a month. Just twinkies and water

Discounting time slept sleeping... that's approximately 600 Calories and no nutrition per day. You'd drop weight pretty quickly for sure. You'd also feel like total gak and be running headlong into health problems. Hell, you'd be starting to develop scurvy at that point.

 Sigvatr wrote:
Want to lose weight? Gain muscles.

Muscles are heavy. If I gain some, I will certainly gain weight.

Arf, meant to say "fat".

Blaming this one on being overworked.

 Sigvatr wrote:
Want to lose weight? Gain muscles.

Proven that just having a higher muscle mass more calories are consumed even in a rest state than someone of similar mass with less muscle.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/weight-loss/in-depth/metabolism/art-20046508

 Chongara wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
You could try the twinkle diet, one twinkle every four hours for a month. Just twinkies and water

Discounting time slept sleeping... that's approximately 600 Calories and no nutrition per day. You'd drop weight pretty quickly for sure. You'd also feel like total gak and be running headlong into health problems. Hell, you'd be starting to develop scurvy at that point.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/

Any diet that actively avoids proteines is a stupid diet.

Really, dieting isn't too hard. Just stay away from empty calories like candy, soda, chips, white bread, and pastries. Stuff like that. Drink lots of water. Eat lettuce. Just plain lettuce (I like iceberg for this personally). Super low calorie but, unlike water, it has some bite to it. A lettuce on whole wheat sandwich is surprisingly effective at stopping you from snacking.

 DarkLink wrote:
It's all because crossfit is still very new, and as more and more talented athletes come in from various sports, they bring their knowledge and experience with them and it evolves.

See, this is part of the problem. Saying something like "CrossFit evolves." makes it seem less like an exercise program, and more like a religion.

 DarkLink wrote:

There's no arbitrary law of physics that designates that you can't or shouldn't do any strength exercise for time or reps. God did not step down from heaven and decree that thou shalt not perform more than 5x5 deadlifts a workout.

Actually, any exercise done for time isn't about building strength, its about building power. And, for some exercises, that's unwise. Deadlift, in particular, is bad as it is very easy to bounce the weight.

Pushing for reps is different, of course, as that method can be used to develop strength. Though, again, it depends on the specific exercise.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 Chongara wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
You could try the twinkle diet, one twinkle every four hours for a month. Just twinkies and water

Discounting time slept sleeping... that's approximately 600 Calories and no nutrition per day. You'd drop weight pretty quickly for sure. You'd also feel like total gak and be running headlong into health problems. Hell, you'd be starting to develop scurvy at that point.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/

Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

See this is a rather different scenario you've put forward. The dude in question was getting vitamins, protein and fiber. That's very different than just 4 Twinkies a day.

 DarkLink wrote:
I can't tell you how many times I've crushed athletes in workouts who -looked- fit, and I'm far from the most athletic crossfitter I know.

Since when did working out become a competition?

 dogma wrote:

Since when did working out become a competition?

When Cross Fit became a thing.


Now, to me, there's nothing wrong with encouragement while lifting, ESPECIALLY when you're under a heavy* squat rack or some other lift. But I cannot stand when people are trying to one up each other in the gym.... Get in there, get the work you set out to do done, and get out, no fething around!


*heavy being heavy for the individual.... since what is heavy for me, is barely a warmup for someone else, the same as what's heavy for someone else is barely a warmup for me.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

Now, to me, there's nothing wrong with encouragement while lifting, ESPECIALLY when you're under a heavy* squat rack or some other lift. But I cannot stand when people are trying to one up each other in the gym.... Get in there, get the work you set out to do done, and get out, no fething around!

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 DarkLink wrote:

You also seem to think that within crossfit, the competition portion is like, super-serious. It's really not.

Yet you "crush" athletes in workouts.

Got home...turns out this last week of intensive training brought me to 278....
Im getting a sicaran.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Got home...turns out this last week of intensive training brought me to 278....
Im getting a sicaran.

That down in weight... up in weight lifted??


If it's the former, congrats! Keep it up!

If it's the latter... congrats, keep lifting

down in weight. the bet was 280...