Gamesification of Fitness is Unhealthy
Not gonna lie, being an active participant in all things CrossFit made writing “Sunday musings…” almost effortless. CrossFit as muse, if you will. There was science and structure. Man, you should have seen the minutiae we parsed on the Message Board back in the days when it was all about the Cybergym. When I started doing CrossFit back in December 2004 there were maybe 50 gyms and 5,000 folks who could call themselves CrossFitters.
Everyone and everything was interesting, to say the least.
I spent so much time on CrossFit.com that my daughter called it “CrackFit”! Still, it made sense. Constantly varied functional movements performed at relatively high intensity. Proper form. Consistency in both form and the scheduling of exercise. Only after locking down your form and consistently doing the work do you apply the intensity. Mind you, the word RELATIVE is there for a reason; intensity is different for every CrossFitter. Intensity was relative to an individual’s capacity to generate and tolerate it. If you were a solo CrossFitter exercising in your garage or a corner of your local GloboGym the fidelity to the progression form, consistency, then and only then intensity was your personal responsibility. If you were one of the lucky few to have a CrossFit Box and a coach at least some of that responsibility was assumed by your coach.
By defining fitness, CrossFit promised to not only make you more fit, but to allow you to objectively measure that fitness. Work capacity across time and modal domains (WCATMD). How much could you move how far how fast. The data generated by the workout of the day (WOD) could be graphed. The area under the “work over time” curve represented a measurement of fitness. This, in turn, allowed you to compare your results each time you repeated a WOD, creating a very personal kind of competition: you vs. you. Each CrossFitter was engaged in an attempt to be fitter tomorrow than you were yesterday through the efforts you made today.
In those early days there was much talk about the importance of rest and recovery. The standard schedule was 3 consecutive days working out followed by a rest day. The community argued over the risks of being over-trained vs. under-recovered. If you weren’t trained enough your performance would suffer; if you were injured in the gym or you had insufficient rest you might very well perform worse at whatever it is you are training for. Still, with the exception of civilian first-responders and members of the military, all of whom performed physical tasks where the impact of their fitness was clearly a factor on the job, the vast majority of people who sought their fitness in a CrossFit Box or in the CrossFit CyberGym were simply after fitness as a conduit to health, with perhaps a little bonus on the basketball court, on skis, or on a surfboard.
Competition was you vs. you.
Any time you can measure something, real competition is possible. Honestly, in the history of the human race, competition arises EVERY time something is measurable. CrossFit would be no different. Although, to be fair, the original CrossFit competition was little more than a barbecue in the foothills of Aromas, CA where a bunch of mostly SoCal folks got together to do one WOD per day over the weekend. They called it the CrossFit Games! Looking back it’s actually rather quaint. Why just one WOD per day? In chats with the founder and the rest of the core CrossFit team they flatly said they were concerned that someone would be killed if they die more, After all, everyone at the first iteration of the CrossFit Games was pretty much just someone who loved CrossFit enough to score an invitation.
But the CrossFit Games became a “thing”. They took on a life of their own, in some ways becoming the tail that wagged the dog. Where once there was a founder who wished to move from fitness on to health, who took a hands off approach and supported a couple who were committed to developing a version of CrossFit for kids, we ended up with a fitness company calling itself a media company and producing the phenomenon that ended up on ESPN and became THE CROSSFIT GAMES. Professional and semi-professional athletes now taking part in competitions that featured not our quaint little Aromas one event per day stuff, but 3-4 days or 3+ events per day, each one more taxing than the most challenging WOD at that first little barbecue. The Games jumped the Land Shark then they programmed a half Marathon one year on Day 1.
So what? Who cares? These are pros. They get paid in some way, shape, or kind to compete. Even the Masters athletes almost uniformly had some kind of financial skin in the game. They owned a CrossFit gym and wanted the free marketing. Just like the “Open Division” athletes they had sponsors. Whatever. Honestly, if that was all it was and the Games simply brought more people into the CrossFit universe I would have been fan number 1. Turns out all those new folks were just as interesting at the original crew way back in the aughts. Fertile ground for yours truly and my writing.
But that’s not really what happened. Out in the wild the “Fitness as Sport” thing became THE thing. Despite the protestations of the founder, despite the deeply informed concerns expressed by the founders of the CrossFit Kids branch, competition became a very, very big deal. It’s not for me to say that it became THE big deal; the gym founded by my sons and still open at that time was run using the ca. 2008-10 model of you vs. you. No, gyms became invaded by people who were convinced they were CrossFit Games athletes just needing that right coach, that right training, and off to Cali (and later Madison) they’d go. Even more troubling, a significant percentage of CrossFit gyms began sponsoring and hosting local competitions to provide gym goers a place to prove their chops as competitive CrossFitters.
The only folks who really benefited from this development were the local orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists who tried to put all the CrossHumty Dumpty’s back together again.
Why bring this up now? I left the CrossFit universe, making a final break somewhere around 2018 or so. Stopped writing on CrossFit platforms. Stopped commenting on almost all things CrossFit in my personal writing. I maintained meaningful contact with a very, very tiny group of OG’s, the owners of the first gym in Cleveland and the founders of CrossFit Kids, a few fellow early adopters. My son closed his gym, I retreated to my garage, and I’m mostly content. Honestly, I would have been entirely content if my friends from Ramona would just be a bit better at returning my texts.
At least I was until last week when I read an article in the Sunday NYT about a new fitness company called Xenom that was launched for the specific purpose of providing regular Tom, Dick and Harriet gym members an outlet to compete at events that are for all intents and purposes CrossFit Games knock-offs. Yup, for $500-$700 you, too, can compete in a weekend that looks an awful lot like the extravaganzas once upon a time dreamed up by Tony Budding, Dave Castro, and the rest of the CrossFit Games crew. Folks who used to trash their bodies at tiny little local events for $20 and shitty keg beer are now pushing way beyond the limits of “relative” intensity for…
…well, what?
Sadly, for a dozen or so reasons, none of which had anything to do with CrossFit the program or CrossFit the movement, CrossFit as I first knew it died. Make people better, chase proficiency in the 10 fundamental disciplines of fitness, become the cornerstone of health and healthspan, all abandoned. The high road not taken. CrossFit is an “Official Partner” of Xenom. Where once we convened on a platform that hosted passionate debates on how to scale workouts to safely achieve the desired stimulus, that once obsessively debated the nuances of 3 on/1 off vs. 2/1, we now have an “Official Partner” to a company that charges amateurs to push beyond the safe limits imposed by the fundamental boundaries of a fitness program designed to be both effective and safe.
CrossFit, at least the CrossFit laid out in the CrossFit Journal Vol. 2, is perhaps the most elegant, fully elaborated physical fitness program since the Kennedy Presidential Fitness school programs of the 1960’s. Train for the unknown and the unknowable. Use functional movements and combine them in constantly varied ways, adhering to strict form conventions, and exercise at relatively high levels of intensity. Measure your outcomes and objectively assess your progress over time. Seek to be more fit, to be better tomorrow than you were yesterday through your efforts in the gym today. There is competition, for sure there is competition, but it is that purest of competitions.
It’s you vs. you.
Fitness was never meant to be a competitive sport. Fitness was about being the best version of your physical you. It was about fighting against the inevitability of physical decline. It was about teaching kids how to move, to inoculate them against the certain traumas inherent in the traditional sports they played. Work capacity across time and modal domains, functional fitness performed at relatively high intensity was always a health thing. Still is. That’s why an article in the Sunday Times brings me back to the topic I wrote on every Sunday for more than 10 years. Back to a world I left years ago. Competitive fitness is unhealthy. It was unhealthy for the masses in the heydays of the CrossFit Games, and it’s surely unhealthy now.
Those were heady days, those early days of CrossFit. When almost no one know Darrell but a whole bunch of folks knew about a guy named bingo. When the soul of CrossFit lived in the tiny town of Ramona in Nowhere, CA. When all of my texts were returned and all we thought about was a better tomorrow.
I’ll see you next week…
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