Hacker News Reader

Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

It has become a cult. I personally have no problem with people lifting and motivating each other and CrossFit was originally quite good, especially the competitive athletes. But now a days it’s become a huge cult where it’s all about people motivating each other to see how many reps of a certain exercise a person can do while completely throwing the form out of the window. Couple of my friends are in sports medicine field and they tell me on how CrossFit has become a way to keep sports meds employed because it’s single handedly the most cases of sports injury in their clinic.

View on HN

To be fair, the growing numbers of CrossFit athletes alone could describe the growing numbers of injuries. If e.g. 10x as many people do CrossFit than do handball, they will account for a majority of injuries.

Bodybuilding and powerlifting has been around for many years though and has more athletes than CrossFit. Powerlifting also uses a lot heavier weights but since the rules are extremely strict for form in competitive powerlifting, injuries are less common. Bodybuilding uses relatively lesser weights but focuses more on higher reps and symmetry for which you need good form. CrossFit tries to combine both - heavy weights and high reps which is a recipe for injury. Either do heavier weights and low reps or do relatively lighter weights and high reps. When they try to combine both, it leads to CrossFit type injuries. Add to that, your group of people yelling at you trying to motivate you into doing the 23rd rep on a poor back deadlift form and it gets even worse.

Maybe, but CF regularly uses for workout of the day an acronym that escapes me for now that is basically "until exhaustion" (possibly "amrap" - as many repetitions as possible). So many of those is going to make you susceptible to injury, especially with their "keep going" mentality.

AMRAP workouts are almost never executed "until exhaustion" - they are usually time-limited. There are other types of workouts which have increasing loads or repetitions until the athlete can't keep up - usually called "death by" (yes, it has "death" in the name, surely that means Crossfit is a death cult) - but those not exactly "until exhaustion" - at least not always, since if you can't lift the next weight in the line it doesn't mean you necessarily exhausted (though it may be). I don't see why this would be more prone to injury though - most workouts are meant to make you tired, and when you're tired, you may lose form, and when you lose form, you may be susceptible to injury, especially if you let your ego run away from you. That's where coach comes in and tells you to stop doing stupid, drop the weight and fix the form, or change the exercise.

Yea, usually motivation by your peers is a good thing but in CrossFit, it’s detrimental as it forces you to stop listening to your own body because of peer pressure.

that's true of any exercise that involves a group

Reply on news.ycombinator.com