Crossfit: Time to Change its Reputation
“Yeah I’ve been wanting to try crossfit, but I’m worried about getting injured.” My roommate says to me after I had just returned from my most recent workout at the crossfit gym. I have heard sentiments similar to this for years, and especially during my chiropractic school training. After having met the local crossfit gym owners Taneil and Jared of Crossfit Low Oxygen 2, I decided to do some investigating on the topic. I knew the rumors and a lot of expert opinion on injury rates in different sports, but I wanted to know what the hard numbers were, and what the most recent research says on the matter. What I found was a bit of a surprise to me, firstly that there actually is some decent research on the topic in spite of the relative newness of the sport. You see it takes a long time to create published peer reviewed research. It can sometimes take years for data from research studies to be available to practitioners and it takes even more years (15 or more) for these findings to be incorporated into things like textbooks and syllabi of students. So I was very excited to see studies within the past few years on the topic of crossfit and injury rates. What I found was also surprising to me, The research found very little difference in the injury rates between more common sports such as soccer, football, long distance running, and crossfit. In fact some research suggests that sports such as soccer, football and basketball have a higher predisposition to injury because of the incidence of contact with other players (Klimek et al. 2018). Unfortunately most of the studies in this analysis were survey studies, which are pretty weaksauce in the research nerd world which I spend a lot of my time. Then I came across a study of military athletes and their training and injury rates. Studies of military recruits are especially great because so many aspects of military life are controlled and similar across the groups being studied, and not to mention these are highly fit and motivated individuals that want to be able to train in order to be prepared for the high risk scenarios that they encounter as part of their daily lives. The researchers looked at a broad range of training types in their analysis, much of military training is based on old school training incorporating a lot of miles hiking and running with or without packs on, and a lot of previous injuries are associated with these training programs. So they assessed if changing up the training to high intensity fitness training or crossfit type training would increase rates of injury and/or decrease their performances. What they found was no significant increase in injury rates with the high intensity crossfit style training. In fact, the researchers suggest that it may actually decrease the chances of injury because the military recruits weren’t running as much(Poston et al. 2016). Coming from an extensive running background in which I sustained many different overuse injuries, this actually made a lot of sense to me. It seems like a lot of our initial opinions on crossfit as medical providers and individuals were skewed by our own biases and limited exposure to these athletes. These are some of the limitations which research is designed to get rid of. Can you get injured while doing crossfit, of course… Just like you can get injured running, playing soccer, skiing, and rock climbing. As crossfit and fitness training keep growing in popularity, the medical community and society as a whole needs to begin to recognize it as another form of sport that poses no difference in injury rate and occurrence than other sports.
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