Injury Prevention In Crossfit
Crossfit can be Good Medicine
Physical Abilities
Crossfit improves your strength, endurance, speed, coordination and balance. Your learn to control your own body as well as external objects such as barbells. This makes you generally fitter as a person which is healthy and a good goal for everbody to have. In combination with a healthy diet this also enables you to build muscle mass and loose body fat.
Toughness
Crossfit makes you a tougher person. It teaches your the value of hard work and how to push yourself to your limits without giving up. That's what improvement really is; an adaptation to a demand at the border of your possibilities. There are no shortscuts, only blood sweat and tears and Crossfit lets the world know this unequivocally. By pushing your limits you will realize that your body is capable of so much more than you thought possible .
However...too much of a good thing can become a bad thing !
Find the right dose
There's a catch to being overly motivated by the exitement and benefits Crossfit brings. You might not want to rest. You don't get stronger by training but by recovering from training. Ignoring rest days leaves you under recovered and promotes injuries instead of progress. Crossfit rarely causes catastrophic injuries while overuse injuries are more common:
„The most injured body parts during Crossfit were the shoulder (n = 87, 28.7%), lower back (n = 48, 15.8%), and knee (n = 25, 8.3%). The majority of injuries were caused by overuse (n = 148, 58.7%). A short duration of participation (<6 months) was significantly associated with an increased risk for injury.“
„An injury rate of 3.1 per 1000 hours trained was calculated. Injury rates with CrossFit training are similar to that reported in the literature for sports such as Olympic weight-lifting, power-lifting and gymnastics and lower than competitive contact sports such as rugby union and rugby league.“
„The shoulder was most commonly injured in gymnastic movements, and the low back was most commonly injured in power lifting movements. Last, the injury rate was significantly decreased with trainer involvement (P = .028).“
These injuries can be avoided by holding back in training. This means treating a WOD as training instead of competition. In weightlifting you don't test your maximum everytime you enter the weight room. You practice your technique and build up your strength in the 70-90% range of your maximum. A marathon runner doesn't build his endurance by running 42km every day but instead different distances at different speeds. Every powerlifter knows that you build strength in training and test strength in competition.
Are You Training for Progress or Exercising to Failure ?
Let's first start with a precise definition what training actually is:
„Training is physical activity done with a longer-term goal in mind, the constituent workouts of which are specifically designed to produce that goal. If a program of physical activity is not designed to get you stronger or faster or better conditioned by producing a specific stress to which a specific desirable adaptation can occur, you don’t get to call it training. It is just exercise.“
Source: (5)
Recover and Adapt
This definition already shows why sometimes less is more. You adapt to a training stimulus by recovering from it. No recovery means no adaptation. If your elbows and shoulders have been hurting for the last month and you haven't made any progress, maybe it’s not because you don't train enough, but because you train too often. Consistency is the key to progress, but beating yourself up in the gym isn't the answer either. If you're not intending to compete 3-4 times of Crossfit a week is more than enough for you to stay healthy and improve at the same time.
Former national coach of mens gymnastics Christopher Sommer:
Train like an adult not like a child
"People who are adults and mature in their approach to training are going to do what they need to do now, in order to get what they want later. In psychology spheres, you’ll see this labeled as delayed gratification...the opposite would be stroking the ego. A child says I want results right now. An adult knows: Do what you need to do now to get what you want later."
Stress is more than muscles
"The problem is that most people only base their training on muscular fatigue. Muscles adapt fast — we’re going to replace all your muscle tissue in about 90 days. It’s going to take me 200-210 days to replace all of your connective tissue. So if I’m only basing my training on what muscle tissue does, I’m further and further behind on what my connective tissue can handle, which means if you’re one of the people that like to push hard in training, you’re just an accident waiting to happen." (6)
Enjoy Training Enjoy Rest
Enjoy the WOD and the way it makes you feel alive, but understand that for longterm improvement and health, rest days are needed. This can mean not training even when you feel like it and training on days you don't want to train. There should be a balanced relationsship between training and rest so that adaptation can occour. This way progress is ensured and injury prevented.
Give 70% in most WODs so you don't burn out in the long run. If crossfit is your hobby don't treat it like a competition but rather like training. Leave something in the tank so your body still functions the next day and can adapt. If you can’t walk the next day it wasn’t a good workout it was too much.
“Enjoy training and enjoy rest because in the long run consistency trumps intensity.”
Coach Georg
Sources:
1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5753934/
2 https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Abstract/publishahead/The_nature_and_prevalence_of_injury_during.97557.aspx
3 https://journals.humankinetics.com/doi/pdf/10.1123/jsr.2016-0040
4 https://startingstrength.com/article/training_vs_exercise
5 https://startingstrength.com/article/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-supercompensation
6 https://anthonymychal.com/3-training-lessons-from-christopher-sommer/