After almost two weeks of enrollment at Peak 360, I'm still not sure whether I love Crossfit or hate it. It does seem to get results - much in the same way a high-caliber elephant gun "gets results," i.e. quick, explosive, painful, and with the real possibility of bodily fluids sprayed all over the place - but results nonetheless.
For a guy my age, I'm in pretty decent physical condition - or so I thought. I can knock out 5K runs on any given day without much effort. I've run a half-marathon in 2:20 - not just on flat asphalt like seemingly everyone else these days, but on the expert mountain bike trails at Oleta River. And, having worked out since I was 19, I know my way around a gym - a conventional gym, anyway.
At Peak 360, I quickly found that all of that I mentioned had very little predictive value as to my ability to handle any kind of Crossfit workout. Initially, one has to complete a "fundamentals" series of classes before attempting a Workout of the Day ("WOD"). These are designed to teach the basic moves that comprise the building blocks of Crossfit. The first class was innocuous enough - we brushed up on our rowing, squats, and deadlifts - all movements I'm pretty comfortable with from my time in the regular gym. Cool. I can handle this, I'm on my way to being a Crossfit bad ass!
Wrong. Day 2 started out with a review of day 1, then we moved on to presses. OK, fine. My shoulders are relatively weak, and I'm not used to doing these with barbells - but still, the basic movement wasn't too different from the dumbbell presses I've done in the gym for years. Then, kettlebell swings. Uh-oh. Never done these before. As it turned out, I didn't feel as if I was that awful at this movement, but swinging the thing up and down repeatedly was very much starting to take its toll. And that was just "practice." Then we went into a mini-WOD, comprised of movements we'd learned so far.
Houston, we have a problem. 3 sets of 3 of the exercises, at 15 reps a pop, TIMED. Yup - the expectation is to get this done as quickly and explosively as you can, while maintaining good form. "For time" means you're going to do this, no matter how long it takes, no matter if you're wheezing through your last sets while everyone else has finished seemingly an eon ago. The thing is, with me, many of these exercises are not all that "difficult," if done by themselves for a handful of reps, with rest between sets as is typical for my leisurely conventional-gym workouts. With Crossfit, the key is to just get after it, limiting your rest as much as humanly possible - it's strength training, mobility training, and aerobics rolled into a giant ball of hurt and overall suck, if I may be blunt. It became readily apparent that I have neither the endurance nor the strength to do this well, and that with some of the moves like box jumps, jump rope, rope climb, etc. I perform awkwardly, at best.
All the more reason why.....I probably NEED to do this. Too many years of the sedentary office lifestyle have taken away much of my former athleticism and fitness, followed by too many multi-course beer and wine pairing dinners.
I'm not familiar with other "boxes," but Peak 360 was recommended to me by two people who know an awful lot about Crossfit. It's a spartan setup, as many of these places seem to be - the coaches and the community are really what make or break any of these gyms. Stepping in the place at first is vaguely disorienting and intimidating, as you see a bunch of jacked-up guys and girls loudly dropping barbells, then quivering on the floor at the end of their WODs. If these people struggle so much with the workouts, what hope do *I* have? The answer is "the same," because at least in theory, these workouts are scalable - meaning to begin with, I'm not going to be lifting the same amount of weight or jumping as high as dudes who have been at this for 2 years. That said, I think I suffer a bit more than typical, simply because I look like someone who could be expected to throw some weight around. I'm substantially weaker than I look, you gotta believe me! I had one of these "scaled" WODs on Monday, and I'm still crushingly sore on Thursday, mostly within those little-but-important muscles I never knew I had.
The coaches at Peak are all cool knowledgeable guys and girls who seem like your best buds before and after the workout, but during the workouts, they are relentless. They are also sticklers for form, which is a good thing. Sometimes that works against me, because the other day I was doing deadlifts during the WOD, and desperately wanted to lessen the weight. Apparently, since I was still practicing good form with my lifts at the prescribed weight, I was not allowed to deviate from the "Rx." And now, as a result of that, my hams are still feeling it.
Peak 360 is either going to whip me into top shape or kill me - I give a 50/50 chance either way. read more
