It’s time to stop attacking non CrossFitters. Barely a week goes by when I don’t see social media slamming of perceived ‘inferior’ forms of exercise and their practitioners. All too often this slamming is from CrossFitters – worse still, CrossFit Affiliate owners.
All that tells me is that some people are more concerned with ego driven archaic chest beating and territory marking than they are with people’s health. Just because you eat like a caveman doesn’t mean you have to act like one. If you’re in this game for any other reason than to make people healthier, fitter or more highly performing, it’s probably not the game for you. I don’t care how good your business brain is – if helping people isn’t right at the top of your value set, there’s only so far you can go and only so successful you can be.
Maybe it’s because you feel threatened? If so, the problem isn’t with them, it’s with you. Being threatened only tells me that you’re not secure enough in your own product to stand it up to criticism and comparison. If you wouldn’t be 100% comfortable with a ‘competitor’ opening up next door, then it’s your own house that needs addressing, not theirs. Shift your attention from the perceived threat THEY bring, to the good that YOU bring. Spend less time worrying about them, and more worrying about you – it’ll be better directed.
I’ve heard Affiliate Owners question what they’re going to do about the impending (insert your choice of developing exercise trend here) invasion. If you think they can do it better than you, maybe you should join them. If you know you can do it better than them, you’ve got nothing to worry about – welcome the competition.
You see, here’s the thing. Exercise exists on a continuum. As much as we humans have an almost incessant obsession with categorising things in binary there is no ‘good’ and ‘bad’. There is only better or worse. Picture a long straight horizontal line. This is our continuum. On the left of the continuum are things that cause a small net gain in health/fitness/performance. By net gain, I mean the positives slightly outweigh the negatives. One the right of the continuum are things that cause a massive gain in health/fitness/performance – the positives MASSIVELY outweigh the negatives. I talk more about this continuum concept (and what exercises fit where) in ‘Functional Exercise’, Where to Draw the Line?. I’ll admit that I believe that CrossFit sits as far to the right of this continuum as you can get – if I didn’t I wouldn’t use CrossFit methodologies on myself, my clients, and the people I care about. But my belief in the methodologies I choose to align myself with doesn’t automatically relegate everything else to ‘bad’. And it certainly doesn’t give me the reason or right to bash alternate methods. My perception of CrossFit as the gold standard is just that – my perception. A different person with a different perception, different information and a different value set may in turn come to a different conclusion about the ordering of the continuum. And I completely respect that. I THINK I’m right. I don’t KNOW I’m right. That would be arrogant and short sighted.
Our responsibility is to move people as far along the continuum as we can. Note that the aim is not to dump everyone on the far right – but simply to progress them. For a completely decondition chain smoking, ‘Bold and the Beautiful’ binging, exercise loathing, sugar junkie… walking to the letterbox once a week while bicep curling a tin of tomato soup is a MASSIVE jump up the continuum. Once they achieve that, we can work on the next step. But whatever you do, DON’T YOU DARE criticise this healthy behaviour change. Feel free to encourage and educate, but criticise you may not. The same goes for any point on the continuum. As long as the exercise is causing a net gain to their health, they’re benefiting. Progress them to the right, don’t bash their current position.
CrossFit Forges Elite Fitness. Read that again. ‘Forges Elite Fitness’. It’s our fitness that should be elite, not our attitude that should be elitist.
