I’d had a niggling injury that had prevented me from running. It was a flare up of my tendonitis that I’d had at the back of my right knee following the saddle height adjustment on my bike. I was struggling to get it right even after numerous trips to the physiotherapist.
The guy that I had seen about it had tried a number of different approaches including massage, ultrasound and acupuncture. The trips to see him in his little clinic in Lichfield were always quite amusing (in spite of the pain he was often inflicting on me). He was clearly one of those guys that was in competition with his older brother. He was obviously successful in his own way but his brother had a huge private physiotherapy clinic in Birmingham, clients that included Olympic athletes and had competed for Great Britain athletics at the Moscow Olympics. Quite a large thing to try and emulate, but difficult to live up to. He had me in stitches most of the time as he went through his life story. Really nice guy and a great story teller.
As I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do fitness wise, my mate Rosie suggested I give Crossfit a go. I must admit I’d never heard of it but Rosie seemed to think it would be right up my street as it incorporated a number of different sports and involved quite intensive physical exercise. Sounded good to me so I looked online to find more about it. It turned out that there was a Crossfit Centre very close to my office on Loughborough, and also not far from I was now living in the nearby village of Quorn. I found the contact details of the guy running it and he suggested I come down to have a look at the facilties. So I did.
The centre was set up on an industrial site in a warehouse unit. I met up with the owner and he explained a bit about what Crossfit was all about as well as showing me around the facility. He explained that Crossfit was about high intensity fitness using a variety of different sports and workouts. He used the term WODs which were ‘Workouts of the Day’. These were a set of exercises which changed regularly and incorporated a number of elements which were a combination of aerobic, anaerobic and weight training.
The equipment that he had in the facility covered this wide variety of exercise including free weights, pull up bars, medicine balls, kettle bells and a rowing machine as well as other stuff. He also explained that Crossfit had its own tournaments, so there was a heavy competition element to it as well. This was all new to me, and made it more appealing than just getting fit for the sake of it.
I’ve been a member of a number of gyms through the years but I struggle with the concept of just doing weights or indoor exercise with no goal. That just doesn’t motivate me. I need something to aim at so the exercise has some kind of purpose, whether it’s a 10k running race or something else.
While I was at school a few of us in the rugby team used to go down to the gym at the local leisure centre to do some extra fitness work as well as some weights. Mainly it was low weights but high reps, just to help with conditioning and in line with our training programme, so it made sense.
Whilst we were in there we used to see three older guys come in to do their own weights session. They strolled in in their gym vests and long hair, and made a beeline for the bench press. Before getting started they would walk around the gym slapping their arms and psyching themselves up. Then one of them would jump on to the bench press whilst the other two would stand at either end to help if they were struggling with the weight. After much puffing and panting from the guy about to start lifting the weights, the real performance would begin. The guy lifting would start wailing like a banshee as he pushed the weight up off his chest whilst the other two screamed encouragement like some possessed chimps. It was hilarious. Once one was done, they swapped over and the next one would go through the same routine after high fiving each other and telling each other how awesome they were. We christened them the ‘Pump it up brothers’ and it became a bit of a highlight to our sessions.
Back to Crossfit. After the introductory session I decided to give it a go so I signed up to the induction programme. Any newcomers weren’t allowed to use the equipment or join in the workout sessions without doing this. It involved four separate lessons which the centre owner ran. He was quite a character. He was very sociable and was really friendly to everyone down there. He was also clearly a full on Crossfit ambassador and very thorough in his induction programme. I was in a group with five other newbies and we went through an introduction to all of the various bits of equipment and exercises before we finished with a thirty minute WOD.
It was actually useful to get some proper coaching on weight lifting techniques as I’d never really had any up until that point. I’d done some basic weight stuff at rowing, but here we were learning about dead lifts, clean and jerks etc where good technique was important to avoid injury. I’d also never used kettle bells before and these seemed to feature quite prominently in the WODs along with pull ups. The facility had a metal frame at the back that you could do various exercises on including pull up work with rubber bands. These seemed to be a particular favourite of the owner who seemed to be able to do endless reps of these, he was on it all the time. He was a very strong guy which wasn’t surprising given his devotion to it. I think he did two or three workouts a day which was clearly paying off for him.
The bit I enjoyed the most though was the WOD at the end. This could be a combination of anything but generally involved kettle bells, pull ups and weights as a core element plus a variety of other things. Apparently this mirrored the format of the Crossfit tournaments. The combination of exercise was different each time so the outcome was dependent on the strengths and preferences of those taking part. The WODs were pretty exhausting due to the high intensity nature of them and rep element. The winner of the WOD was the one that completed it in the fastest time, so a pretty simple format. I definitely felt I was getting a good workout each time.
Once you’d completed the induction programme you were then free to sign up to the classes to join in on the WOD session or could also come down and use the equipment. I went down a few times after completing the classes and did enjoy it. However, I couldn’t really get in to the whole philosophy of it the way the hardcore members did. You could see there was good banter between them and they really had a competitive thing around winning the WODs. They would talk about some of the Crossfit stars and point the rest of us to You Tube clips of them in competition. But for me it just didn’t hit the mark. I had no interest in competing in a tournament, possibly because it was so niche and a bit random. I think you had to really buy in to the concept of this as a sport, and I didn’t. It definitely wasn’t in ‘the pump it up brothers’ league but it had that gym bunny feel to it that I couldn’t relate to.
So worth a try and served a purpose for a very short time but I needed to get back to racing in more conventional sports that had a wider appeal.