Re: Crossfit
I for one subscribe to the fitness notion that "to each his own," even if it's a fitness notion that creates a vulnerability to injury:
http://www.board.crossfit.com/forumdisplay.php?f=12
Strength training is NOT just about body-building. The notion of activity specific training is spot on.
www.tabataprotocol.com More specific, even is this: If I want to learn how to run/fall/jump, go to cover, stand off-hand in cover ready for extended times with my M4, then I do those things with my M4. If I want to do 300 meter intervals with my M4, duty belt (if I had one - I'm not LE or military), body armor, radio, etc., then I'd run 300 meters with that gear.
Strength training, properly executed, provides the musculo-skeletal-ligamental/tendon-joint surface integrity necessary to engage in the specificity of interval work and activity specific effort. By properly understood I mean x1 per week, 12' total exercise time, compound movements over no more than 8 exercises, each rep performed to total, complete muscular failure with perfect form and the final rep of each exercise ended with a 30" static hold, if you have anything left in the tank after the primary exercise.
Unless you're in your 20's or 30's, how lean one gets is a direct and primary function of nutritional protocol, unless of course you are doing CF x4/week x2 hrs/session, or, training for marathons with 60-70 miles per week (or you're a Kenyan
And that nutritional protocol is optimized if it's high in saturated fat, middling in protein and just enough carbs to sustain ones activity specific efforts, coupled with ABSOLUTELY NO WHEAT/GRAINS of any kind!!
The gains one gets from any fitness protocol are NOT derived from the exercises themselves, but rather in the recovery intervals that occur between bouts of the exercise. There is no more important area in which the old adage is true than in fitness training: You cannot get enough rest!! and so the trick is in figuring out how get the optimum balance between strength training, activity specific work - intervals, if you will, recovery time and the nutritional protocol that supports it all. Anybody can get injured. It takes no smarts to produce that. Not everybody is smart enough however to be "smart" about these critical variables.
tony
(now retired from being a Clinical, Health and Exercise Psychologist - although still training HIT x1 per week and at 73.5 yoa standing at 5'6,5" and 159.0 w/ 9.9% BF this AM.