Who do you want to look like?

The guy on the left is the "so called" definition of fitness is he not? Wow, those marathon runners are fit guys. They can run 42km at speed without stopping. The same can be said with triathletes and most other endurance athletes. I hear this all the time in the Globo gym " So if I want to loose weight, should I just do cardio?"

This is the misconception that has come about through jogging trends in the 80's, undertrained coaches/personal trainers and the horrible one hour sessions of whatever it may be, spin, boxacise, pump blah blah blah that the Globo gym pushes on you. I guess it isn't a bad thing to be out there jogging for hours, or in your pump class with your fluro spandex doing bicep curls to Bon Jovi, atleast you are still making an effort to stay healthy. But ask someone that is doing CrossFit if they would like a nice one hour session of Fight gone bad and they would tell you where to go.

Lets go to our athletes pictured on the top of the page. The marathon runner who seems to be only good at one thing, running long distance. He will come up short in nearly all other parameters of fitness. What! there are other parameters of fitness other than cardiovascular endurance? Yes thats correct. If we look at the way CrossFit define their fitness parameters, they are; Cardiovascular-endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, accuracy. This seems to make much more sense.

Now if we take CrossFits model and start to look at the marathon runner we can see just how unfit he would be. Put him under a 100kg back squat or ask him to jump 50cm's onto a box and he would be in serious trouble. The only accuracy he trains is making sure he gets his glass of water in his mouth at a drink stop. He trains in one energy system the "Aerobic energy system" and by doing this it drags his other parameters down. Conversly, if we look at our sprinter he can run sub 11 second hundreds, lift huge amounts of weights, put both his legs behind his head and I bet still have the capacity to run a good marathon time.

This is the fitness I want, and a program like CrossFit will deliver. If you want to look like our friend on the left, get into your local globo gym and hit the cardio machines. Hey, you could even see me working there hassling you to get off the peck deck and do some deadlifts.