Is CrossFit for Me?

“Is CrossFit for me?” CrossFit coaches, sports coaches, personal trainers, and current members of the CrossFit community are often asked this question.

CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman answered it best: “CrossFit is not for everyone, but it is for anyone.” So, is CrossFit for you?

Maybe.

We’ll dig into that, but first, let’s start with what CrossFit is.

Put simply: CrossFit is the most effective way to improve your fitness.

We define fitness as your work capacity across broad time and modal domains. By “work capacity,” we mean your ability to move your body weight or external loads over time. By “broad time,” we mean workouts should span a variety of timeframes, from sprints to more extended endurance efforts. And by “broad modal domains,” we mean workouts should involve various functional movements, from running to lifting weights to gymnastics.

In CrossFit, our workouts are constantly varied because life demands well-rounded fitness. We don’t just want to equip you to be strong or fast or to have good endurance. We want you to develop in all those areas and more. Plus, the variation in our workouts keeps them interesting. You’ll never be bored, because there are always new ways to challenge yourself and keep improving.

Additionally, one of the things that makes CrossFit CrossFit is that everything is measurable. This measurability is crucial, as it allows you to track your progress and make sure your training is working. It also allows you to set specific goals and fosters accountability toward those goals. You can test and retest your performance across different benchmark workouts over time to check your progress.

In an effort to put it in even simpler, more actionable terms, Glassman explained how you achieve world-class fitness in 100 words:

As you can see, nothing in those instructions for achieving world-class fitness renders any group or individual incapable of doing CrossFit. This is a place where everyone is welcome, regardless of their fitness level, age, or physical ability.

“Anyone” may include individuals who:

• Are out of shape
• Are in the best shape of their lives
• Have never worked out before
• Have spent their lives working out
• Have chronic injuries
• Have no injuries
• Are very young, very old, and every age in between
• Have physical disabilities
• Are short, tall, small, medium, large, etc.

Anyone can do it because one of CrossFit’s most empowering aspects is its infinite scalability. You control your fitness journey, and your highly skilled and highly trained CrossFit coach is always there as your ally to help guide your journey and intensity so you have the most beneficial experience.

For example, here’s what you’ll likely see when you step into most CrossFit gyms:

• A former collegiate athlete going for a personal record
• A 93-year-old who believes it’s never too late to be fit
• A “CrossFit kid” preparing for life
• Someone who’s six months pregnant and wants to stay strong and fit throughout her pregnancy
• Someone with young-onset Parkinson’s disease trying to minimize her symptoms
• A paraplegic athlete achieving her next big goal
• An elite athlete pursuing excellence in their sport
• A military veteran healing from combat and honoring those who serve
• Everyone in between

Each CrossFit athlete is unique. They may lift different weights, run different distances, or substitute various movements, but this individualized approach is the essence of CrossFit’s adaptability and inclusivity, making it a fitness program that can be tailored to your specific needs and goals.

Rest assured, what you won’t see in a well-run CrossFit gym are people who are in over their heads, are forced to lift more weight than they should, or who prioritize load over technique. CrossFit is about safe and effective training under the guidance of professional coaches. Contrary to what is often portrayed in the media and on social media, CrossFit is not about pushing people beyond their limits or causing unnecessary pain or injury. It’s about individual progress, community support, and overall health and fitness. This is the reality of CrossFit.

That said, there are some people for whom CrossFit is not a good fit.

CrossFit is not for people who:

• Don’t want to work hard
• Prefer low-intensity workouts that confer fewer fitness benefits
• Don’t like tracking scores or assessing progress
• Don’t want to learn how to do a wide variety of different movements well
• Don’t like to stretch themselves, physically and mentally
• Prioritize sport-specific specialization over general physical preparedness (GPP)
• Aren’t coachable and can’t leave their ego at the door

If you resonate with most of the items on that list, CrossFit may not be the best fit for you. However, if those items don’t describe you or you’re open to trying something new to improve your health and fitness, here are a few compelling reasons to try CrossFit.

You want protection against the ravages of time and disease.

Seventy percent of deaths in the U.S. are attributed to chronic disease, including obesity, coronary heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke, some cancers, Alzheimer’s, peripheral artery disease, advanced biological aging, drug addiction, and others. Medicine is not the most effective or safest way to treat chronic disease. The doctor may give you a drug or perform a procedure to bring you back to a better level, but this doesn’t address the root cause of a health issue that is likely related to lifestyle.

Improving lifestyle factors is the best strategy for reversing chronic disease or significantly reducing your risk of these diseases. CrossFit’s prescription of constantly varied, functional movements executed at relatively high intensity, alongside our dietary recommendations, provides the best means possible to reverse or avoid issues associated with chronic diseases.

View sessions from our 2023 Health Summit to learn more about how CrossFit cures chronic disease.

You want to be coached by professionals

Anyone who has experienced exceptional coaching in any sport knows the interaction can feel almost magical. The coach has an uncanny ability to say the right thing at the right moment. You feel challenged and supported, and you feel in the coach’s ability to help you reach your objectives. Although great coaching may appear effortless, it’s actually the result of a combination of skills, attributes, experiences, and techniques.

Coaching is fundamentally about fostering change. Outstanding coaches achieve remarkable results partly through their actions with athletes in the gym: teaching movements, spotting errors, providing corrective cues, and motivating athletes to progress. These essential elements of effecting change are often absent when observing a session led by a less proficient coach, and it’s why CrossFit coaches undergo rigorous and regular education and mentorship around the CrossFit methodology and the value of coaching virtuosity.

While technically, CrossFit is free to ANYONE who wants to learn and practice the methodology, getting coached by a committed and professional CrossFit coach is the best way to reach your goals safely and efficiently.

Your time is precious, and you want the biggest bang for your buck

If you have one hour a day and want to use it to get in the best shape of your life, CrossFit is the way to do it. In a one-hour class, you get a warm-up, a workout lasting from 3 to 50-plus minutes, and a cool-down. And if you are consistently training three to five days per week, you can get everything you need regarding your cardio (what we call metabolic conditioning), mobility and gymnastics, and weightlifting in just one hour a day. Intensity over volume and variety over specialization are why CrossFit works and why people stick with it.

You want to challenge yourself physically and mentally every day

Part of what makes CrossFit CrossFit is that time, weight, distance, and repetitions are meticulously tracked for every workout. Every Workout of the Day (WOD) begins with a talk at the whiteboard where the coach describes the workout, prescribed weights, and time domain, and each workout ends back at the whiteboard, where each person’s scores are written down.

While some don’t love sharing their scores publicly, tracking scores is part of CrossFit’s culture for two reasons: 1) It promotes accountability, intensity, and community, and 2) When athletes know their scores will be recorded, they’ll work harder, hit their edge more often, and get better results.

Even for people who are only trying to beat yesterday’s version of themselves, tracking demands a commitment to working your physical weaknesses and mindset muscles daily.

“The methodology that drives CrossFit is entirely empirical. We believe that meaningful statements about safety, efficacy, and efficiency, the three most important and independent facets of any fitness program, can be supported only by measurable, observable, repeatable facts; i.e., data. We call this approach ‘evidence-based fitness.’” —CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman

You want to feel like an athlete again

Nearly 75% of the people who do CrossFit worldwide are over age 25. That means 75% of CrossFit practitioners are no longer involved in high school and college sports, and many don’t have anywhere else in their lives where they get to feel like an athlete. However, CrossFit gyms are places where everyone feels like an athlete — we call everyone who regularly engages in CrossFit training an athlete. Some aim to be the best athlete in their gym; some just like feeling more athletic than they did yesterday. All are welcome.

You want to look and feel better

When you ask someone who does CrossFit how it makes them feel, you’ll hear words like strong, powerful, capable, confident, healthy, and fit. If you press them a little more, you’ll hear that since they started doing CrossFit, they eat and sleep better, have more fun being active with friends and family members outside the gym, have more energy, are doing better at work, have better relationships, get sick less often, take fewer trips to the doctor, have improved health markers like blood pressure and body fat, experience fewer injuries, and feel more connected to their communities. Walk into a local affiliate today to see for yourself.

You crave variety

CrossFit is about constantly varied training, meaning whenever you walk into the gym or view a workout on our site, you will likely see movement combinations, loads, and time domains you haven’t seen before. One day, you may repeat two quick movements over and over for 6 minutes. Another day, you might do six slow and heavy movements that take 38 minutes to complete. Whether focusing on endurance and stamina, strength and speed, coordination and flexibility, or balance and accuracy, you will adapt to such a diverse program because it’s broad and ignores no aspect of fitness.

You enjoy being part of a community

Many people walk into a CrossFit gym thinking they’ll just get a great workout but end up with so much more. According to Chief Brand Officer for CrossFit and long-time CrossFit athlete Nicole Carroll, “It may seem counterintuitive, but I believe our rigorous standards create the belonging, camaraderie, and sense of shared triumph CrossFit is known for. When you push yourself to your limit, when you work right at your edge, it isn’t always pretty. Your tidy, protective layers go out the window. You let people see who you really are. This is true vulnerability, raw and real. … Sometimes you look like a badass, sometimes you’re a crying mess. But no matter how hard you struggle, we won’t let you give up on yourself. ” 

While CrossFit didn’t set out to create a community, it was inevitable. When you bring together people who work hard, want to be held accountable, and celebrate every type of person, body, and ability in the gym, a strong community would naturally develop. Ask many who have been going to a gym for a long time, and you’ll hear that the friends they’ve made make it easy to show up and get after it, even on those days when they don’t feel like it.

All that said, you’ll only truly know if CrossFit is for you if you walk into a gym and take a class.

Over the past two decades, we’ve heard from many people who’ve said they wish they’d started sooner. And they wish they’d known long ago that CrossFit was “the missing puzzle piece” that  would improve every aspect of their lives and health.

You deserve to start experiencing those benefits for yourself.