I jumped off that band wagon when I hired a personal trainer for a few sessions. The guy is also a full-time fireman and explained how and why it's better to train for the long term than just rush to lift heavier and heavier weights. After all a fireman can't have a lot of down time due to training injuries. So far I'm in better shape using less, though not light weights and doing more reps (10-20).
See, statements like this typically come from someone who has jumped in with a crowd that is not looking at the bigger picture. As Rob Orlando says, it takes YEARS to become strong. As you say, people are in a rush to lift heavier and heavier weights, without worrying about the accommodation that must take place in the rest of the body and the rest of the skeletal muscular system. That's why Crossfit recommends lifting weights at or near the 1 rep max only ONCE per week. Few people can sustain the ability to lift heavy like that more than once a week, and doing for the same lift is a quick way to over train.
Now, an experience that I just had that illustrates, to me, why CrossFit is the best approach for physical fitness for the military.
I just got done with and NTC rotation, out at Fort Irwin, California. My brigade, the 37th IBCT, just spent two weeks out in the "Sandbox", which is the actual training area. It's all desert and scrub desert, similar to Afghanistan. One of our missions that we were required to conduct was basically a movement to contact, or what I like to call search and attack. We were supposed to recon a site that had been used to launch mortars. Predictably, we came under attack while moving to the launch site. The attackers were hold up behind a large hill, on the side of a small mountain, what could be called a spur. They had dug themselves into the rock face, essentially, and had overwhelming fire on the draw leading up to their position. I did the only thing I felt was appropriate under the circumstances, I climbed up the backside of the mountain. It was pretty sheer, and I thought I was going to have to go on all fours in a couple of spots, but I ended up making it to the top, around the backside of their positions. There were three bad guys, all with their backs to me. In all three cases, I managed to come up behind them and "kill" them before they could get a shot off. Part of that is because they never bothered to pull rear security, and part of it is because I was able to move so quickly from one spot to the other. No one in my squad could believe that I moved up that hill so fast. Was I out of breath when I got to the last guy? Yes. Was I so gassed that I couldn't fight? Absolutely not. I attribute this to all of the crosstraining that I've done in CrossFit, and on my own time, as well as natural athletic ability.
Kent
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Topic: Fitness Professionals Outraged By Viral Video From a Crossfit Gym (Read 1869 times)