Combat, survival, many sports, and activities of daily life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist. The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any individual committed to lifelong fitness regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs. At CrossFit, we work exclusively with compound movements and shorter, high-intensity cardiovascular sessions. Instead of lateral raises, we do push-presses. Instead of curls, we do pull-ups. No leg extensions, we do squats. Why do we do this? Because compound or functional movements and high intensity or anaerobic cardio is radically more effective at eliciting nearly any desired fitness result. We do things in an endless variety of drills. Jumping, medicine ball throws and catches, pull-ups, dips, push-ups, handstands, presses to handstand, kips, cartwheels, muscle-ups, sit-ups, scales, holds, the clean & jerk, sn**ch, squat, deadlift, push-press, bench-press, and power-clean. We make regular use of running and rowing machines, Olympic weight sets, rings, parallel bars, free exercise mat, horizontal bar, plyometric boxes, medicine balls, and jump ropes. There isn’t a strength and conditioning program anywhere that works with a greater diversity of tools, modalities, and drills.
