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The Complete Guide to CrossFit
The real costs, the first workouts, the gear that matters, and how to decide if this is your thing - before you spend a dollar.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Is CrossFit and Why People Love It
Picture this: you're standing in a large, open warehouse-style room. The floors are rubber. The walls are exposed brick or corrugated metal. Along one wall, there are squat racks with barbells resting on them, plates lined up neatly by size. On another wall, pull-up bars hang from the ceiling, and there's a stack of wooden boxes, thick jump ropes, and heavy medicine balls in a corner. There's chalk dust on the floor near the lifting platforms, and the air smells like clean sweat and rubber. This is an affiliate box - that's what CrossFit gyms are called - and if you walk in on any given day, you'll see a group of people moving through exercises together, some fast, some slow, all of them working hard.
So what actually is CrossFit? At its core, it's a fitness program built on constantly varied, functional movements performed at relatively high intensity. That sounds like a mouthful, but it breaks down simply. Constantly varied means you won't do the same workout twice - the exercises, the combinations, the rep schemes, and the time frames all change daily. Functional movements mean the exercises mimic things you actually do in real life: squatting down to pick something up, pushing overhead, pulling yourself up, running, carrying, and throwing. These are movements you've been doing since you were a kid, just now loaded with weight or speed. High intensity means you're pushing yourself harder than you would