Our standards aren’t arbitrary rules or outdated traditions. They’re the foundation of our program. CrossFit’s movement requirements, nutritional guidelines, and intensity targets exist to find the perfect balance between safety, efficacy, and efficiency — the three factors that should be used to evaluate any fitness program.
- Safety: the risk of injury associated with the program
- Efficacy: the results a program delivers across the population using the program
- Efficiency: how fast the results are achieved
When these factors are out of balance, the usefulness of a program is compromised. If a program is 100% safe, you’ll find, as you dig into the (lack of) results, it is also 100% ineffective. A program that delivers incredible results quickly, but in the process sidelines 80% of the users with injury, is just as unusable. Or, if the results delivered are great but it takes years to get them, this is also not the scenario we’re looking for. Ideally, a program optimally balances safety, efficacy, and efficiency in a way that delivers exceptional results within an acceptable timeframe, safely. This is how a program measures up and stands out as a quality option among other offerings.
CrossFit’s Standards
So there’s no confusion about what our standards are, elite fitness requires that we:
- Learn, practice, master, and work out with functional movements.
- Incorporate variety across all workout parameters.
- Get uncomfortable regularly.
- Eat in a way that supports our efforts in the gym.
To understand why these standards are so critical to the results CrossFit delivers, we need to examine them through the lens of balancing safety, efficacy, and efficiency.
Functional Movements
Movements like squats, presses, deadlifts, lunges, Olympic lifts, push-ups, pull-ups, jumps, sprints, and carries are the nuts and bolts of our workouts. These movements develop all of our musculature, tendons, ligaments, and bone, enhance general physical skills to a significant degree, and allow us to move large loads, long distances, quickly to generate high intensity. The results we achieve are, in large part, due to the potency of the movements we use.
We relentlessly obsess over proper technique and range of motion in these movements because this enhances safety and efficacy. For example, when our standard is that an air squat always goes below parallel rather than stopping at parallel, those final inches aren’t about perfectionism; they’re about activating the posterior chain, building essential mobility, and developing the full range of motion your body needs for real-world challenges. Every rep counts because every inch delivers measurable benefit. As we learn to move more efficiently (with better technique), we can complete more work, more easily and more quickly, thereby increasing our power output, or intensity, spurring greater results.
At the same time, our refined line of action supports orthopedically sound (safer) movement and develops capacity in the ranges of motion life demands. As a result of our technique work, we have a good balance of safety and efficacy. With our teaching and cueing methods and highly effective progressions, the time investment to develop proficiency in a wide variety of functional movements is relatively small, adding a dose of efficiency to the process.
Variety
We don’t just vary some things in our workouts; we vary everything. Loads, reps, sets, rounds, duration, and distance. This comprehensive variety is what builds the broad, general, and inclusive fitness that CrossFit practitioners value. It’s not just about kicking ass at the gym; it’s about kicking ass at life, and our program prepares you for that.
This variety also provides elements of safety. First, by using a wide variety of functional movements, we develop our musculature, tendons, ligaments, and bones fully by stressing them from all angles. In addition, variance allows us to train more often while avoiding overuse injuries.
While it may take extra time to learn more movements, we are experts at teaching them. And one of the great things about functional movements is that they share many common movement themes. Once you learn one, you have a foundation to learn many more relatively quickly. The variance in our program supports the balance in safety, efficacy, and efficiency.
Intensity
To get the results we’re looking for, we have to get uncomfortable regularly. This doesn’t mean redlining, flailing around out of control, or wrecking ourselves only to have to take time off with an injury. Getting uncomfortable means pushing ourselves to the point where we’re hanging on to maintain our technique while holding our pace. Our lungs and legs may be burning, we may be breathing hard, but we keep going and fighting to keep the arch in our low back, reach proper depth, and lock out fully. We refer to this as threshold training, and this is how we strike a balance between safety, efficacy, and efficiency every day within our workouts.
With threshold training, we push ourselves to an uncomfortable place of relatively high intensity because this is where we get results in the shortest time. Simultaneously, we labor to preserve the technique we developed over months of honing proper mechanics and consistency in these movements. The charter we emphasize is one of mechanics, consistency, and, only then, the judicious application of intensity, which is our way of balancing safety, efficacy, and efficiency for the best results.
Nutrition
We need to eat in a way that supports our efforts in the gym and our overall health. That is, we can’t eat like a 5-year-old (yes, I’m looking at myself in the mirror right now). Chicken nuggets, candy, Pop-Tarts, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, French fries, and ice cream will not fuel elite fitness. We need to experiment — which includes weighing and measuring our food — and constantly refine our diet to find the right combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fats from whole food sources that support our activity level and performance, but not excess body fat.
Eating this way allows us to push harder more often in the gym while still recovering better and supporting all of our organs, metabolic systems, and bodily processes. In this way, proper nutrition enhances the efficacy, efficiency, and safety of a program. Without addressing the nutrition component, a fitness program will diminish its impact on all three of these factors and dramatically blunt the results achieved.
That’s it. Those are our standards. We implement them day in and day out for a lifetime. Simple but not easy. This is our unvarnished truth — no dumbing it down or compromising, no flashy gimmicks. These standards are not just about being hard for hard’s sake or morally superior somehow; we hold them unrelentingly because this is how we get the best results. We owe this to those who are searching for a way to be the best version of themselves or for a reason to take that first step on a journey that will save their lives.
This is why we will not waver in holding the standard.
About the Author
Stephane Rochet is a Senior Content Writer for CrossFit. He has worked as a Flowmaster on the CrossFit Seminar Staff and has over 15 years of experience as a collegiate/tactical strength and conditioning coach. He is a Certified CrossFit Trainer (CF-L3) and enjoys training athletes in his garage gym.