Crossfit is a controversial word in the world of fitness and muscle building. While many people absolutely love crossfit and swear by it as the ‘holy grail’ of training (actually getting pretty evangelical about it even), others treat it with distrust at best and disdain at worst.
The controversy comes from the fact that you need hardly any formalised training in order to open up a crossfit gym. That’s as alarming as it sounds – it means you can end up getting coached through some pretty intense and dangerous movements by someone who doesn’t technically have any real idea of what they’re doing. That, and the culture surrounding crossfit is known for pushing people hard and possibly a bit too far, too fast in some cases. Specifically it has a nasty habit of training people to exhaustion with something like burpees, then getting them to pump out huge numbers of repetitions of compound moves like deadlifts or clean and snatches. Fatigued erector spinae + lots of moves not designed to be used for endurance training = problems. The net result? Lots of injuries.
Crossfit’s Saving Graces
But this doesn’t really reflect on the general principle of crossfit. In other words, it doesn’t mean that crossfit can’t be an effective way to train, provided that you find a good club and you are careful and sensible in the way you progress.
And actually there are a lot of good things you can say about crossfit too. For instance it elects to focus not on just one ‘aspect’ of fitness like many other activities (such as running or strength training) but rather encourages its athletes to try and focus on all things at once: cardio, strength, endurance, flexibility, speed etc.
And the workouts are super intense. Combining cardio with resistance training is actually one of the very best ways to ensure that you burn fat and that you maintain muscle, while the compound nature of many of the exercises ensures a good hormonal response and a very quickly effective form of training.
How to Train Crossfit Style at Home
The good news though is that you can get all the benefits of crossfit style training without having to sign up to class, or to put yourself at any risk – you just need to adapt the core principles of crossfit into a home workout (while leaving out the not-so good bits).
First then let’s have a look at what some of the key ideas behind a crossfit workout should be. I asked a close friend who has been doing crossfit for a number of years now and he told me that the main principles were:
- To keep mixing up the training with new and different routines
- To aim for functional strength with an emphasis on compound movements, speed, power and flexibility
- To ensure you maintain a high intensity throughout all workouts
- To combine endurance with resistance
- To take a competitive attitude and constantly push yourself
To this end, many crossfit workouts consist of ‘circuit’ type workouts, supersets and other variations on the idea. In other words you will constantly be swapping between exercises with no rest, normally under timed conditions while trying to see how many repetitions you can pump out. Typically this might mean swapping between two or three different full-body exercises (though there may be emphasis on a particular muscle group, ala bodybuilding) and pumping out sets of 8-10 with no rest for a continuous 7 minutes. It’s intense.
This is something you can obviously emulate at home if you like. For instance you could do burpees, pull ups and hand stand push ups and repeat for seven minutes and see if you can keep beating your last score. Alternatively you could do something like dumbbell clean and snatches with burpees and dips. Combine two or three exercises that target the right muscles and that you think will get your heart pumping then see how many you can do in a set time frame. You’ll burn a ton of fat and bring out some ripped and lean looking muscle in the process. Compete with yourself, but remember as well that variation is one of the key principles, so keep introducing new ideas and varying the sequence.
Equipment and Exercises
The main piece of equipment you’ll be missing if you train crossfit at home is the barbell which crossfitters use for moves like the aforementioned clean-and-snatch or deadlift. This is actually no bad thing as without these powerlifting moves you’ll be putting yourself at far less risk of injury. Do be careful with the dumbbells when squatting and snatching though and listen to your body. Beginners are probably better off focussing on bodyweight moves and more isolated moves to begin with to develop some basic strength and endurance.
That said there are some other pieces of equipment that are quite key to crossfit, but you can get quite a lot of these at home. For instance the pull up bar is pretty essential and can be used to perform what are known as ‘kipping pull ups’. These are pull ups where you swing your legs slightly in order to generate momentum and explode yourself over the bar. It’s a more cardio intensive version of the exercise although it makes life a little easier for the target muscle groups. You can use this exercise on a standard pull up bar in your home (about $10 and will fit in a doorframe).
Another popular piece of equipment among crossfitters is gymnastic rings. These are rings that will hang from a pull up bar or any mounting point normally, and which can then subsequently be used to perform a range of bodyweight exercises such as neutral grip pull ups, dips, suspension press ups and muscle ups. Again, these can be bought very cheaply to be incorporated into a home crossfit workout. Likewise similar purchases that you can make to increase the variation in your workouts while also training resistance and endurance at the same time might include punching bags, battle ropes and medicine balls. None of these things are particularly expensive, but all of them will keep your workouts intense and varied which is what will give you all the benefits that get associated with crossfit right in the comfort of your home.