The CrossFit community is thousands strong spread across a score of countries and populated with some of the most knowledgeable coaches and athletes in sport and strength and conditioning. Though strong, committed, and talented, the fact remains that our community is in large part connected by the Internet and diluted by geography. This, for many, means that opportunities for receiving inputs from our coaches are limited to text and getting to training events. Both have obvious limitations.
It struck us recently that though we deal in tens of billions of bits of data monthly at CrossFit.com, only very rarely does someone offer up photos or videotape of their training efforts for evaluation. This month we test and demonstrate coaching via digital inputs and offer an enticement to our friends to photograph or tape their efforts, post them to the CrossFit message board, and let the experts render feedback.
To test and demonstrate our digital coaching concept Tony Budding and Nicole Carroll each digitally photographed their Clean and Jerk and sent the photos to Coach Mike Burgener for evaluation. We’re sharing the results of Mike’s inputs here, and later this week we’ll post these pictures to our message board in a section reserved for digital coaching. It’ll be easy: get pictures of your effort, post them to the net, and stand by ready to receive the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Though not strictly necessary, we put a line of tape down a wall that ran to ground and out perpendicularly from the wall to define the frontal plane which divides the athlete front half from back half. Perpendicular to that tape line we ran another piece of tape to define the sagittal plane which divides the athlete right half from left half. Placing the athlete directly over the crosshairs formed by the intersection of these lines, we then outlined the starting foot position. These lines help give perspective to the photograph. The shots were taken from a position three paces forward of the frontal plane per Coach Burgener’s request.
It looks like it worked, but only time will tell. You be the judge. Post your pictures and let us know if the inputs make a difference to your performance. Isn’t that generally our standard for assessment at CrossFit?
This article, by BSI’s co-founder, was originally published in The CrossFit Journal. While Greg Glassman no longer owns CrossFit Inc., his writings and ideas revolutionized the world of fitness, and are reproduced here.
Coach Glassman named his training methodology ‘CrossFit,’ which became a trademarked term owned by CrossFit Inc. In order to preserve his writings in their original form, references to ‘CrossFit’ remain in this article.
Greg Glassman founded CrossFit, a fitness revolution. Under Glassman’s leadership there were around 4 million CrossFitters, 300,000 CrossFit coaches and 15,000 physical locations, known as affiliates, where his prescribed methodology: constantly varied functional movements executed at high intensity, were practiced daily. CrossFit became known as the solution to the world’s greatest problem, chronic illness.
In 2002, he became the first person in exercise physiology to apply a scientific definition to the word fitness. As the son of an aerospace engineer, Glassman learned the principles of science at a young age. Through observations, experimentation, testing, and retesting, Glassman created a program that brought unprecedented results to his clients. He shared his methodology with the world through The CrossFit Journal and in-person seminars. Harvard Business School proclaimed that CrossFit was the world’s fastest growing business.
The business, which challenged conventional business models and financially upset the health and wellness industry, brought plenty of negative attention to Glassman and CrossFit. The company’s low carbohydrate nutrition prescription threatened the sugar industry and led to a series of lawsuits after a peer-reviewed journal falsified data claiming Glassman’s methodology caused injuries. A federal judge called it the biggest case of scientific misconduct and fraud she’d seen in all her years on the bench. After this experience Glassman developed a deep interest in the corruption of modern science for private interests. He launched CrossFit Health which mobilized 20,000 doctors who knew from their experiences with CrossFit that Glassman’s methodology prevented and cured chronic diseases. Glassman networked the doctors, exposed them to researchers in a variety of fields and encouraged them to work together and further support efforts to expose the problems in medicine and work together on preventative measures.
In 2020, Greg sold CrossFit and focused his attention on the broader issues in modern science. He’d learned from his experience in fitness that areas of study without definitions, without ways of measuring and replicating results are ripe for corruption and manipulation.
The Broken Science Initiative, aims to expose and equip anyone interested with the tools to protect themself from the ills of modern medicine and broken science at-large.
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