Crossfit Quotes

What the hell. Is this a new phase in your Crossfit indoctrination, walking around with raw root vegetables?”  “Beta carotene, motherfucker. Antioxidants. I’m helping my body eliminate free radicals.”  “Take a vitamin. You look like a douche.

There were, sadly, some things that were just impossible to explain, like the plot of Inception and CrossFit.

What the hell. Is this a new phase in your Crossfit indoctrination, walking around with raw root vegetables?”  “Beta carotene, motherfucker. Antioxidants. I’m helping my body eliminate free radicals.

~Have NO fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with YOU, therefore NO harm can befall YOU; all is very, very well. Do this in complete faith and confidence~

Over time, our beliefs begin to blend into our identity. Your belief in CrossFit makes you a CrossFitter, your belief in climate change makes you an environmentalist, and your belief in primal eating makes you paleo. When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity—which is why disagreements often turn into existential death matches.

Form and technique first, reps and weight second.

You can only regret something and truly call it a mistake if you don't learn and grow from it.

You're never going to do something by accident. You have to believe in yourself to want to become something.

With how busy she is with CrossFit, her book club, and the stained-glass class she’s started taking, we’ve started opting for more, quicker calls these days, rather than twice-a-month hours-long catch-ups.

CrossFit firebreather eventually discovers: the chief competitive advantage in this sport is the ability to endure discomfort. The willingness to sacrifice comfort is what makes all the other gains possible.

Oh, fuck, I've just proved that I really am a fruit and nut from California. I'll just show you to the New Age bookstore down the street and get you some organic cold-pressed green juice and a CrossFit session before you have your reading with the psychic.

Create strength so you don't need support. Don't use support so you can become strong.

Successful people have three related abilities in great abundance – the ability to work hard, the desire to do it, and the commitment to follow through on it.

Perfect never gets the opportunity to become better.

At the end of the day, only you know how hard you worked. Make sure you gave it your best.

Being a champion is not about holding your hand in the air and accepting a medal, it's about the way you carry yourself every second of every day.

~In motivating people, YOU've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example - and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved~

The thing you dread should be your first priority. Because if you’re not willing to find the chink in your armor, the Hopper, the Unknown and Unknowable, the randomness of life, will find it for you.

Hero WODs are meant to take an athlete outside himself. They’re supposed to put you in the Hurt Locker. They put you on the ground. You feel like you’re about to die. Then you get up, and remember some incredibly strong, brave young guy who didn’t.

Pentecostals, who promoted fitness as an overtly religious purification process. To them, idleness and gluttony were offenses punishable by God, while disciplining the flesh through grueling strength training and fasting was a sign of virtue. For them, lazing around the house while eating junk food was not a metaphorical sin, but a literal one. By contrast, some churches nowadays actively condemn modern gym culture as an overcelebration of the self as opposed to God. “CrossFit is not like church; it is more like the hospital, or even the morgue,” critiqued a Virginia-based Episcopal priest

Inside of me there are two dogs. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.” —CHEROKEE STORY OF “TWO WOLVES

The fifth reason that explains why CrossFit fails is that an immense of people gets injured from CrossFit, because the trainers lack knowledge on injury prevention.  A CrossFit trainer does not necessarily mean that they are an actual “certified personal trainer” who is trained the nutritional, training, and the injury prevention aspects of an accredited personal training educational program. 

Painstorm XXIV Run 100m 50 burpees Run 200m 100 pushups Run 300m 150 walking lunges Run 400m 200 squats Run 300m 150 walking lunges Run 200m 100 pushups Run 100m 50 burpees

Instead of 'I'm the king of the world if I win, and a failure if I lose,' and the crushing pressure that entails, the spiritually rewired athlete's internal logic is this: I'm a child of God; that's my primary identity. God loves me regardless of what happens in this competition. God has given me these talents, these amazing gifts, and it's my responsibility to use them as best I can, to perform and succeed to the utmost of my ability. But it's not for personal glory, or to feed my towering ego. Rather, every burst of speed and power is a testament to higher power whose love transcends any kind of earthly success. The competitive results are not part of that higher reality. But the effort is.

There’s surely a period where your body needs protein to repair and build after a muscle-straining workout, particularly something like a max session in the weight room, a CrossFit WOD (workout of the day), or a high-intensity interval session. But it’s not so much an anabolic window, Schoenfeld says, “it’s an anabolic barn door.” As long as you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it’s almost impossible not to get through.

Not with a man who looks like he invented Cross-Fit.

„Żyjąc w coraz bardziej sterylnej rzeczywistości, unikamy cierpienia i bólu. Zapominamy o tym, że i jedno, i drugie jest integralną częścią naszego życia i postępu. Crosfit wprowadza te uczucia do naszego sownika.

Jeśli chcesz osiągnąć doskonałe wyniki, potrzebujesz doskonałego paliwa. Nie możesz tak po prostu nasikać do baku.

Każdy element tego treningu opierał się na ćwiczeniach wielostawowych wykonywane w większej liczbie powtórzeń zapewniają ci niepowtarzalne uczucie, jakby ktoś zmienił ci serce na wibrującą ubijaczkę do jaj.

CrossFit Games athletes are renowned for their ability to suffer, but this event tested everyone’s limits of endurance, stamina, fortitude, and pain tolerance.

Failure has been the key ingredient to my success in sports and in life. Had I not known failure, I would have continued to accept “good enough.” I might be a mediocre lawyer or athlete. Instead, I’m a two-time CrossFit Games champion.

I was ready to invest everything I had into being a better coach at the exact same moment that she was ready to invest everything she had into being a better athlete. We began this journey together, at the same starting point. Our partnership has always been on equal footing; we figure things out together, test and tweak them together, and get better together.

The CrossFit community celebrates strong women and powerful performances, helping to reinforce a new paradigm in which being a strong woman is inspiring and impressive. It’s become popular to be capable in your own body.

Despite the CrossFit craze sweeping the nation, those of us who walk a few miles a day are as active as our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Barre is results-driven and appearance-based—it’s got the cultishness of CrossFit or a boot-camp class, but with looks, not strength, as its primary goal. It’s not a pastime, like going to a dance class or taking a lap swim, because the fun you are pursuing mostly comes after the class and not within it. In barre class, I often feel like my body is a race car that I’m servicing dispassionately in the pit—tuning up arms and then legs and then butt and then abs, and then there’s a quick stretch and I’m back on the track, zooming.

Faith doesn’t work by formula, so we are not going to either. Faith, as much as it pains me to say so, is not CrossFit, because God, I think it’s safe to say, doesn’t do burpees. And also doesn’t boss us around. Which means I cannot dictate your core movements. This is another reason we are going to be guided by a spider’s web: No two are alike. Each is a custom design reflecting not only the species of spider but also the environment in which the spider finds itself.

Sealfit and other NFF phenomena like obstacle races and CrossFit ask us to accept, even embrace, difficulty; to overcome the seemingly impossible and in so doing overcome the selves that we are today.

The point is, there are no definitively good or bad things that happen in life. Not everything that looks like progress necessarily is. Not everything that looks like tragedy necessarily is. Only time will tell whether something falls into one category or the other. Time ... and your attitude. The way I see it, you have two choices when you're in the dirt. You can roll over and die. Or you can dig in and grow. The choice is yours.

I compete in a sport that requires its athletes to develop three different physical abilities. The first one, which we call engine, grows the fastest. The second one, skills, is a catch-all for gymnastics movements, which take longer to master. Strength, the third one, is a lifelong project, by far the slowest and most time-consuming physical ability to build.

For a man who sells insurance, he is obscenely fit. Like cut triceps and flexing shoulders and hands that look like they do a lot more than tap at a keyboard. He must do CrossFit after working hours. Otherwise he’s very naturally gifted. This is healthy, right? Noticing men and their attributes?

Neither the past nor the future is in our control, so if that’s where your attention is, you are diluting what you’re capable of right now.

The way I see it, you have two choices when you’re in the dirt. You can roll over and die. Or you can dig in and grow. The choice is yours.

I felt like when I really pushed it, I was getting closer to God, that I was getting closer to spirit. The harder I went, the faster I got, the stronger I became, I just felt like every time, it was closer and closer to a place of stillness and truth and spirit.…

They both had backgrounds in science, and enjoyed similar pastimes such as cycling and CrossFit.

One of the truisms of CrossFit is that you should do the thing you hate most, because it’s only in mastery that the hate will dissipate.

On the other side of the mental noise and shock and fear of failure that makes you want to cry is a place where your heartbeat is still pounding, but more slowly. Adrenaline flows. But the fear is gone, because you know you are exactly where you are meant to be.

The ritual genius of a CrossFit WOD gives both kinds of people exactly what they want, swirled into its opposite. The hero is also the dragon.

There was something about CrossFit that was so harmonic with the ethos of Semper Fi. CrossFit demands courage and an appetite for discomfort. It presses the whole person, mind, body, and spirit, against the whetstone of strain and fatigue, and people must choose to stay there until they are sharp. It changes people. It alters their identities, and binds them.

The physical process of growth bathes young bodies in the elixir of quick recovery: the more you burn now, the more you will be able to burn tomorrow. That is what the prime of life feels like, in the rhythm of girls’ feet tearing together down a track, and the arcs and leaps of movement, in training and competition.

I had heard rumors from several people that CrossFit was cult-like and all-consuming, and that it pushed people so hard they injured themselves.

And like the kids who’d taught Greg Glassman how to do gymnastics in the park, they were one another’s teachers. “Coach believed that the moment you learned something, you had the responsibility to teach it,” Amundson recalled in an account of CrossFit’s founding days.7 “Everyone at CrossFit Santa Cruz learned the intricacies of the foundational movements, with the expectation they would teach the skills to others.

You can’t get better without sacrifice. It requires a tolerance to discomfort.

WOD 1 mile time trial Rest 2:00 2x400m at time trial pace, rest 1:00 in between

100 squats 50 ring dips 30 L-pullups   3 rounds of: 100 squats 20 ring pushups 12 pullups   5 rounds of: 50 squats 15 ring pushups   10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 pullups ring pushups

About a year before, Kitty and Lydia had embraced CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast.

What a person wants should be so solidly conceived and constructed in his mind that it seems to have already happened in the past. This twist in tense, changing a wish into a memory, He says, is the way to get things done,

Like most of the special operations community, their physical training centered on useful strength, cardiovascular endurance, and durability, which, as both of them were pushing age forty, was increasingly important. Looking like a steroid-fueled bodybuilder was not part of the equation and was a liability in terms of both physical performance and blending into civilian populations. Their workouts pulled elements from various coaches and training programs, including CrossFit, Gym Jones, and StrongFirst. The idea wasn’t to be able to compete with endurance athletes, power lifters, or alpinists, but to achieve a broad-based level of fitness that would allow them to perform well in each of those areas. After a series of warm-up exercises that most would consider a serious workout, they completed the strength and endurance Hero WOD “Murph,” named in honor of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Mike Murphy. Wearing their body armor, they started with one hundred burpees followed by four one-hundred-yard buddy carries. Then it was right into a two-mile run, one hundred pull-ups, two hundred push-ups, three hundred air squats, followed by another two-mile run. Both men powered through, thinking of the scores of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who didn’t make it home.

He does CrossFit; I . . . get cross when people tell me to get fit.

In my fourth year as a Games athlete, I had finally stockpiled enough wisdom and experience to keep a cool head in the midst of Dave’s mental assault.

Odyssey Planning 101 Create three alternative versions of the next five years of your life. Each one must include: 1. A visual/graphical timeline. Include personal and noncareer events as well—do you want to be married, train to win the CrossFit Games, or learn how to bend spoons with your mind? 2. A title for each option in the form of a six-word headline describing the essence of this alternative. 3. Questions that this alternative is asking—preferably two or three. A good designer asks questions to test assumptions and reveal new insights. In each potential timeline, you will investigate different possibilities and learn different things about yourself and the world. What kinds of things will you want to test and explore in each alternative version of your life? 4. A dashboard where you can gauge a. Resources (Do you have the objective resources—time, money, skill, contacts—you need to pull off your plan?) b. Likability (Are you hot or cold or warm about your plan?) c. Confidence (Are you feeling full of confidence, or pretty uncertain about pulling this off?) d. Coherence (Does the plan make sense within itself? And is it consistent with you, your Workview, and your Lifeview?) • Possible considerations ° Geography—where will you live? ° What experience/learning will you gain? ° What are the impacts/results of choosing this alternative? ° What will life look like? What particular role, industry, or company do you see yourself in? • Other ideas ° Do keep in mind things other than career and money. Even though those things are important, if not central, to the decisive direction of your next few years, there are other critical elements that you want to pay attention to. ° Any of the considerations listed above can be a springboard for forming your alternative lives for the next five years. If you find yourself stuck, try making a mind map out of any of the design considerations listed above. Don’t overthink this exercise, and don’t skip it.

Like most of the special operations community, their physical training centered on useful strength, cardiovascular endurance, and durability, which, as both of them were pushing age forty, was increasingly important. Looking like a steroid-fueled bodybuilder was not part of the equation and was a liability in terms of both physical performance and blending into civilian populations. Their workouts pulled elements from various coaches and training programs, including CrossFit, Gym Jones, and StrongFirst.

Air bikes are a popular piece of fitness equipment, especially among air bike crossfit An air bike is a combination of a traditional exercise cycle and an elliptical machine. With an air bike, you can work out both your shoulders while increasing your pulse rate.

CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast.

If you have ultimate belief in something, you have higher purpose. If you have higher purpose, you are able to accomplish amazing things. It’s

Back at Tennessee Tech, Rich was working as Chip Pugh’s graduate assistant. He trained athletes in the morning. Then he’d hit a strength WOD in the college weight room. After that, he cracked open the Bible and read his way through the New Testament, chapter by chapter, in the weight room. Every so often, he’d poke his head into Pugh’s office and ask a question about what he’d just read, if something didn’t match what he’d heard or needed to be unpacked. He wasn’t interested in going to church or participating in any organized religion. “He was trying to get away from that,” says Pugh, reprising his role as weight-room minister. “He was searching for the truth, not what someone else thinks.

People are confounded when a football player puts Bible verses in his eye black or kneels to pray in the end zone. To non-believers, it seems like a kind of spiritual flamboyance or pushy proselytizing when athletes publicly acknowledge God as the central pillar of their game plan. What these spectators rarely consider is why this spiritual orientation is so effective, on and off the field—why it works, and feeds on itself. Instead of “I’m the king of the world if I win, and a failure if I lose,” and the crushing pressure that entails, the spiritually rewired athlete’s internal logic is this: I’m a child of God; that’s my primary identity. God loves me regardless of what happens in this competition. God has given me these talents, these amazing gifts, and it’s my responsibility to use them as best I can, to perform and succeed to the utmost of my ability. But it’s not for personal glory, or to feed my towering ego. Rather, every burst of speed and power is a testament to a higher power whose love transcends any kind of earthly success. The competitive results are not part of that higher reality. But the effort is. The leap toward perfection of effort, a kinetic hymn, is a connection to God. It’s sacred, the way prayer is sacred. And at the same time it is exquisitely concrete. It has mass, speed, position, trajectory, in the now of a throw or a catch or a weight that needs to be lifted. It’s where physics meets the soul. This transcendent frame of reference doesn’t take away competitive pressure. But it takes away the emotional pressure that degrades performance and locks an athlete up. Faith eliminates a lot of psychic gear grinding and inefficiency. For a well-prepared, well-trained athlete, it’s a winning formula. And it was a winning formula for Rich Froning in July 2011.

As Henniger conducts a tour of his factory, he brims with pride. He points to the ventilation system that sucks air from fourteen welding tables through tuba-size funnels into a series of Willy Wonka pipes overhead. “Most welding shops are dirty,” he says. “Ours isn’t. I put in a whole system to pull out the dust so these guys have clean air to breathe.” He leans over and sweeps his index finger across the floor. It comes up spotless. Henniger smiles, and casts his gaze across a continent of polished concrete. “You can see it shining,” he says. “We have a Zamboni going around the floor all day.” One can only imagine what kind of Christmas morning moment must it be for a thirty-something guy to take delivery of his own Zamboni.

Each of the factory’s welding stations can make any piece of equipment Rogue manufactures. “We don’t have single-purpose machines where the guy pushes the green button,” Henniger brags. “There’s five hundred jobs you can put on these tables.” On the welding floor, no one works on one kind of job for more than half a day before switching to a batch of something different. If you don’t vary the task, he says, “you wear people out.

As Greg Amundson observed in the early days, it’s not so easy to distinguish between physical capacity and mental toughness. The ritual of movement executed at high intensity, the development of muscle memory, is a process of binding muscle fibers to neural circuitry. And differences in neural circuitry are reflected in, and caused by, cognitive changes—this is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety, depression, and addiction. In a physically intense, ritualized effort, it’s impossible to tell what is mind versus body versus spirit. When a gymnast vaults, or a sprinter rockets to the 100-meter mark, or a CrossFitter tackles “Fran” to the ground (or vice versa), these distinctions are not relevant, and perhaps they are not even real. They are real only for spectators.

The theory of sport-as-sacrifice, argued convincingly by University of Illinois classics professor David Sansone in a provocative monograph, Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport, is that human beings developed sacrifice as a cosmic pay-it-forward strategy: you give something up so that your people can have that same thing in the future. When this ritual developed among hunter-gatherers, it involved the sacrifice of a hunted animal, so that there would be more animals to hunt in the future. In this ritual, two things were sacrificed. One was the animal. The other was the energy of the hunt, because it took a lot of work to kill that animal and haul it back home. When hunter-gatherers became farmers, they kept the ritual of blood sacrifice. They had animals—cattle, sheep, and goats—at the ready. They didn’t have to hunt them. But the fullness of the ritual was defeated by this very convenience. “It is not only that the life of the beast must be ‘taken’ in order for the hunter to survive,” Sansone notes. “The hunter must give of his own energy in order to get.”2 It was at this point that athletics, things like footraces, became associated with religious festivals. The animal was sacrificed, and the race—the energy of the hunt—was laid down alongside it. The energy of the hunt, the element that was missing from the sacrifice of a domestic animal, morphed and evolved into athletic ritual.

It became sport, which is itself a form of sacrifice,” writes Sansone. “For only if sport is a form of sacrifice can we explain its ritual associations. There is no other plausible reason to account for the fact that the Hurons played a game of lacrosse in order to influence the weather for the benefit of their crops. It is only because they engaged in ritual sacrifice that natives of the Sudan hold wrestling matches at the time of sowing and harvesting. In Homer’s Iliad the hero Achilles honors the death of his companion Patroclus with an elaborate funeral that consists of various kinds of sacrifice: hair offering; holocausts of sheep and cattle; libations of oil, honey, and wine; slaughter of horses and dogs; human sacrifice and athletic contests.”3 Once the ritual expenditure of energy was decoupled from the hunt, it didn’t especially matter how that energy was squandered. The rules and forms could proliferate a thousand ways, to accommodate the terrain and the materials at hand. The rules and conventions could morph and become subject to contention, debate, wagering, and technical innovation

As rituals are drained of their intensity, their roots are buried in the sediment of years, centuries, even millennia. As the human movements that are meant to expend energy become easier, more comfortable, less intense—a leisurely tour through the Nautilus circuit, watching TV on the elliptical—sport becomes exercise. Without intensity, it’s not a ritual. It’s just a grind. Ritual becomes habit. The memory and meaning are lost. But the roots of the ritual are still alive. And when the habits, for some reason, are re-endowed with intensity, they become rituals again. Because the root of the ritual, sport as sacrifice, is still alive inside us, it feels like a memory of something. It is a new shoot from an old root that makes a Hero WOD come alive. It’s why, in a CrossFit box, you can be outrun or outlifted, but there’s no way to feel defeated unless you slack off. The visceral sense of sacrifice, of giving all of one’s energy up—underlies every WOD. Detonating all the fireworks means there will be more and bigger fireworks next time. Giving everything you have banishes regret.

Amundson’s let his hair and beard grow out. It gives him a bear-like, almost cuddly appearance, in contrast to the sharp, clean-shaven jaw and shaved head of his early photos. His times and weights have not devolved from youthful high-water marks—they’ve gotten better. He’s very conservative in his training, striving for tiny improvements at the margins. He gets to the box at five in the morning and leaves at nine at night. He spends the whole day interacting with athletes, setting goals, teaching private classes, or leading an advanced class where he works out as well.

A lot of the data in the athletes’ notebooks is quantifiable evidence of progress. But some of it, by design, is intangible. “What’s happening between the ears,” Amundson says, “in the heart and spirit of the athlete—it’s a combination of mind, body, and spirit. Everything is interwoven. The movements, we’ve been doing since the beginning of time. We’ve forgotten them, but our ancestors were deadlifting rocks to build homes. There is definitely something magical about intensity—pushing past your perceived limitations. It gives you a tangible reference point, and we judge ourselves from that new reference point forevermore. No pull-ups to five pull-ups becomes a reference point. The goal then is to continue to push those reference points in our lives further and further out into the horizon.

FRONING GOES TO THE 2011 GAMES WITH A BIBLE VERSE TATTOOED in Celtic letters along the right side of his torso: Galatians 6:14, a reminder not to boast about anything except God. Bible verses are scrawled on the tops of his shoes: Galatians 2:20 on the right and Matthew 27:27–56, about the crucifixion, on the left. It keeps him focused.

The sheer numbers associated with chronic disease, the magnitude of the medical and financial iceberg, make a mockery of this approach. The toll of the seven most common chronic diseases, in costs and lost productivity, was $4.2 trillion in the United States in 2012, up from $1.3 trillion in 2003.4 Chronic diseases account for more than 65% of corporate health-care costs. In a single year, there were almost 0.5 million new diabetes diagnoses for Americans ages twenty to forty-four, and 1 million new diabetics aged forty-five to sixty-five. Those are just the people who felt bad enough to see a doctor. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 79 million Americans are pre-diabetic, which means their bodies are teetering on the edge of a disease that leads to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, and limb amputations if it isn’t controlled.5 Those people can be pulled back from the brink to some kind of normal future if they decide to make some significant changes in their lives. Unfortunately, 65% of employers in a large 2011 survey cited the difficulty of motivating employees to change their behavior as their top health-care challenge.

Every athlete is required to keep a notebook and record all his workout results, but also responses to CrossFit Amundson’s Question of the Week. “We’re contemplating why we were brought to this earth,” Amundson says. “What are we here to do?” The questions are scrawled on the whiteboard before Monday’s workout. They’re all calls to action. “How can I contribute to the betterment of the world today?” “How can I be of service to other people?” “Who do I need to thank in my life today?” Athletes write in their notebooks. Sometimes they team up in groups of two or three to discuss their answers. Then they start the warm-up and the workout, which is probably some couplet, triplet, or chipper designed by the Glassmans and performed by the original firebreathers ten years before, to the day.

But pleas about cost savings don’t get people to change their behavior. Neither do voluntary assessments that are supposed to scare people straight. The people who’d be most scared don’t show up for the assessments, because they know the assessments will tell them things they don’t want to hear. And the people who show up, unless they’re told they’re going to keel over within a year, figure they can make marginal changes and be fine. It makes you wonder whether the conventional corporate drive toward “wellness” isn’t just ineffective, but also a huge missed opportunity. The reigning assumption in the world of HR managers, large insurers, and policy wonks is that changing behavior is hard, so people need to be nudged toward healthy behaviors by making that change seem easy and palatable. “Gamify” it. Give people points for reading informative online articles about nutrition. Count pedometer steps. Make the healthy choices seem just a little bit different than the choices that result in chronic disease. Make the change seem smaller, so that people can follow a bread crumb trail of small adjustments to a better life without really changing their perspective. There are a lot of snazzy mobile apps and candy-colored motivational posters that push this approach. There are a lot of single-serving snacks with low calorie counts, sold as healthier-but-you-wouldn’t-know-it. They’re packed with sugar, so they end up making people hungrier and fatter.

Perhaps it is the essence of any sport. If you peel away the modern mass-market spectacle that sport has become, and the history of sport, to its root—the genesis of sport—there’s ritual sacrifice. In the oldest chronicles of sport that we have, from ancient Greece, sport is sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of human energy. In the first Olympics, the ritual veneration of Zeus, the footrace began at the far end of the stadium. The athletes tore forward to a finish line at the footsteps up to the statue of their preeminent god. It was the winner who carried a torch to the top of the steps. At the altar, the torch was lowered to light a fire, not for the view of the crowd, but to consume the burnt offering of an animal. The champion himself was dedicated, although not literally sacrificed, to the god as well. His athletic performance was also an offering. It was energy, exertion, wattage, offered up alongside the animal. That athlete with the torch at the foot of the statue would recognize and understand what Rich Froning is doing in the arena in Carson, California.

As rituals are drained of their intensity, their roots are buried in the sediment of years, centuries, even millennia. As the human movements that are meant to expend energy become easier, more comfortable, less intense—a leisurely tour through the Nautilus circuit, watching TV on the elliptical—sport becomes exercise. Without intensity, it’s not a ritual. It’s just a grind. Ritual becomes habit. The memory and meaning are lost.

I still want the normal guy to be able to purchase our equipment. It shouldn’t be a $1,000 bar no one can afford. You should be able to buy it for your garage and have it last forever,” Henniger says. He lines up a series of what he calls “bad bars”—ranging from $200 to $1,200—alongside Rogue’s standard $290 barbell, and points out every flaw or evidence of sloppy construction in his competitors’ products. “If you put our bar against a $1,000 bar, our specs are as high as a $1,200 bar. It debunks the myth that you need to charge $1,200. I want a lot of people to have them.

When you see a Rogue bar next to a bunch of other bars, it stands out in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It projects an aura of quality. It makes bars costing twice as much look tinny. Part of this is the finish. Rogue has its raw steel cylinders ground and polished to a fine finish, so coatings don’t reveal any imperfections. They use more expensive coatings, higher-quality chrome and zinc that clads the steel in bright silver or all-business black. Rogue’s most expensive bars are coated with satin chrome, which is four times as expensive as any other coating. It has a matte finish that’s less forgiving of surface imperfections than a black or shiny surface treatment. Its velvety smooth sheen communicates the precision of its manufacturing, the same way a MacBook Pro does. Henniger claims it gives a lifter more feel on the bar.

The knurl-forming process, he says, “is the machining equivalent of magic.” The diamond pattern is produced by two knurling wheels that cut intersecting troughs in opposite directions. Each wheel is like a tractor plowing furrows in a farm field—when it moves to an adjacent strip of field, it needs to fall into the exact same groove in the area of overlap, or the tracking will be off. For that to happen on a knurling machine, the wheels have to match perfectly. A discrepancy of two-thousandths of an inch can create double-tracking, which compromises the grip value of the knurl. Knurling wheels sold as identical typically vary by five-thousandths of an inch.

There’s going to come a time,” he says, “when you start to miss. Here’s what you do: when a negative thought starts creeping into your head that you can’t do this, just stop, look around you at the crowd and all the energy coming at you. Soak that up and use that. There is no better venue to snatch a 70-pound dumbbell.” In other words, it’s a good day to die.

Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community.

Amundson never coaches movements by telling athletes what not to do. He believes that even if the error is presented as a caution or correction, the phrase still lodges in the athlete’s mind, and that the athlete is so focused on the phrase that he unconsciously follows it as a direction. On a deadlift, most CrossFit coaches say, “Don’t round your back.” Two of those words, “don’t” and “round” are negative. Amundson won’t use those words. He’ll say something like “Maintain your lumbar spine.” If an athlete says, “I want to work a bit light on the deadlift because I don’t want to get hurt,” he can scale down the load. But he has to rephrase his request: “I want to stay light to protect my back.

Maybe the answer isn’t trying to get there by inches. Maybe the answer isn’t HR wheedling employees into changes they’re told are easy. Maybe the real opportunity is to say: We’re going to try something crazy difficult, something really intense. Everybody who steps up to do it is going to feel like they’re about to die, albeit for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, tops. Strong people and not-so-strong people will see one another’s heroic efforts. And in the end, we’ll be more than faster, more powerful, harder to kill, and generally more useful.7 We’ll be a group of people that knows it can do crazy difficult things. Reebok’s CrossFit logo is a big equilateral triangle pointing up—the Greek letter delta, the mathematical symbol for change. If the wellness nudgers can’t save us, if comfortable solutions won’t make us strong again, maybe intensity—the willingness to get comfortable with discomfort—is the only thing that will really make a difference.

In the flash of violent effort it takes to jump a bar from floor to overhead, the central nervous system fires electricity into large muscles. The torso pulls quickly under loaded steel. As the bar moves up, its knurled grip is telling the nerve endings in your palm that it is a weapon. And your nerve endings believe it, because this is how good metal weapons feel in the hand.

Sacrifice demands purity, and isn’t worth as much without it. This is why people get so pissed off when athletes get busted for performance-enhancing drugs. If sport were merely a competitive quest for excellence, pharmaceutical augmentations would be considered an innovation, and their side effects would be considered the price of doing business. We would feel the same way about doped-up athletes that we do about doped-up musicians: it might make them better at what they do. It’s part of the world they live in, although it’s a shame when they overdose or die. But if deep down, we know that sport is the sacrifice of a hunter’s energy, then doping destroys the purity of the ritual, and that’s what leaves us feeling robbed. It also spurs people to cheer for younger elite cyclists like Taylor Phinney, who conspicuously eschew not only banned substances but milder performing-enhancing measures like “finish bottles,” the crushed-up caffeine pills and painkillers that riders gulp down in the home stretch.5 The nutritional taboos of the Paleo Diet mesh perfectly with this mythos. The living root of sport is why Jerry Hill does one-legged box jumps in the Games, coaching from the floor of the arena: no excuses. And it’s why, when we see Chris Spealler carrying a 150-pound ball across the stadium, it seems like one of the great, for-the-ages moments in sport.

Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community. At the end of his two-month woodland retreat, Amundson realized two things. The first was that it doesn’t matter how much of a firebreather you are if you can’t cut any slack to the important people in your life. The second was that all his macho law-and-order jobs had defined him, and if he wanted to stop being That Guy, he couldn’t work that kind of job.

CrossFit’s ten attributes of fitness—Endurance, Stamina, Speed, Strength, Balance, Accuracy, Coordination, Agility, Flexibility, Power. And then, in continuous fashion, Courage, Confidence, Perseverance, Virtuosity, Resilience, Service, Faith.

He ditched the plasmapheresis treatments. He kept going to CrossFit with his brother and sister, and got his dad to join. For everyone else at CrossFit Oldtown, the Unknown and Unknowable was tomorrow’s workout. For Mike, the Unknown and Unknowable was how much of his nervous system had been nipped around the edges since the last time he’d done the same WOD. Workout loads were going down from heavy to moderate to lightweight, and then to only bodyweight. The mission was simply to push his body as hard as it could go, with its corroded wiring, to make the system remember its repertoire of full-body movements.

Forestalling defeat is different from fighting for victory. It requires a more tenacious effort. Everyone at CrossFit Oldtown saw this, and it sheared them of their excuses. If Mike could show up and give the WOD his all, what excuse did anyone else have to do less? He spurred the others by example, as firebreathers always do. Their presence makes people push to ignite the same fire inside themselves, by mimicry or osmosis.

Amundson joined a boxing gym and a Brazilian jujitsu school, two more sources of CrossFit recruits. His wife found a local ranch where they could buy horse stall mats. Glassman had discovered horse mats back in Santa Cruz as a less expensive alternative to roll-out rubber matting. “There’s something about a cement floor covered wall-to-wall in black horse mats that just fires me up,” Amundson wrote in a CrossFit Journal chronicle of his mom-and-pop garage gym.2 On the walls, they hung framed T-shirts from their favorite CrossFit affiliates, photos from their days at CrossFit HQ, a whiteboard, and a six- by ten-foot American flag. For a husband and wife, coaches at heart, it was a perfect pint-size box.

The world projects possibilities and restrictions onto people based on identity variables (age, race, gender, etc.). We need to explore the sneaky ways we’ve internalized those stories. Internalized identity rules sound like “Because I am X, I cannot also be/do Y.” For example: • Because I am a mother, I cannot take a pole dancing class. • Because I am forty years old, I cannot become a student. • Because I am well-known in my community, I cannot go to therapy. • Because I do CrossFit, I cannot do Zumba. • Because I am a man, I cannot ask my partner to hold me.

CrossFit,

Derek was trying to justify his self-created CrossFit label and the need to be part of something bigger.

So that's a really important point I think that Tom Seyfried tries to make: The ultimate tumor suppressors are healthy mitochondria. There are different ways: Exercise, CrossFit, ketogenic diet, low carb nutrition, intermittent fasting, periodic caloric restriction - we

It takes a special person to take failure on the chin, check their ego at the door, and to learn from their mistakes. But oftentimes that is what's required to be successful.

Anyone who's looking to achieve success must realize that keeping their foot on the gas pedal will eventually leave their tank empty.