In the simplest terms, CrossFit is an incredibly effective strength and conditioning program.  The CrossFit Method will prepare you for life and sport better than any other training regime in existence today. If there were another system that worked better we would steal it and use it at our gym.

CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide. It is also being implemented in nursing homes, pre-schools and physical therapy.....if you fit somewhere inbetween it can probably help you.

Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.

The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We've used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don't change programs.

The needs of Olympic athletes and our grandparents differ by degree not kind. Our soldiers, skiers, mountain bike riders and housewives have found their best fitness from the same regimen. 

Watch Nicole Carrol's video, "What is CrossFit?"  Windows Media, Mov

Download a free copy of the CrossFit Journal article, "What is Fitness?"
Download a free copy of the CrossFit Journal article, "CrossFit Foundations"
 
                                            
CrossFit was created by Greg Glassman in Santa Cruz, CA in the late 90's.  His goal was to create an incredibly effective Strength and Conditioning Program.  He achieved this by developing a training regimin that was CONSTANTLY VARIED,  focused on FUNCTIONAL MOVENTS, and was performed with HIGH INTENSITY. 

Crossfit is constantly evolving.  It has taken what works best and eliminates what doesn't, if an exercise provides superior results it stays in the program, if not it is banished to the scrap heap. CrossFit is what remains - bar none, the most effective fitness program created to date. Through years of ongoing clinical trial (20,000 people a day do Crossfit now) this quest has developed into a fitness movement that is spreading rapidly around the world. From the "average Joe/Jane" to the military, police, professional and amatur athletes Crossfit is delivering results like no other fitness program before it.                          

The CrossFit program contains three essential elements.
1) Functional Movements
2) Intensity
3) Variance

When scaled properly these three elements address the fitness of the elderly as well as that of an elite athlete, the only difference is the load and intensity need to be scaled for the individual. What we have found is that the best results from both groups and everyone inbetween are produced when training with Functional Movements (lifting relatively large loads, large distances, quickly), at High Intensity (more work in less time) and with Constant Variety.
"CrossFit is an incredibly creative and effective program. I thought I knew what variety was until I found CrossFit. I was mistaken. One of my favourite quotes from the CrossFit philosophy is 'strive to blur distinctions between "cardio" and strength training. Nature has no regard for this distinction.'  If you're in a CrossFit gym you're in the right place."
- Tony Leyland, SFU School of Kinesiology
      
CrossFit has been called "The Sport of Fitness" because it re-introduces personal athletic achievement and performance to training. The mindset at the start of each workout is to be stronger, move faster, more efficiently, with better form than ever. This is why even after years of training CrossFit style, scores and times in workouts continue to drop and athletes continue to improve. Its hard, fun, exciting, challenging, and will push you to be your absolute best!

Why Crossfit? Results. Period.
                                              
What's the CrossFit Difference?

In gyms and health clubs throughout the world the typical workout consists of isolation movements and extended aerobic sessions. The fitness community from trainers to the magazines has the exercising public believing that lateral raises, curls, leg extensions, sit-ups and the like combined with 20-40 minute stints on the stationary bike or treadmill are going to lead to some kind of great fitness. Well, at CrossFit we work exclusively with compound movements and shorter high intensity cardiovascular sessions. We've replaced the lateral raise with push-press, the curl with pull-ups, and the leg extension with squats. For every long distance effort our athletes will do five or six at short distance.

Why? Because compound or functional movements and high intensity or anaerobic cardio is radically more effective at eliciting nearly any desired fitness result. Startlingly, this is not a matter of opinion but solid irrefutable scientific fact and yet the marginally effective old ways persist and are nearly universal. Our approach is consistent with what is practiced in elite training programs associated with major university athletic teams and professional sports. CrossFit endeavors to bring state-of-the-art coaching techniques to the general public and athlete who haven't access to current technologies, research, and coaching methods.

There are ten recognized general physical skills, and we train each of these.  They are cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, speed, balance, and accuracy. CrossFit recognizes that you are only as fit as your weekest link, and has developed a fitness program that improves each of these ten skills.

1.. Cardiovascular/respiratory endurance- The ability of body systems to gather, process, and deliver oxygen.

2. Stamina - The ability of body systems to process, deliver, store, and utilize energy.

3. Strength - The ability to apply force.

4. Flexibility - The ability to maximize the range of motion at a given joint.

5. Power - The ability to apply maximum force in minimum time.

6. Speed - The ability to minimize the time cycle of a repeated movement.

7. Coordination - The ability to combine several distinct movement patterns into a singular distinct movement.

8. Agility - The ability to minimize transition time from one movement pattern to another.

9. Balance - The ability to control the placement of the body's center of gravity in relation to its support base.

10. Accuracy - The ability to control movement in a given direction or at a given intensity.