In CrossFit, fitness is measured by work capacity. Coach Greg Glassman in Understanding CrossFit states the following:
What we’ve discovered is that CrossFit increases work capacity across broad time and modal domains. This is a discovery of great import and has come to motivate our programming and refocus our efforts. This far-reaching increase in work capacity supports our initially stated aims of building a broad, general, and inclusive fitness program. It also explains the wide variety of sport demands met by CrossFit as evidenced by our deep penetration among diverse sports and endeavors. We’ve come to see increased work capacity as the holy grail of performance improvement and all other common metrics like VO2 max, lactate threshold, body composition, and even strength and flexibility as being correlates—derivatives, even.
However, there was always something that bugged me in the above statement that was brought out when I watched the following video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-zmRP0e3kE]
I think you would have to admit that, while John Tavares may or may not be fit, at least in the CrossFit sense; he is amazingly athletic to be able to juggle a hockey puck in the chaos directly in front of the net. As a coach, this video helped me focus on what I should be coaching. While it is not clear to me if that kind of athleticism can be taught, this video made it clear to me that when fitness is actually used and/or needed, it is often in chaotic conditions requiring specific skills that were never practiced.
Here is another video that illustrates the difference between athleticism and fitness. You will have to download but it is worth it. [wmv] [mov]In this video, Gillian Mousey, who also was third place at this years CrossFit Games, shows amazing athleticism by moving from dead lifting to handstand walks to a tumbling passes quickly. Yes, she is a former gymnast but the point is that she is able to move between different exercises that require fundamentally different body positions quickly and easily.
I think the distinction between athleticism and fitness is worth considering from both a coach’s and and athlete’s perspective for the two following important reasons:
Athletes are the context in which fitness happens. That may seem a little obvious, but no more obvious than humans are the context in which computer programs are judged useful, i.e. the most powerful computer applications also consider usability a major factor of it’s continued success. By understanding the context, it is much easier to know how to train an athlete as a coach and much easier to know how to (or what to use to) measure progress for an athlete.
Less obvious, but possibly more important for both the coach and the athlete, is that implicit in the statement from Understanding CrossFit, “We sought to build a program that would best prepare trainees for any physical contingency—prepare them not only for the unknown but for the unknowable,” is that for athletes to be able to successfully complete tasks that they may have never done before, they will have to both consciously and unconsciously use their athletic skills in creative ways. In other words, not only must successful athletes be able to learn tasks from an outside source (e.g. a coach, a book, a video, or another athlete), they also must be able to teach themselves how to complete new tasks not explicitly covered in training: They must synthesize a physical solution from non-specific trained and practiced skills.
In the coming weeks, I will post, on Sundays, more about what I am going to call for now “owning your fitness.” It is a little new-age-y, but we’ll just have to live with it for now. Advance warning, some of it will be contradictory and “not quite baked” but, as a result of these posts, in the next few months, you will see some small but important changes in the programming and more consistency and clarity in the coaching.