You’ve heard about and maybe even studied the European Renaissance, about a 300 year period of cultural change. It’s the definitive period that splits the medieval period and modernity. You might think, “Wow! Humans learned some new stuff in that period that thrust us into modernity.”… and you’d be wrong. A renaissance is actually a return to or re-visiting of old thought. The European renaissance was a return to the thoughts, teaching, art and culture of late antiquity, the Greco-Roman world in it’s prime. The European renaissance revived democracy! It wasn’t new, people just lost track of it. The renaissance is even responsible for the discovery of the new world and ‘Merica!
What the hell does this have to do with CrossFit? If you’re still reading, I’ll tell you.
The thing CrossFit as a company has done better than anything else, is protect the methodology. The Level-1 training guide, The Level-2 course, and the CrossFit Journal as far as I’ve tested, remain untainted by shotty influences. CrossFit has been relentlessly vigilant against ill-informed adjustments to the definition of fitness and the goal of increasing work capacity across broad time and modal domains. Any revisions to the L-1 have been semantic; the L-1 I read in 2012 is basically the same as newer editions.
The L-1 is so rock solid that we don’t interpret it with our fitness, it interprets us. Meaning, we can try to pick and choose what we don’t like about the methodology, but really, we’d be pointing out what we’re missing in our health.
Does that sound close minded? Is the L-1 keeping out a wealth of helpful information? To me it’s actually refreshing. A solid methodology to come home to ought to be refreshing. We live in a world with no shortage of information. If CrossFit welcomed every guru, influencer, champion and doctor, what would it be? It certainly wouldn’t be the compass that it is.
With social media, it is very easy to get distracted from fitness in CrossFit’s definition (the true definition IMO). Influencers peddle silver bullets to help us fulfill our fitness desires. Supplements, cold plunges, saunas, novel recovery tools, programming, sleep aids, that thing that shocks your abs, you get the picture. They’re all sexy and fun, but the secret sauce for increasing fitness is summed up in 100 words, and the most important are the first 26– the things we eat.
I’m not as concerned with the products influencers sell. You’ll buy something, try it for a bit, you’ll like it or you won’t, whatever. The most dangerous things they sell that distracts us from CrossFit and the L-1 are the identities and aesthetics. We’re tempted to chase an aesthetic, whether it be weight loss or muscle gain or that combination. Body fat % is an important health metric and so is muscle mass. Pursuing a single aesthetic goal does little for our fitness, and yet pursuing fitness has the result of improved aesthetic.
Listening to different voices in the fitness arena is fine and good as long as you examine those voices through the lense of the level-1. If you feel like you’re stuck and drowning in a million opinions, step back and and refocus your efforts on eliminating or at least avoiding sugar and Work capacity across broad time and modal domains. A health renaissance.
