From the Sidelines

Yesterday I posted up this story about NW CrossFit winning the 2009 Affiliate Cup. I ended up having lots and lots of great information leftover from my chat with NW CrossFit founder Jake Platt, part of which I’m planning on using in a future column about how I myself have actually been doing CrossFit for the past few months.

CrossFit is known as the “sport of fitness”, and rightfully so. Each workout is an intense competition against oneself. In that spirit, here’s a bit more from Northwest CrossFit founder Jake Platt.

On what to expect from the CrossFit games: “It was the third year that CrossFit had an international competition like this; I hadn’t been to the games before so I did’nt know what to expect. ”
On the preparation for the event, specifically about how CrossFit doesn’t release the events until a few days before the games: “You’ve got to prepare yourself for the unknown and the unknowable. We do all of our programming here at the gym, and we made sure to do a lot of CrossFit Football, basically a heavier version of CrossFit. The workouts are a little shorter, but they are geared a little more towards sport. I wanted to make sure our guys were strong. I knew at the games they were going to be setting us up with a really heavy load.”

On one of his clients, former University of Washington football center Juan Garcia: “I just finished training Juan Garcia, getting him prepared for Minnesota Vikings training camp. We went five days a week of two-a-days. He says it changed his life. We have a lot of college players and a lot of ex-Huskies.”

On how he got into CrossFit:“I got into CrossFit in Jan. of 2007. I’d dabbled in it a couple of times. I had to get a trainer to assist me, and the guy I hired was a CrossFit coach. So when I had him training alongside me, I immediately saw his programming was superior to mine. I emptied my cup and went back to school essentially. We went and got our affiliate and went form there.”

On how he’s seen CrossFit grow in our area: “I’ve seen it explode. Last year, I had about 35 people, now we have about 500 members between both gyms. There’s no particular age group or gender that we’re training. We’ve got kids…I’ve got a 5-year-old in here doing burpies. I have a 64-year-old former Admiral…we’re looking to train everybody. We’ve really learned how to scale the workouts to fit within the scope of people’s abilities. Everyone tries to say it’s too hard, too dangerous or too extreme. The beautiful thing is that we can measure performance. We created modified workouts…90 percent of my business is based off of training the general population, from the soccer mom to the computer programmer from Microsoft. From 9 a.m. on on any given day, you’ll see about 20 soccer moms and you’d think you walked into yoga class.”

On the ability to scale workouts, and how it makes CrossFit appealing:: “The art form of training really comes from having a coach that is really capable to asses where someone’s abilities are and provide them an exercise ability that is challenging. That is what we’ve done really well. We have scalability.”