Real Men Do Pirouettes.

Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc hard and fast. Five or six days a week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports. 

Does this sound familiar? These are the words of Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit.  Simple.  Highly Effective.  

Handstands? Press to Handstands? Pirouettes? Flips?  I have heard that in the early days of CrossFit all of these gymnastics elements were incorporated into the training program.  That is no longer the case. 

Besides Flux, there are not many CrossFit boxes that incorporate movement complexity beyond the olympic lifts.  I think it has to do with:

(1) FUNCTIONALITY: This is a productive concept that has been wildly misconstrued and hollowed out to a shell of its original meaning.
  

I often hear from people, how are double unders or pistols functional? Folks! There is more to the body than "moving large loads quickly over long distances." Flips, back walkovers, bridges, bridge push-ups are often only a dream to people because they lack the spinal mobility to perform such movements.  But what if people committed as much time to a simple bridge as they did to destroying their Fran time? Here's a question for you: How functional is your body if when placed in a compromised position, you simply twist your back to pick up an object and you hurt yourself because your entire spinal column moves as one large clumsy piece of wood rather than as a series of mobilized and activated units? Or, you find yourself in the classic Thai fisherman's pose - in a deep squat with one foot flat on the ground, the other knee on the ground with your feet tucked under your ankle.  You try and stay down their for a prolonged period of time but your hip aches, your heel is off the ground and you feel like you are going to fall backwards. How functional is your body? How strange is it that you can have a sub 3-minute Frran time and still be compromised by the movements I just discussed? Functionality is more than a barbell movement. 

(2) FEMINIZED MOVEMENTS:  You don't need to take a course in gender studies to understand that barbell work has been constructed as a 'masculine' practice and that gymnastics has been constructed as a 'feminine' practice. Perhaps our next T-Shirt should read, "Real men do pirouettes". CrossFitter's around the globe have radically challenged the mainstream ideal feminine figure. Female CrossFitters take great pride in their strength and there is a certain bravado that accompanies a heavy backsquat.  And witness the recent CrossFit Games, where many of the women outlift many of their CrossFitting male counterparts from back home.  

BUT..., the reverse hasn't happened. Neither men nor women are clamouring to perfect their pirouettte or their splits, or their bridge.  One reason is that these movements are not valued as highly as the back squat or other strength based movements.  

What if equal value was given to both the back bridge and back squat? Here's a concrete example. Jane and Don have been working hard for their first bridge. Jane just recently met this goal and Don is hot on her heels. By the way, Jane  backsquats over 200 lbs (ass to grass). 

Don is no spring chicken (sorry Don) but his spine is more supple than most 20 year olds. Don could not push himself off the ground into a bridge when he started. I think only one or two vertebrae of his entire spinal column was actually moving.  The rest were like wood.  Plus, his shoulders were so closed he could not straighten his arms so he would just collapse onto his head.

But fast forward and here we are several months later, wIth their supple spinal columns these two move like graceful cats. They perform efficiency.