Next week, the amount of trash talking that normally ensues between N.C. State and UNC-Chapel Hill students will increase tenfold.
Students participate in trash talking because they feel the need to protect their “goodness.” A person’s goodness is anything that has meaning in one’s life, according to Soren Palmer, an English professor at N.C. State. This university means something to the students who attend it, but the University can’t stand up for itself. For this reason, students instinctually protect the University and anything else that they consider to be their goodness.
Well, it’s time I straighten out some of the myths about CrossFit, a part of my goodness.
The goal of CrossFit is to forge all-inclusive fitness through a combination of gymnastics, Olympic lifting, aerobic exercise and bodyweight exercises, according to CrossFit, Inc. By aiming to increase cardio-respiratory endurance, flexibility and muscular strength any two days in a CrossFit gym are different.
“In sum, our specialty is not specializing,” CrossFit said on its website.
CrossFit is referred to as a fitness trend, but it’s about time it loses the trend title because it hasn’t lost any momentum since entering the market for exercising options. The number of CrossFit affiliated gyms grew 43 percent from 2011 to 2012 according to KSL, a Utah news broadcasting agency. There were only 18 CrossFit affiliated gyms in the United States in 2005, and it has grown to more than 7,000, according to CrossFit, Inc. Granted, 43 percent growth is hard to sustain. But here we are, eight years later, and its popularity is still growing. CrossFit is here to stay and will continue to attract a unique breed of members.
It has incredible benefits, but it only seems to make it in the news for its risks and costs. In the past month, Consumer Reports, Huffington Post, CNN and ABC have all featured articles regarding the risks. Most recently, KFVS, a Missouri-based news broadcasting company, featured CrossFit in a story on Oct.14. The condition more stories refer to is Rhabdomyolysis. It occurs when skeletal muscle breaks down and sends products of damaged muscle cells into the bloodstream, which leads to kidney failure. Though it has occurred with CrossFit members, the condition is not unique to CrossFit. Marathon and ultra-marathon runners are commonly diagnosed with cases of Rhabdomyolysis, along with other athletes returning to fall conditioning training.
Another misconception is the public’s association of CrossFit with injury. There is a learning curve with every fitness routine and nothing about CrossFit makes it unique to abuse. If someone begins CrossFit too quickly, injury will likely ensue, but this is true with starting any exercise regimen too fast. And though there are a great number of benefits associated with CrossFit, we commonly emphasize the bad things before ever arriving at the good things.
Its benefits clearly exceed its costs, but to reap them people have to jump in and stop sitting on the sidelines. It may be hard to view what makes the exercise lifestyle so beneficial from the outside, but take a leap and you’ll soon find out. Each CrossFit gym is unique, but all gyms encourage camaraderie amongst their members and teach discipline and perseverance. No one exercising regimen is perfect for everyone, and don’t assume CrossFit is all bad based solely on its repeated bad publicity. People just have a tendency to emphasize the costs of something new before noticing the benefits.
