What is Health..?

Hint: this is not a "CrossFit is the holy grail" kind of post, read it with an open mind.

This is the second blog post in a little series defining our 3 objectives of what we're trying to create for our members in our PEAK Gyms: Happiness, Health & Fitness!

Before we get started, please do this: 5 Burpees.
No stepping in and out, not necessarily fast, but just drop to the floor and pop back up 5 times. 

Now if you already knew that doing those burpees would mean that for instance your knee/hip/shoulder would ache, or if you thought "noways I can do burpees without first warming up...", then this article is 100% for you as it's intended to create correlation between our training in the Gym and what we can do outside the same!

But before we dig in to that just for full transparency: this blogpost is NOT arguing that training hard is bad for you. We are not trying to say that it's BAD to get very strong, or that develop capacity in higher skill movements makes you unhealthy. 
What we are discussing below is that often, what it takes to acquire HIGH performance level in the Sport of CrossFit (or any other sport for that matter), might actually be too much for the general population, depending on what actual goals they have with their training.

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Is there a difference between maximising HEALTH and maximising PERFORMANCE?

We started last week by talking about what "True Fitness" is, and how we might want to be careful with seeing our capacity in the Sport of CrossFit as an example as the only measure to go by, and we're kind of continuing that theme this week when we talk about a Healthy Fitness level.
Similar to last week's philosophy we'll argue that "maximised performance" is not always the same as HEALTH, and we might surprise you with what we consider "needed" to call yourself Healthy in regards to fitness markers..

Taking a step back to last week, we argued that "True fitness is a compromise of skills because excessive capacity in one area or skill will blunt the capacity elsewhere.", and similarly we can also say that too much capacity in one area of fitness would actually reduce your level of Health!

What? Are you saying that if I get too good at something fitness related it makes me LESS Healthy!? Yes, it could..

Let's make a few examples of extreme capacity in different sports and you probably understand where we're coming from:

Take a Power Lifter that can Deadlift +400kg for men and +250kg for women (yes there are those out there!) or an Olympic Weightlifter that can Snatch +200kg for men or +120kg for women (there are scarily enough many of those too!).
Both of these athletes are incredibly STRONG and the feats are super impressive, but what about:

• Their cardio vascular capacity?
• What about their joint health?
• Again from last week: can they run and play with their kids on the beach for hours?
  
• Another factor for Powerlifters is that there are studies that have shown that elite level Power Lifters life expectancy is significantly lower than the general population (up to 4.6x times as high mortality rate vs a comparison group in THIS specific study), BUT there's also beliefs that this is correlated to the common use of Anabolic Steroids and other substances that harm your health.

On the flip side of that we can take the Marathon Runners, being able to run a marathon sub 2'30h as an example is incredibly impressive and shows an incredible aerobic capacity and endurance, but to get to that capacity it's likely that you've sacrificed capacity in other areas where we ask ourselves:

• How's your muscular development, considering it's proven that healthy strength training create longevity and reduce risk of bone density issues when you get older? (less broken bones and hip replacements).
• Again, how is the lower body joint health going to look?
• Can you move houses, or even just change position of your couch at home?
• Can you pick your kids up and carry them on a hike?

Yeah, but I'm not a world class weightlifter or marathon runner, how does this relate to ME?

That's when it all gets interesting, because if we look at what we tend to try to achieve in the gym we can now start asking ourselves the question: Is increasing my capacity in this area going to improve, or reduce my actual HEALTH?

As always the answer is: it depends..
We believe that there is 100% an increased HEALTH coming out of increasing your Fitness Capacity, but only to a certain level. Once you start maximising your performance levels beyond what can be considered healthy we can see that things like the above start becoming a problem.

As an example, if you can Back Squat 1-1.5x times your body weight with great form, without need for knee sleeves and/or weight belts, we think that you are without a doubt strong enough to handle basically all "normal" things that life can throw at you, and you have a healthy body that can do that unassisted.

If we take it to the extreme and we instead chase a much bigger back squat, let's say 2.5-3x body weight (which is not uncommon among Elite level CrossFitters these days), we tend to see that the body is now starting to take strain that might not be necessary for an everyday "athlete" just training to be Fit & Healthy for a life outside the gym.
Because, it's not uncommon that athletes training at such a level where they chase "more than necessary for life"-goals, their bodies start taking strain, to the point where injuries and "living with pain" is more common than not in this group..

Because we know that the person that can back squat 2.5-3x their body weight tend to also be the person having aching knees, lower back problems, and/or other issues.

Now if we then take a look at other areas of the Sport of Fitness-training that could be considered when it comes to defining a HEALTHY approach to your fitness, let's think about things like High Level Gymnastics-development. 
We LOVE seeing people learning how to do for instance pull ups, hand stands, rope climbs, and maybe even muscle ups - and doing those with a healthy volume is in our opinion only going to add to your health as it makes the upper body strong and using them in your conditioning training can also increase your overall fitness levels = more health.

But... When it comes to developing those skills to be at a HIGH competitive level we might need to analyse what's needed to be able to compete at the highest level of for instance the sport of CrossFit - an athlete wanting to be at a Semi Finals, or even CrossFit Games level, needs to be able to do at least:

• 50 Unbroken Butterfly Pull Ups
• 30m Unbroken Hand Stand Walk, sometimes with some tricks like pirouettes etc in there
• Multiple Legless Rope Climbs under fatigue
• +15-20 unbroken Ring Muscle Ups
• Etc

Now, none of those amazing feats are in themselves unhealthy - but to get there, and in combination with training to maximise Strength and Cardio Vascular Capacity at the same time, athletes must often push their training volume, and frequency of training said movements, to such high levels that their bodies take massive strain.

The most competitive athletes in the sport of CrossFit, (and in other sports*), are often "banged up", carries multiple joint issues and while that is actually ok if being competitive is the MAIN GOAL for an athlete - we argue that it's not what us mere mortals, that are training mainly to simply live a better life outside of the gym, should experience.

*IMPORTANT: All high level athletes in basically ANY sport carries niggles & injuries. Just take a look at the Premier League in football, how often are athletes out of action due to injuries?
How often do we see that top level Cyclists or Runners have to sit out of competitions due to overuse training issues? All the time..
Training to become the very best requires an insane amount of training and when that is the goal we should not judge these athletes as "unhealthy", we are simply saying that for general population overuse injuries and constant pain and aches is basically the opposite of health... 

Simply put: your training should make you feel BETTER in your every day life, not worse. 

HERE'S A FEW WAYS TO THINK ABOUT YOUR TRAINING IF YOU ARE TRAINING MAINLY FOR HEALTH FIRST & PERFORMANCE ONLY SECONDLY:

• You should wake up in the morning PAINF REE. Try the top of this blog challenge for a week: do 5 burpees every morning first thing out of bed, if your knees/lower back/shoulders can't handle that without hurting, maybe it's time to take a different approach to your workouts!
• By trying to become as WELL ROUNDED as possible you will create the most healthy fitness level possible, so if you already have for instance high Strength Levels, try to maintain them rather than trying to increase them as this will allow you to put more effort into the things that are not yet 100% well developed (perhaps your conditioning and gymnastic capacity needs more focus as an example).
• You should be able to do all movements in the gym without "assistance", weight belts, knee sleeves etc should in our opinion not be necessary for someone that is training for HEALTH. Only do movements and loads that you can do without your body breaking, without such assistance.
  PRO TIP: If you are already carrying an niggle/injury and "the belt makes it feel better", maybe it's time to rather get to the root cause of the issue instead of putting a bandaid (= belt) on it?
• LISTEN TO YOUR BODY. If your elbow is hurting when you're doing a certain movement, leave it. Most of the time, you will be better off by avoiding movements that causes pain*, and find variations that your body is happy to do today so that you can come back and try those other movements another day.
  *Burning muscles from hard training is not what we're defining as "pain", if your legs are burning because you're doing Thrusters: good for you!

A HELPFUL TOOL - The Super Human Functionality Project.

The "SHFP" is designed for our members to find imbalances. Such imbalances can occur in capacity between for instance bilateral (to arms or two legs) movements and unilateral (one arm or one leg) movements. The imbalances can also display it self in regards to Strength vs Cardiovascular Capacity vs Gymnastic Skill Development and the level of Fitness an human being can display in either of those areas.

We test these areas in certain test protocols that shows up in our programming throughout the year, and then use the data we find to further guide each member INDIVIDUALLY on their needs.

But what's also super cool is that we have categorised all our tests according to 5 different levels, where you can easily see what you need to be able to do to consider yourself fitting in to each category.

THIS IS OUR DEFINITION OF THE DIFFERENT LEVELS:

Here's an example that we hope will drive home the whole point!

If we take some relatively simple test markers and paint a picture where an athlete can do the below, not more and not less, in these commonly used fitness tests:

• Back Squat: 1,0x Body Weight
• Strict Pull Ups: 5 unbroken controlled reps
• Push Ups: 10 unbroken controlled reps
• 5km Run: sub 27'30min
• Can climb a 4,5m Rope 

We argue that this athlete has MORE capacity than what life will ever require of him/her, and funny enough this is actually part of our FITNESS-LEVEL in the Super Human Functionality Project - but we know that all of those features are achievable without needing to train with an insane volume in any of the areas tested = we can get there with a HEALTHY training approach.

We can even confidently say that we actually can go beyond those levels with a simple "One workout a day"-approach and without overtraining any modality to the point where we experience pain/niggles/injuries - what if we slowly train to get to our PERFORMANCE-LEVEL in the Super Human Functionality Project with the same test markers:

• Back Squat: 1,5x Body Weight
• Strict Pull Ups: 10 unbroken controlled reps
• Push Ups: 20 unbroken controlled reps
• 5km Run: sub 25'00min
• Can climb a 4,5m Rope without using their feet

We have seen MANY athletes getting to that level and believe that ANYONE can get to within 1-5 years of healthy training with us, timeframe will depend on starting point and training history.

We have many other tests that we use to measure the mentioned single leg/arm capacity, pulling VERSUS pushing strength, other conditioning tests as well as classic CrossFit Benchmark workouts, and much more - the above is just a simple examples of what we're quite confident would be "amazing" for 90% of the human population to get to, yet seem to sometimes be forgotten as a very healthy level of fitness soon as we get there and start pushing for more..

So what do I do if I can back squat a lot more than that, but can't run a 5km without stopping..?

Well, you probably guessed that this is kind of the point with this whole blog post: TRAIN YOUR WEAKNESSES, while maintaining your strengths.

As an example, if the program shows that today we are building up to a 1 Rep Max Back Squat and then Run 5km For Time (just to make a very direct example):

• ONLY Back Squat 1,5x your body weight, even if you could do much more, and save the energy for:
• Run as HARD as you can within your current fitness capacity, (smart pacing is still advised).

This will mean that you maintain your strength, whilst still holding back in the squat tester, but you have not emptied the battery before it's time to Run = you can maximise your outcome on the Run which is what you need the most.

This can then be extended to your whole training week/month! Because, if you for instance have a "heavy day" of training on Tuesday, and you see in the programming that we will be working on "conditioning & cardio" on the Wednesday, you can simply hold back and focus on form and speed on the Tuesday WITHOUT MAXING OUT as that will allow your body and CNS (Central Nervous System) to be fully recovered for a much harder push on the Wednesday - which is what YOU need.
Not waking up with sore knees or a tired lower back when it's time to work on that conditioning because you didn't max out can in this case create much more fitness across the board over time!

By analysing your current capacities and actual needs to create a HEALTHY fitness like this, you can control and moderate your whole training week to best suit your actual individual needs as it allows you to improve the various areas of fitness that you actually need, instead of always chasing max performance in areas that you already are good at! 

BUT WHAT IF I WANT TO BE COMPETITIVE??

Well that's another story!

If competing in the Sport of CrossFit (or any other sport that requires higher levels of performance for that matter) is a BIG Goal of yours, then you need to train in a way where you are balancing improving your capacity to levels that are so high that you can compete, with the increased risk of niggles and injuries.
Just like any other sport, there is a sacrifice to be made and if being truly competitive is a goal of yours, we would like nothing else but to see you succeed in reaching your goals!

PS. We also have some of the most developed "competitive programs" out there with our CCF Competition-program which is available for those of our members that want to train for more than just Health & Fitness - that program is the base that have previously sent 3x Teams to the CrossFit Games and arguably had the most athletes compete at a Regionals/Semi Finals level over the last 15 years.
Our members have access to this program, and Open Gym access at certain times during the day with their standard PEAK-memberships.

Give us a shout if competitive CrossFit is what you are looking for and we gladly explain more.

WRAPPING IT UP.

Just to make sure that we're getting our message across here:
We're not saying that you should "absolutely not try to get stronger", and we're not saying that you should not try to increase your capacity in higher level gymnastics & olympic weightlifting movements. We're also not saying that you will automatically hurt yourself or become unhealthy if you can squat more than 1,5x times your body weight..

What we are saying is that chasing higher levels of performance MIGHT very well be counterproductive to why you joined the gym in the the first place.

If you joined us to simply become healthier and live a better life outside the "four walls" of a gym, then use the above info to direct your training towards what YOU need and push hard within that. And while you do it, celebrate the little victories that will come in the shape of a bigger back squat, more gymnastic capacity etc - because magically those things seems to happen, even when we don't direct all our life energy towards making it so.

Your Team at PEAK