CrossFit and Injuries Study and the Importance of Personal Training

CrossFit critics love to point out that it can be dangerous.

There’s no doubt, people get injured doing high intensity training. They also get injured doing gymnastics, playing basketball, skiing, and playing rugby.

If you’ve done sports, be it hockey or hiking, you’ve probably sustained an injury. Heck, you’ve probably injured yourself doing even silly things like moving a couch or reaching for something in the backseat as you drive.

The point: Sports are dangerous. Life is dangerous.

And when you join a sport, part of the reason you get coached is to keep you safe. You’d never join a gymnastics class and attempt back flips without proper instruction. And if you started with us, you didn’t start doing Olympic lifting and handstands and rope climbs and pull-ups without proper one-on-one care coaching.

At Madlab School of Fitness, we believe it’s our job to help you gain strength, speed, power, mobility, stability, as well as ingrain proper movement patterns for life, to prepare you for whatever life throws at you. The idea has always been that the movements you learn in personal training will prepare you for life, whether you’re an aspiring Games athlete or a grandma looking to stand up off a public toilet until she’s 100 years old.

Our job isn’t to watch you in an on-ramp group class along with 20 other athletes throwing weight around that’s too heavy for you at a high intensity, over and over – which is why all of you have been through one-on-one personal training.

Getting to the critics:

The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research published an article in 2014 about CrossFit and injuries. Link to article here.

The authors of the article followed 132 CrossFit athletes and concluded that injury prevalence during CrossFit training is similar to sports like gymnastics and Olympic weightlifting, and lower than contact sports like rugby. Shoulder and spine injuries were reported the most often.

The study took into consideration many different variables:

“The questionnaire included patient and health demographics including age, sex, smoking status and alcohol consumption. And performance enhancing drug use,” stated the authors of the study.

But what the study didn’t report—which is arguably more important than age, sex and smoking status—was whether or not the athletes getting injured were being coached individually, or if they were simply hitting high intense, random workouts day after day without due care for their own personal physical limitations. It didn’t take into consideration whether they were being coached at all, for that matter.

At Madlab, we believe that while injuries can, and will inevitably happen, it is the people, not the training itself, that tends to be the biggest cause of these injuries.


For example, if you’re an athlete with limited shoulder mobility and scapular stability and you try to lift 135-lb. over your head for 30 reps in a row, there’s a higher chance of getting injured than someone who has been properly trained, and who has the strength, power, technical ability, as well as mobility and stability to handle the volume and load.

So while the article can be seen as threatening to CrossFit affiliates worldwide because it accuses the training as being dangerous, we do not see it this way.

Instead, the article presents real data about injuries among 132 of its study subjects. And it provides Madlab School of fitness data that will help steer new athletes to coaches who will help them avoid injuries.

The article goes on to list certain aspects of CrossFit movements that make people particularly susceptible to injury. The kipping motion is one of these movements.

“This may lead to the unusually high prevalence of shoulder injury…,” the article stated.

This once again comes down to personal responsibility in terms of selecting appropriate movements for each individual.

There are many athletes at Madlab School of Fitness who are not clear to kip. One of they key concepts of the CrossFit methodology is that each movement and workout is universally scalable. So while some athletes may have adapted to and have the fitness to complete 100 reps of kipping chest to bar pull-ups safety, others practice ring rows or strict pull-ups in bands that assist them in order to protect their shoulders, or simply to build strength before introducing the kip safely.

Figuring out what movements are right for you is crucial to your training. And by the time you all reached group classes, you should all have been familiar with your own “Rosetta Stone,” so to speak. Your Rosetta Stone helps you translate how to scale movements to meet your current limitations. So, for example, if you have shoulder stability or mobility deficiencies, you know that when squat snatch come up, you’re working on overhead lunges or strict presses. And, of course, as you improve, your Rosetta Stone will change.

If you don’t think you know your “Rosetta Stone” today, are often unclear about how much weight you should be lifting, or how to properly scale movements, or even if you just want to sharpen your skills, contact your coach and do some more one-on-one sessions.

Even if you’re a top athlete, one-on-one training is going to help you. It will help you improve physically. It will keep you safe. It will ensure you’re here for the long haul.

Thursday

Warm-up:

20 Bowler Squats/20 Cassak Squats
Light 250 meter row
2-minute Goblet Squat
Harder 250 m row
5-minutes of empty barbell work

Tech: Hang Cleans (5, 5, 5)

*Last month we did 3 rep hang cleans. What can you do for 5 reps?

Workout: 3 minutes on, 3 minutes off times 3

3 minute AMRAP:

3 Hang Cleans (165/115 lb)
25 Double Unders (or 50 single skips or 50 high knee skips)
Rest 3 minutes

Repeat 3 times

*Scale accordingly. Choose a weight where you can do 3-reps in a row. That being said, this should be heavy.