Pottstown Athletic Club

-  Mike Warkentin, managing editor, CrossFit Journal Are you addicted to met-cons to the detriment of overall fitness?  Yes, we know you feel like you didn’t accomplish anything on deadlift day.  It’s very clear you’re unhappy that you are not out of breath and dripping with sweat.  We’re just going to lie here on the rubber with shaking legs while you head over to the corner to bang out 100 burpees for time.  We’ll even start the clock if you feel the need to hit a quick Fran.  But we’re wrecked from heavy day, so please don’t ask us to join you. Here’s why: You’re part of a CrossFit program. Conditioning is a big part of CrossFit. Many workouts done in CrossFit gyms and programmed on  CrossFit.com  cause you to sweat heavily, breathe hard and collapse on the floor at the end. These workouts range from relatively short tests such as Fran to longer challenges such as Cindy, and many Hero workouts take athletes into time domains past 2...

Septuagenarian CrossFit coach Mike Suhadolnik refuses to let his peers age gracefully. Mike Suhadolnik, a former offensive tackle and middle guard at Illinois State University, spent most of his life powerlifting. At this best, he benched 350, squatted 450 and deadlifted 550 lb. His physique implied fitness. But when his daughter Molly and her now-fiancé Tim Hahn asked him to overhead squat more than seven years ago, he couldn’t get the bar over his head. Then they asked him to do burpees. “I played football in college. I said, ‘No problem,’” Suhadolnik recounted. “I couldn’t do a burpee.” Disturbed by this, the then-65-year-old visited his doctor in Springfield. “I told him I wanted to live until I was at least 110 years old but that I did not want somebody pushing me around in a wheelchair, walking with a walker or having someone wipe my butt,” said Suhadolnik, today 223 lb. The doctor recommended changes...

In this open letter to CrossFit trainers, Coach Greg Glassman discusses the importance of virtuosity, defined in gymnastics as “performing the common uncommonly well.” Unlike risk and originality, virtuosity is elusive, supremely elusive. It is, however, readily recognized by audience as well as coach and athlete. There is a compelling tendency among novices developing any skill or art, whether learning to play the violin, write poetry, or compete in gymnastics, to quickly move past the fundamentals and on to more elaborate, more sophisticated movements, skills, or techniques. What will inevitably doom a physical training program and dilute a coach’s efficacy is a lack of commitment to fundamentals. Rarely now do we see prescribed the short, intense couplets or triplets that epitomize CrossFit programming. Rarely do trainers really nitpick the mechanics of fundamental movements. I understand how this occurs. It is natural to want to teach people advanced and fancy movements. The...