Equipment

Affiliate owners discuss budgeting for replacement gear and making the new equipment last.

A 45-lb. plate can be a great doorstop.

Of course, it’s a better fitness tool, but what else can you do with a broken bumper?

The business of fitness is tough work, and CrossFit athletes are tough on implements. As eager as affiliate owners are for their clients’ PRs, progress inevitably comes with broken weights, snapped skipping ropes and busted rowers.

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CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman: “Nobody’s doin’ enough with dumbbells.”

It makes workouts both easier and harder, movements better and worse, and Fran times go down and up.

It is the dumbbell—the paradox of workout implements.

“(It’s) a different effect. There’s no wiggle room. You can’t be off balance. You gotta keep your head steady. You have to have pretty good form to do stuff with a dumbbell,” explained Jason David, owner of St. Clair Shores CrossFit… Continue Reading

Filthy, under-maintained rowing machines cost affiliates money and add seconds to workouts.

You’re finishing the 1,000-m row during Jackie and can’t afford to waste time before moving to the thrusters. In a rush to unstrap your feet, you finish your last stroke, release the handle and let it smash into the monitor.

Your affiliate owner might admire your intensity but loathe your carelessness, and if you dismounted the rowing machine with such abandon… Continue Reading

Relatively cheap and easily available, sleds are a versatile option for CrossFit gyms.

Pulling or pushing a sled is like getting smacked with a baseball bat through a phone book: It hurts like hell but doesn’t leave much of a mark.

Long preferred by powerlifters and others for their ability to ramp up workload without creating excessive soreness, sleds might have been considered premium items in the early days of CrossFit, when it was far… Continue Reading

Parents use an old invention to fill the gap between training wheels and the freedom of two wheels.

Learning to ride a bike is an important rite of passage for a child, but it can be a challenging process for both the child and the parent.

Children often move from tricycles to bicycles with training wheels and then make the big jump to a bike without training wheels. The distance between the last two stages is… Continue Reading

Over 30 percent of CrossFit affiliates in the U.S. turn to community-owned insurance to protect their businesses.

Four years ago, there was an idea to create something that would represent our strength and initiative, something that would become the backbone of our reputation and allow us to take aggressive action in defense of our affiliates and trainers: insurance by and for the CrossFit community. In 2009, this idea turned into a massive funding… Continue Reading

It’s about 3 a.m. on Saturday after the Legless event at this year’s CrossFit Games. The Rogue Fitness crew and volunteers have just dismantled 40,000 lb. of steel rigs for rope climbs—and then constructed another 40,000 lb. of A-frames for pull-ups at the StubHub Center in Carson, Calif.

“We just took down the rope-climb rig. Now we’ve got five rows of, I think, it’s five 80-foot rows of A-frame,” says Rogue… Continue Reading

Mike Warkentin believes special equipment will never take the place of practice and effort.

I have little use for the gear debate about which shoes are better for which workout, whether tights help anything at all, which speed rope is best, what wicking system will keep my crotch drier, or whether I’ll produce 2 percent more power lifting off plywood instead of stall mats.

Who the fuck has time for this?

I like… Continue Reading