Besides healthy eating, health enthusiasts stay active in fun ways they prefer. Some are into yoga and swimming while others love running and cardio workouts more. While these workouts are effective at losing fats, people who want a quicker solution at achieving their best shape more often than not resort to high intensity workouts like CrossFit. Los Angeles can actually prove that with its growing number of CrossFit gyms making the city appear more like a badass.
“CrossFit is a type of conditioning
and strength workout
that makes use of bodyweight for
resistance to be able to build power
and strength all over.”
What is CrossFit?
The concept of CrossFit was founded back in the early 2000s as a workout program designed for police, military forces, and firemen. Since then, it has slowly taken the world of fitness by storm, evidently keeping its members in their top shape while helping them build their muscles faster.
Nowadays, CrossFit is officially defined as a type of conditioning and strength workout that makes use of bodyweight for resistance to be able to build power and strength all over. Unlike other workout programs, with CrossFit, the cardio workouts and the number of hours one has to spend in the gym are not strictly defined. One may even need not use any equipment or added weights to do it.
CrossFit’s current basic principles have been established in light of the several simple observations made by its athlete trainers over the past 30 years. Presumably, CrossFit has grown popular ever since because of these key reasons:
- Heavy lifting contributed more power to trainees than endurance athletes. CrossFitters who have attempted to use maximum weights for heavy lifting successfully made it after three attempts.
- It provides more versatility, i.e. all over strength, stamina, or power can be achieved with it compared with endurance workouts, body building, and a lot more.
- High Intensity Interval Workouts (HIIT) that are often present in CrossFit programs provide more health benefits than simple endurance-centered exercises. Additionally, HIIT workouts need not be done daily and can even be done in under an hour and yet the strength that trainees have built up still remains.
- The many fitness domains that CrossFit covers are primarily what attracts its lovers to stick with the program. These include accuracy, agility, balance, cardiovascular and respiratory, coordination, flexibility, power, speed, stamina, and strength.
CrossFit’s Benefits
Although CrossFit may not be for everyone, it definitely is an amazing way to stay healthy and fit while achieving a solid strength base and a lot of CrossFit lovers in Los Angeles have apparently seen that.
Among its many benefits, the following are considered CrossFit’s best:
1. Intensity
CrossFit is an intense, fast-paced workout that can be done in less than 15 minutes a day. Although quarter of an hour initially sounds not challenging, the entire period is going to be stuffed with nonstop high intensity movements like jog and squats, burpees, jumping jacks, or whatever a trainee prefers. This kind of exercise has proven to be great at burning the system positively.
2. Dynamic Workouts
CrossFit is not like other exercises that will require you to bulk up or climb steps or do routine workouts that can get boring in the long run. It is not basic weightlifting either. Rather, it is a program that uses many different types of exercises done continuously, pushing trainees’ body parts to their limits. Here, you can do a particular set of workouts the first day and then go for a different set the next day to just keep your mind spiced up.
3. Nonstop movements enhance joint mobility.
The different functional movements a CrossFit workout covers promote frequent movement of limbs in different directions. It also introduces proper ways of heavy lifting, reducing injury risks one can experience from holding a weighted bar, weight stacks, or dumbbells overhead.
4. It’s good for the heart.
Throughout the entire CrossFit workout, the heart rate remains elevated and this enhances one’s endurance. As a matter of fact, American Council on Exercise has found out that CrossFit trainees had improved their heart rates to 90% passing the fitness industry guidelines of having to attain 64 to 94 percent boost of heart rate in order to achieve cardio endurance.
5. Personal Coaching
Since CrossFit is not a typical sort of workout, having a patient and motivating coach is vital during the trainee’s first few days. Fortunately, majority of great and reliable CrossFit classes are led by coaches to make sure that the workout is properly executed. CrossFit trainers determine their trainees’ most suited programs through gauging their first performance. They immediately adjust the programs while still upholding CrossFit standards to make sure these can best suit to the trainee’s abilities. It may even impose a “no rep” on an occasional basis if the trainee is seen without a real effort in carrying out the exercise. In CrossFit, coaches inspire, advice, motivate, and celebrate the success of their trainees.
6. Different Kind of Motivation
Intensify is what CrossFit brags about the most but hidden in that fact is that trainees are unaware that they have also been pushing themselves to do the most they can through each workout exercise. It is tailored such that its trainees can diligently put in their effort and max themselves out to achieve the best results even if the routine is only done in minutes.
7. Time Efficient.
CrossFit workouts can be completed in 15 minutes or less but as previously mentioned, this period requires nonstop movements. By its end, the trainee will have burned more than calories than a regular 30 minutes to 1 hour-long workout because of the intensity and effort he poured all over.
8. Relationship Builder
Many gyms accommodate a crowd of random people focusing only on their own different exercises but not at CrossFit gyms where the crowd is usually a community of strangers who encourage and help each other to push their boundaries towards that same goal that is to get in the best shape the fastest and best way possible. It does not define a time period, i.e. a few can finish earlier than the other. Nonetheless, the same bouts of appreciation can be seen as trainees praise each other for their hard work. With CrossFit, the camaraderie is set different.
9. Improved Health
Accuracy, agility, balance, coordination, endurance, flexibility, power, speed, stamina, and strength are what fuels CrossFit to inspire a larger community. Evidently, these were achieved as CrossFit workouts promote hormonal and neurological adaptations across all the body’s metabolic pathways. The different combination of movements help transform a trainee’s personal quality of life.
10. Improved Lifestyle
CrossFit encourages people to invest more in health and fitness. The sooner trainees see the effect, the more they want to eat and drink healthy, consequently trading their junk snacks for something real and whole.
Have you tried — or do you plan to try — Crossfit?
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