There are people who do not want to gain only aesthetics when they go to train, but to improve their performance and physical abilities. Endurance, flexibility, power, strength, balance, etc. All these abilities can be obtained by practicing a single sport. Its about CrossFit. It is a sport based on high intensity functional training that helps you improve all these capacities and, ultimately, improve your performance. In addition, if you eat a diet according to your goals and that meets the needs of your workouts, you can also obtain a fairly aesthetic physique.
In this article we are going to focus on how CrossFit trains and what are its advantages over other sports.
CrossFit as a high intensity sport
There are people who are capable of running for 60 minutes in a row and lifting a lot of kilos in basic exercises such as the bench press. These people are in good physical condition, but they can improve a lot more. A discipline such as bodybuilding or weight lifting in the gym is not going to make you gain endurance, but only strength and hypertrophy. On the other hand, if you only train by running, Nor are you going to generate adaptations based on strength and increased muscle.
It has been shown that there are interferences in the body when we perform different exercises depending on the objective we are pursuing. If our goal is totally aesthetic and we want to gain muscle mass, we have to focus only on the weights. If we are continuously doing long-term cardiovascular exercise, these interferences will negatively affect the muscular adaptations that must be made to achieve hypertrophy. The opposite will also happen, if we want to be high performance athletes and we base our diet and training on weight lifting, we will be compromising resistance gains.
This can be avoided by training CrossFit. It is a discipline in which you can work and improve both endurance and physical strength at the same time. And it is that their exercise routines are a combination of both disciplines made for people who want to improve both. You could say that it acts as a physical conditioning program in which we have a functional movement training, but developed at a high intensity.
High intensity is key to breaking our stagnations and surpassing ourselves. If we always train in the same way, with the same weights and for the same time, we will not give the body the possibility of generating adaptations both in terms of resistance and strength.
What is it for
Many people still do not know well what is done in this sport or what it is for. Being relatively new, there is still a lot to work on and learn about. CrossFit is one of the most complete sports activities in the world. He works in a very varied way and thus monotonous activities are not done. There are several main physical areas that are worked on in CrossFit.
The first thing is agility. It is something that with age and sedentary lifestyle is lost. People can regain and gain more agility with CrossFit workouts. Another aspect is coordination, balance and flexibility. These three aspects are related to each other. These are skills that we lose over time and as we age and that can be regained or gained in these high intensity workouts.
The most common goals for people who train CrossFit are: gain strength, power, endurance, precision, breathing capacity, muscular endurance and speed. By working on all these capacities in a varied and non-monotonous way, it confers greater adherence to all training programs. More than once you've probably heard someone say that gym weight training is very boring and monotonous. Maybe it is for someone who is not passionate about training and only wants to achieve aesthetic goals. For these people, CrossFit may be a good option.
Is CrossFit good for gaining muscle?
Something to keep in mind is that if your goal is only gain muscle mass, CrossFit is not recommended. The muscle gain process is very slow and complicated. It requires a series of muscular and nervous system adaptations that can be complicated when training this high intensity sport. In addition, when you want to gain muscle, the most convenient thing is to adapt your diet and your workouts to it.
To generate new muscle and increase our tissues it is necessary to be in a calorie surplus. This is done by eating more calories than we expend with our physical activity and our day to day. If we have a demanding job and on top of that we train CrossFit, other than that the workouts are not focused on hypertrophy, we will have to eat so many calories that it is not sustainable over time.
Therefore, you have to be clear about the objectives you want to achieve once you embark on a mission. If you want to gain a little of everything and your physique is not your main goal, CrossFit is a good option. I am not saying that CrossFit does not achieve a good physique, but it is not the most optimal. In fact, it is very common to see people who have been in a muscle gaining phase training with weights in the gym who start Crossfit in the definition phase. They do this because it is a discipline where the intensity is very high and, therefore, the caloric expenditure is higher.
In these cases, the logic is overwhelming. "I'm going to do high intensity workouts, where I also work on strength, spend more calories and maintain a caloric deficit that helps me lose fat faster." This may seem like the best option, but it is not. High intensity workouts do not allow you to work with high loads. If the muscle does not receive a stimulus to maintain a volume similar to the one it had, if on top of that you are in an energy deficit, it is most likely that you will end up losing muscle mass gained as you lose fat, since the body is not interested in having something that costs it keep it.
I hope that with these tips you can learn more about CrossFit and what its characteristics are.