Level 1 Certificate Course—Supporting Content

This month's Glassman video captures some of the key points from the question and answer session following the lecture excerpted in last month's Technique video. Here, Coach Glassman elaborates on a number of questions that get at some of the finer details of the relationships of technique, intensity, functional movement, and performance that he raised earlier… Continue Reading

In his earlier video article "Better Movements" (Oct 2007 CrossFit Journal) Coach Glassman explained that high power functional movements such as the jerk and the kipping pull-up are better exercises--in several critical ways--than their simpler relatives, the press and the strict pull-up. In "Productive Application of Force" (Jan 2008) he explained why our definition of strength is not equivalent to just muscular contractile force. What really matters is… Continue Reading

Strength, as an isolated quality, can be defined and measured as the biological contractile potential of muscle--as how hard your muscles can contract to apply force. But from our perspective, Coach Glassman explains in this lecture excerpt, that is an incomplete definition and an isolated measure that doesn't really reveal much about its application to real-world functionality (just as VO2 max measurements alone tell us little about a person's capacity and… Continue Reading

In this excerpt from one of his talks at a recent CrossFit certification seminar, founder Greg Glassman discusses the methods and rationale of CrossFit. Fundamentally, what we are about, he explains, is evidence-based fitness. Here he breaks that claim down into its constituent parts and explains the logical, scientific basis of the CrossFit system for advancing human performance. To evaluate any such system, there are three key elements that must be… Continue Reading

Part 2 of Coach Glassman's discussion of nutrition addresses the refined dietary needs of athletes and what's required to optimize your performance. If you want elite physical output, you must be precise about your intake. "Close enough" won't cut it--or as Coach Glassman more colorfully puts it, "If you want top-fuel- type performance, you need top fuel; you can't just piss into the gas tank."

Most of us are familiar with CrossFit's… Continue Reading

CrossFit workouts emphasize high-skill movements (relative to isolation and/or machine-based movements) because they are, in almost every respect, better vehicles for optimizing fitness--for achieving CrossFit's mission of increasing work capacity across broad time and modal domains.

In this lecture from a recent CrossFit certification seminar, Greg Glassman looks at the differences among the shoulder press, push press, and push jerk and compares them to the differences between strict and kipping… Continue Reading

Nutrition can be a touchy topic, like politics or religion, that people take very personally, but good nutrition is the foundation not only for general health but also for high-performance fitness. Much of the public information about diet, particularly the emphasis on low fat and high carbs, has resulted in a near epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes. In this first of a two-part lecture excerpt, Coach Glassman explores some of the science… Continue Reading