What is true Fitness..?

What is Fitness..?

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

If you really think about it, it might not be as easy to answer that question as at first glance - but for us that pride ourselves in improving our members fitness it’s incredibly important that we can indeed answer that question. And for you that’s either already a PEAK member, or thinking about becoming one, we hope that the description below will help you feel strongly connected with our philosophy in your pursuit of improving your own Fitness!

Box Step Ups, not always fun, but definitely functional. 

Greg Glassman, who founded CrossFit back in 2002, said it best when he coined the phrase "True fitness is a compromise of skills because excessive capacity in one area or skill will blunt the capacity elsewhere."

Why is that a good description? Well, we often see that various sports claims that their sport indeed is the best expression of fitness, where for instance Triathletes believes that they're athletes are the fittest on the planet, as does Strongmen & Strongwomen, as does CrossFitters, as does OCR (Obstacle Course Race) athletes.

But when we look into each of those sports individually, and especially the traits of their most successful athletes, we might start seeing that there's some gaps in almost any of their Skill Sets, as a few examples that aren't meant to be aggressive in nature but rather objective:

• Triathletes have AMAZING Cardiovascular capacity, endurance, and mental fortitude. But can they help you move houses? Can they pick up enough load from the floor to ensure that their bone density doesn't become a problem when they age..? Maybe, maybe not.
• Strongmen & Strongwomen are INCREDIBLY impressive with how they can pull trucks, lift big a$$ stones, that most people can't even move, to shoulder height, and much more. But can they play with their kids on the beach for a couple of hours? Can they go on a hike to experience the beauty that our world has to offer..? Maybe, maybe not.
• Obstacle Course Racers are super IMPRESSIVE with their ability to move themselves over various challenging obstacles, quickly, and in the longer duration races often also with a huge running capacity. But, similar to the Triathletes we ask ourselves if they too can pick up heavy loads and move them when life demands it from them? Maybe, maybe not.
• CrossFitters are without a doubt the most WELL ROUNDED out of these example athletes, BUT, and here's perhaps the shocking part of this article considering how biased we obviously are (being a 15 year CrossFit-brand and all):... sometimes the Sport of CrossFit tend to skew the perception of what true fitness actually is.

Before you protest, yes the Sport of CrossFit is probably the one out of the above examples that will test the different Skills needed to call yourself truly fit the best. But, our point here is that we often tend to overvalue the most High Level Skills that the sport has to offer - and sometimes thus also spend too much time trying to develop those, when in reality they might not necessarily be a true expression of your FITNESS.

Meaning: in CrossFit we often overemphasis the ability to lift heavy when it comes to the complex weightlifting used in Olympic Weightlifting (the Snatch & the Clean & Jerk), and we tend to overemphasis the ability to perform high level Gymnastic Skills (like Hand Stand Walks & Muscle Ups).
Now again, before you think we're saying that these are "not good" to develop, just remember that we are simply saying that that there tends to be an overemphasis on their correlation to your true fitness.

Being able to Snatch heavy is cool, but is it a true test of Fitness?

Because, skills aren’t “bad” and they can in fact actually help you INCREASE your fitness as they can help you increase your power output in a given workout, which will in turn give you a bigger return of adaption = improved fitness levels. BUT, Skills are in themselves not a real expression of Fitness if you ask us.

Think about it like this, if we take two different “athletes” with the same well developed strength base, but two vastly different skill sets and fitness levels:

• ATHLETE 1: Super well developed high level of skills in both the gymnastic world and in regards to Olympic Weightlifting, but instead a pretty poor fitness level when it comes to pure fitness as in Cardio vascular capacity like running, and just low levels of the general ability to move themselves and loads for long distances and / or durations.
  
  
• ATHLETE 2: Not yet highly developed when it comes to the gymnastic & weightlifting skills, but instead a great Aerobic base and plenty of “grunt style” capacity.

We now take those two athletes and let them “compete” against each other in two very different workouts, and remember that for this example's sake we say that they have basically the same level of top end Strength, body weight wise and loaded.

Here are the workouts we've chosen for this example:

• Workout 1 -  10 Rounds for Time:
  - 5 Ring Muscle Up
  - 10m Hand Stand Walk
  - 1 Squat Snatch at Body Weight
  
  
• Workout 2 - 10 Rounds For Time:
  - 10m Burpee Broad Jumps
  - 200m Run
  - 30m Sand Bag Carry at Body Weight

It’s quite easy to think that Athlete 1 (more gymnastic & advanced weightlifting) will win Workout 1 hands down, athlete 2 will likely not even be able to get the workout started with the lack of advanced skill yet to be developed.

Similarly, we can assume that Athlete 2 will crush Athlete 1 in Workout 2 as we’ve already established that Athlete 1 has a poor “base fitness”.

So, we could then assume that it’s a draw? Not so fast..

What if we modify the workouts so that the actual MOVEMENTS becomes doable for both athletes Skill Sets, and perhaps a bit more applicable to real life (When last did you do a Squat Snatch in your living room or walk on your hands getting to the bus?):

What if Workout 1 instead is 10 Rounds For Time of:

• 5 Burpee Pull Ups
• 20m Over Head Carry, 50% body weight - or alternatively 20m Bear Crawl
• 3 Front Squat at Body Weight

Now remember that in this example we said that both athletes had a similar top end strength level, which leads us to believe that Athlete 2 would likely “win” over Athlete 1 in this simplified variation of Workout 1 simply because they have a bigger base fitness and engine?

Here's a couple of other examples that are perhaps a bit more extreme, but still helps us make our point: 

What if we make the athletes perform 500m Burpee Broad Jumps vs 500m Hand Stand Walk?
Who would finish faster? Who would build more real fitness? The Hand Stand Walk would arguably condition (or break) the shoulders, but it wouldn't necessarily trigger as much of a conditioning effect as the Burpee Broad Jumps would..

What if the tests are: Carry your body weight 500m and perform a 1RM Squat Snatch.
We know that the athletes would win 1 event each, but in reality who would be most able to use "their fitness" in a real life situation? 

What’s the point?

Which of the athletes would you call if you were moving houses?

Who of the athletes would you wish were living in your house if it was on fire?

Who of the athletes would you be likely to get a “Hell yes!” From if you ask them to go on an adventure like climbing a mountain, or even just a hike..?

Not everyone is a badass firefighter like Charlie here, but carrying heavy stuff is always a good "skill" to have..

The point is this:
Skills are, in our humble opinion, often overestimated in regards to how we measure fitness - often due to the focus that’s given to them in the “Sport of Fitness”, aka CrossFit.

Wait now, are you saying that CrossFit is wrong? Are you saying that Skills are unnecessary..?

No, absolutely not. By learning higher level Skills you can as earlier mentioned use them to increase the power out put in your workouts, some times. And by learning new Skills and having goals like “my first pull up/rope climb/hand stand walk” or “a body weight Squat Snatch” as a few examples it makes the training FUN.

Skills are super cool, and we definitely continuously work on improving our members skill level on a regular basis. BUT, the next time you think you should spend MORE TIME on developing them… just remember skills are not necessarily a correlate to a true expression of fitness.

Running, picking up heavy stuff and carrying it, simpler variation of both gymnastics & weightlifting might in fact be a better way to measure true fitness if you ask us.

That said, there's nothing wrong with having a focus on them if you ENJOY working on those higher level Skills, and you will definitely be able to build fitness with them as part of your arsenal as well. Our approach is to develop Skills steadily while ensuring that your actual Fitness Training is filled with a mix of simpler movement and only sometimes the more complex ones as we believe that will actually allow you to become the Happiest, Healthiest & Fittest version of yourself!

The higher level Skills are also definitely necessary to develop for anyone that wants to do well in the sport of CrossFit, like for instance the Open or local competitions.
And we will always support a healthy level of Skill Development both in our classes for our regular members, and through our more competitive programs for those athletes that have chosen to make the Sport of CrossFit their big goal.

Skills can absolutely be functional and definitely are FUN, we're not saying you shouldn't work on them.

CONCLUSION:

We 100% believe that developing skills, in alignment with your actual goals, should be part of your training and we will definitely continue to program opportunities to develop those skills in our CrossFit classes.
BUT, we will also continuously give you opportunities to develop your true fitness first and foremost. We will continue to push for a fitness that is well rounded and mainly lends it self to the goals that you most likely had when you joined us, or that you have if you are considering doing so as a beginner right now: 

• Improve your overall fitness levels to become a Happier & Healthier human being.
• Reduce stress from your every day life outside of the gym.
• Maybe even reduce the risk of needing medication to manage health conditions associated with an unhealthy lifestyle.
• Being able to pick your kids up and play with them outdoors.
• Play sports and go on adventures with your buddies.

Or maybe simply enough just FEEL stronger in your every day life and feel better about what you see in the mirror, because funny enough “looking better naked” is still a big reason why many human beings join our PEAK Gyms to this day.

So the next time you think about that question, “What is Fitness?”, and how it applies to you, maybe the answer is simply: being able to do the physically (and sometimes mentally) hard things in life in a way where I can be proud of myself!

We think that’s a great way to look at it and when you do too, you know that PEAK is the best place out there to help you achieve that level of Fitness.

See you in class soon?

YOUR TEAM AT PEAK

EDITORS NOTE: This is the first part of a 3 article-series sharing our definitions of what it means to be Happy, Healthy & Fit as a PEAK-member, next week we'll take a look at what HEALTH truly means, and among other things ask ourselves the question: "How much Fitness do you need to call yourself healthy?" Stay tuned!