While press for CrossFit seems to be cropping up everywhere these days (cf., the NY Times Magazine, whose piece about how ‘the superfit walk among us’ has already given Jess endless opportunities to make fun of me), it’s Gawker that deserves special recognition for summing things up way better than I can whenever people ask about the gym:
“CrossFit is an internet-based cult of fitness for psychos, itinerant preachers, ex-killers, and crazy people of all stripes.”
Sounds about right.
It’s a new year, and you’re still fat.
Fret not, though; by popular request, I’m pulling together this ongoing, intermittent series to help you get in shape.
Like fitness itself, the series breaks down into two interlocking halves – exercise and nutrition. Getting fit requires both working in your favor.
Nutrition primarily determines body weight. Exercise primarily determines body composition. If you’re pear shaped, eating less can make you a smaller pear, whereas only exercise can redistribute things around.
Both parts, though, aren’t short-term commitments. How long do you have to keep exercising and eating healthfully? Well, how long do you have to keep brushing your teeth? So this series focuses on sustainable solutions, the kinds of things you can start now and still be doing happily at the end of the year – or the end of next decade.
Coming up, we kick things off on the nutrition side, with some general principles: the three golden rules of eating.
About three years ago, I started doing CrossFit workouts, following the free routines posted daily on the crossfit.com website. They were brief, they were intense, and they worked. I made faster progress in far less time than with anything else I had tried. I was hooked.
About two and a half years back, I started getting together with a couple of other idiots who had tried this CrossFit thing, for monthly workouts in Central Park. Misery loves company, and I quickly found I had more fun, pushed myself far harder, when working out with a group.
When the weather turned cold, we found a small gym on the Upper East Side that would let us, for ten bucks a head, use their space for our group workouts. A few more people heard about it and joined in, and they, too, made fast, significant progress. People would walk in the door unable to do a pullup, and six months later they’d be doing sets of twenty. Other clients at the gym, who over the same stretch of time might have moved up one notch on the lat pulldown machine, would leave their private trainers to work out with us instead. Then, fairly predictably, the trainers would get the owner to ask us to leave.
Lather, rinse, repeat. We lived through that find a place, grow the group, inadvertently steal clients, get kicked out cycle five times. After which, we were just bright enough to start seeing a pattern.
So, back in January of this year, we opened up a space of our own, the Black Box, just below Times Square. It was only 1500 square feet, up on the fourth floor of an old building. I cash-flowed the place myself, unsure whether it was a really dumb idea to have just opened a gym, unsure of whether anyone might actually show up.
But show up they did. And so did their friends. People would get results and brag about it, and now, ten months later and with zero advertising, we have more than a hundred members and nowhere near enough space.
My brother David very kindly took some time out of running his real estate development company to play unpaid broker, and helped find us a new space. We’re still trading lease documents back and forth, but by December 15th we’re hoping to be in our new home.
This second Black Box is nearly six times the size, and on the ground floor (which is good, as we inadvertently knocked down part of our downstairs neighbors’ ceiling in our current space with all of our jumping around). This time through, the stakes are higher. And so is the rent. I’m equally unsure whether opening this considerably larger space will turn out to be a really dumb idea.
But, as they say in CrossFit: get some, go again.
Here’s something I don’t often admit: I was a ballerina.
Okay, technically, I was a danseur. But still.
My mother, who did masters work in dance at Stanford, enrolled me in ballet at a very young age. And I loved it. I was good at it. I danced for years, until, presumably, the fear of cooties contamination from such a female-dominated pursuit caused me to rebel.
Looking back, of course, I realize I should have stuck it out a few more years. Post-cooties, I would have been one of the very few straight guys surrounded by a swarm of lithe women in spandex.
But, anyway, I stopped. Still, to this day, I often look down and catch myself in first position. I have terminal, intractable duck feet.
About a month ago, I badly sprained my ankle. Seeing me hobbling around on crutches and air cast, a physical therapist friend pointed out that my ‘everted feet’ might be to blame. He sent me a copy of the Egoscue Method, in the hopes that fixing my post-ballet posture might save my ankle from a repeatedly sprained fate, and similarly protect my knees – the next joint to go in what appears to be a fairly standard progression.
And, well, I think he might be right. Egoscue’s theory is persuasive, and though I’ve only been doing the exercises for about a week, and so can’t yet vouch much for the results, I already feel better. I’m standing a bit more solidly, with my joints squarely aligned from my ankles up through my shoulders and neck.
His other books, Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC also seem to have garnered rave reviews. So, if you find you’re not standing how you’d like, or if you have pain in your back, your shoulders, your knees or your wrists, they might be worth a read. I’ll post a further review after I’ve had a chance to do the exercises for another month or two. But, in the meantime, for ten bucks a pop, seems certainly worth checking out for yourself.
Merde!
Most of the time, I no longer really get sore from working out.
Except for from workouts involving walking lunges. Enough of those, and – though they don’t seem too bad at the time – for days after, I can barely walk.
Take the deceptively simple “400m walking lunges for time”: find a track, start a stopwatch, and time how quickly you can walk in lunges around that track – 400 meters.
The last time I did this one, I was so sore the next day that I missed my subway stop. I was literally unable to stand up. I had to wait for the woman next to me to get off so that I could slide along the seat, and hoist myself by the bench-side railing.
The workout cropped up again two days ago. And, indeed, yesterday I was brutally sore. But today, for whatever reason, I’m far, far worse.
That coincided, of course, with the first time this year my office elevator has broken down. So, for a slew of meetings, about ten times so far today, I’ve had to haul myself, slowly, slowly, up and down all six flights.
Normally, I could take those six flights without even losing my breath. But, today, I reach the top (or worse, the bottom, as descending is even more excruciating) bedraggled, sweating through my shirt, and smelling vaguely like wet dog.
I’m sure the bankers I’ve been meeting can’t help but have been impressed.
This weekend, the gym I co-own hosted a seminar with kettlebell guru Steve Cotter. The event was great, and brought in fifty or so folks, ranging from a Navy SEAL and a member of the New York FBI Swat Team through to a couple in their late 60’s.
One thing I’ve noticed about the people our gym, and seminars like this one, tend to attract, is that they’re actually really, really humble and friendly. It’s something I noticed, too, in the world of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts fighting. Take Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell, who’s a member of one of our sister gyms, and a world MMA champion. And also an amazingly nice guy.
He’s a strong contrast with a lot of Tae Kwon Do or Aikido black belts I’ve met, who seem proud to proclaim themselves the second coming of Bruce Lee. Or with the body-building mooks at most Gold’s Gyms, who do their best to condescendingly freeze out any less steroidal folks unfortunate enough to walk into their facilities.
In both of those situations, as there’s no reality check on performance, it’s easy for folks to start eating their own dog food, believing they really are as good as it gets. But in a mixed martial arts gym, anyone training is all too aware that, on a given day, some guy with no formal training but a natural right hook might walk in the door and knock one of the most seasoned fighters onto their ass. And, similarly, at CrossFit NYC, the top ranked finisher of a workout one day might the next place ‘DFL’ – dead fucking last.
It’s a good reminder that, in real life, no matter how good you are, there’s always somebody better. And no matter how well you do some things, there are others at which you, in short, suck balls. It can even keep a self-aggrandizer like me from believing his own hype. Which means it’s, undoubtedly, some strong – and hugely beneficial – medicine.
[I haven’t really been pimping out CrossFit NYC on this site, as the gym has been growing almost faster than we can handle without any outside effort. Still, if you’re looking for a great community, the most effective and efficient way to get into world class shape from wherever you’re starting, or just a quick route to looking hot in a bathing suit, stop on by.]
While I’m using this blog as a bulletin board to announce various facets of my life: CrossFit NYC, the workout group I’ve been helping run, just opened a gym of its very own, The Black Box, in midtown Manhattan.
The gym is essentially a nonprofit, so I don’t make any money by pimping it out. Instead, I just honestly believe CrossFit is simply the most effective and most efficient way to get in excellent shape.
We have CrossFit NYC members of every fitness level – from military special forces guys on through to eighty-year-old grandmothers – and as I’m fairly sure you fall somewhere between those two, you should fit right in.
The CrossFit approach has been praised in publications from Skiing Magazine to Men’s Fitness (though, conversely, the NY Times did make us sound a bit like whack-jobs). And we have member testimonials galore (consider an attorney who came to us barely able to do a pullup, and was banging out sets of nearly twenty inside of eight months).
So, come on down, and give it a try. Classes are free throughout January, giving you the perfect chance to actually stick to your New Years resolution for a change.
One big disadvantage of having my younger brother here in New York is that we often work out together. Which, in some ways, is an advantage – working out with someone else always being more fun than working out alone. The problems set in when we start competing with each other. Because, after twenty-some years of practice, the two of us have honed to an art the act of pushing far more than we sanely should, just to edge the other out.
This was made particularly clear yesterday, when the CrossFit Workout of the Day called for maximum weight deadlift attempts. [A deadlift, for those not familiar, essentially involves picking a weighted barbell up off the ground, then putting it back down again. Cf.]
So, we started with the bar and a 45 pound plate on either side, and proceeded to pile on additional weight after each attempt. There’s a point somewhere after adding two such forty-five pound plates on each side that, as you stand up, the metal barbell visibly bends. And, it was about at that point that other people nearby began to stop their own workouts, gathering to watch us go back and forth, back and forth, each time adding more and more weight to the bar.
In the end, as he does about half the time these days, my brother edged me out, though not before we had well crossed the 300 pound mark. But, today, we’re both the losers. I, for example, am typing this standing, because my legs are far too sore for me to lower myself into the chair.
They say love hurts; apparently, that’s doubly true for the brotherly sort.
With all the craziness of the past few months, my workout schedule has been erratic at best. Yet, despite that, I’ve continued to teach a couple of CrossFit classes each week.
There’s a CrossFit saying that ‘men will die for points’ – meaning that, given a bit of competition, people push themselves far, far harder than they would alone. I find that’s doubly true when leading a class, weighed down with the vague idea that whatever instructor street-cred I possess stems entirely from my ability to demonstrate exercises and blaze through workouts well enough to inspire the rest of the class.
Fortunately, years of competition with my younger brother instilled in me the ability to push myself far harder than wise, for the sake of shaming others. So, in class, regardless of my current overall fitness level, I put up more than my body weight in the Snatch or Clean & Jerk, do twenty-rep sets of handstand pushups or clapping pullups. (Yes, clapping pullups.)
When I’m working out regularly outside of class, that’s fine; the instructor days don’t really make a dent. But, at times like this, when lax workout schedules leave me sustaining in-class effort with nothing but grit and curse words, the day after, I’m inevitably a mess.
Today, for example, I could barely lift myself out of bed, started the day unable to squat down sufficiently to pick things up off the floor, unable to raise my arms above shoulder level.
But, perversely enough, that pain got me to the gym. First because, contrary to conventional wisdom, pushing through a workout when sore inevitably leaves me feeling far better by the end than when I started.
Second because, unless I get back onto a regular workout schedule, I’m going to feel like this after every class I teach. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have the Advil budget to make that work.
A little while back, I plugged CrossFit’s Workout-of-the-Day as the best approach I’d found for high-level athletic training. I still think it is. And I’m even more impressed that they put up their WotD for free. So, to support them, I recently subscribed to their monthly journal, which talks through some of the theoretical underpinnings of their approach.
The latest issue, which I received yesterday, is all about gymnastics, about how great gymnastics movements are for developing general fitness. And, in the journal, they suggest that CrossFitters add a gymnastics stunt to their warm-ups, to learn them one at a time. Looking over their list for one to add in, I noticed they included ‘skin the cat’, which I remember hating, hating, hating when I last did gymnastics, at seven or eight years old. So, naturally, ‘skin the cat’ was the first one I tried.
For those who’ve never seen it, skinning the cat looks like this. Basically, you start in a regular pullup position, lift yourself into an inverted pullup position (where your legs are pointed up at the ceiling – the first frame in the photo), then keep rotating through. If your shoulders are flexible enough, you can roll all the way forward to an eagle grip (the last frame in the photo); if your shoulders are strong enough, you can then reverse the movement from that eagle grip position and flip back through the motion in the opposite direction to end up in a regular pullup again.
And, in short: Holy crap, I can totally do it! I can do it repeatedly! I could totally kick seven-year old me’s ass!