The Real Reason CrossFit is So Popular

You can tell me I drank the Kool-Aid. It’s okay. I promise I’ve heard it before.

I drank the Kool-Aid, joined the cult, started hanging with those douchey bro-type lifters, and I never looked back.

I’ve been a crossfitter for almost 2 years now, if you don’t count the 7-and-a-half months I did it several years ago. And however long I’ve been around, I‘ve been a fan for longer. Over the last few months, people have started asking me why I like it so much. “Why are you so into CrossFit?” they ask me. Over, and over, and over again.

The thing is, it isn’t just me. I did the CrossFit Open this year, which is a worldwide competition where athletes complete the same workouts, record their times, and see how they stack up against one another. And I competed against over 100,000 other women under the age of 40. So there are quite a few of us who dig this new sport.

And so I began to think about it all. Believe it or not, despite the fact that, apparently, I’ve become some sort of a meathead, I’ve thought quite a lot about why I (and so many others) AM “so into CrossFit.”

Here’s the truth: fitness, in and of itself, still isn’t terribly important to me. Yes, I want to be healthy. But if I wasn’t doing CrossFit, I wouldn’t be in the gym nearly as much. I might run/lift/veg out on an elliptical enough hours a week to lose or maintain my weight, but I wouldn’t love it. I wouldn’t turn down invitations for it. I wouldn’t sacrifice sleep or energy for it.

Nope. CrossFit isn’t all about fitness.

For one thing, there are a lot of easier ways to be fit. There are a lot easier ways to get ripped, to have abs, to improve your cardiovascular endurance. Less painful ways, even. Ways that aren’t as hard on your body (Yeah, I’ll say it. We all know it. CrossFit is harder on your body than some other things — and not as hard as others. We choose it. That’s life.)

So why CrossFit? Why do I CrossFit? Why do so many others choose CrossFit?

I think it comes down to this: simple, achievable badassery.

I want to deconstruct this for you, because I do not think those words mean what you think they mean. Let’s start with “badassery.”

Doing CrossFit makes you feel like a badass. Even when you feel like you suck, you also feel like a badass. You feel like you’ve done something hard, like at least you tried, like you could take on the world or, at least, handle the nuisances that you know will crop up in your life before you hit the gym again.

Our world — and I mean the industrialized world, often-but-not-always western — contains a serious dearth of badassery. We are relatively protected and secure (or we think we are, anyway), and most of us are separated from the type of manual work that makes you strong inside and out. I’m talking Ma & Pa Ingalls type work here, the work of people who made an entire life out of nothing, or very little, using their own knowledge, skills, and power.

This sense of badassery is hard to describe, but I think it’s something human beings crave. We want to know that we are strong and powerful. We want to have adventures. We want to sally out into the world on a quest and return home triumphant.

And we want to do it in a physical way. CrossFit requires a mind-body connection, a synergy, that we don’t find very many places in this world of ours. Working with heavy weights requires both your mind and body to be on board. You can have all the skill and strength in the world, but if you think you can’t lift that barbell, guess what? You can’t lift that barbell. On the other side of the equation, you can learn all you want about correct technique and angles and good cues, but if you haven’t developed the strength, that bar ain’t movin’.

You can tell this is a new way of being in the world when you see someone first combine their mind and their body this way in the gym. They might hit a lift they thought they’d miss, or learn to do something they never, in their wildest dreams, would have considered possible. The pieces snap together in their brain: “It’s not just my body. It’s not just my mind. It’s totally and completely both.”

And that, my friends, is badass in and of itself.

When that’s the way you are in the gym, it slowly becomes the way you are in the world. Whether you came in mentally or physically stronger, you slowly become more connected to the parts of yourself that you thought were weak, that you discounted. That may have even cause you to feel ashamed, afraid and less than. An athlete who makes this connection feels like they can take on the world.

So CrossFit offers a sense of badassery that is seriously missing in the world.

But there’s also the sense that the tasks CrossFit asks you to do are achievable. If it was only badass, it would only appeal to people who already considered themselves to be in that category.

Instead, though, CrossFit is accessible to anyone. Because you can scale any workout so that most people can complete it in some way, anyone who walks through the front door can begin their badass training camp today.

The workout is accessible, and so is improvement. No matter how much you have to scale when you start, if you keep coming back, you will improve. Because of physical limitations, some people may never do a particular movement as it is supposed to be done, but they will assuredly get better. They will get stronger at that movement and at others, they will learn how to overcome their own mental obstacles, and they will improve.

When people ask me why I love CrossFit so much, I can tell that they don’t see it: it’s not just about what you can make your body do. It’s about overcoming your own obstacles, whatever those are. It’s the overcoming that is the truly badass part about the sport, moreso even than how much you can lift or whether you have a muscle-up.

Since the badassery that CrossFit offers not only encompasses physical activities that elicit that comment, “She’s a beast!” but the mental/physical strength that only comes out when the mind and the body work together, it is achievable for anyone.

That’s a huge draw to the sport because most badassery seems out of reach for most of us. Trust me: when you can’t do a single push up and you can’t figure out how or when or where to practice them, doing 20 (or more) seems impossible, let alone ever doing pull-ups, muscle ups, and rope climbs. These things end up out there somewhere in the realm of leaping over tall buildings in a single bound. You may long for badassery, but you also know it will never be yours.

CrossFit makes these things achievable.

And so we’ve come to “simple.”

“Simple,” I will tell you straight off, is not a great word for what I’m going for here, but it’s the best one I could find. Here’s what I’m trying to capture: life is complex. CrossFit is separate from life in some important ways, and so CrossFit is much simpler.

I make a distinction here between “simple” and “easy.” CrossFit is hard as hell. The workouts can make you feel like you want to die, and learning some of the movements could encompass a lifetime of study. However, it is (or, at least, is supposed to be, or is ideally) simple, in that it is very much less complicated than the rest of life.

Sure, CrossFit is part of my life, but it’s also separate from it. It’s only recently that I ever brought my kids to the gym with any consistency, because for a long time the gym was my happy place and mine alone. Every once in a while, one of my gym friends (who are wonderful, supportive, lovely, close friends, by the way) will mention something offhand about their daily life and I find myself thinking, “Oh, right, she has a job/spouse/kids. I always forget that.”

It’s not that we keep “real life” from one another, but that, when we enter the gym, we enter a different sort of place. A place where real life isn’t as pressing, where the most real thing in the world is the weight in front of you. And everyone gets that. So we talk about the workout, about what we’re working on in the gym and how we feel about it all and how it’s going, and then we walk forward, together, and try to be better than we were yesterday.

CrossFit is simple, too, in that nothing I do or do not achieve in the gym really matters. I mean, it changes me, and that matters, but it’s not life or death for anyone if I can’t do a pullup or set a new personal record in the squat clean. If I want, I can try again next week, or even in six months.

I think this is part of why CrossFit appeals to that set of people who DO already have a certain amount of badassery in their lives. I’m talking about the military folks, the first responders, and a few others. Most CrossFit gyms have at least a smattering of these folks, too — people who certainly don’t seem to need more badassery.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t really matter in the gym. The stakes are pretty much infinitely lower, because there really are no stakes. If you can’t do it today, you will try again tomorrow. It’s contained, quantifiable. Separate from real life. A safe place to both be and not be a badass. A simple place to practice badassery so that you have it when it counts.

And so we love it. I love it.

In case you were wondering and hadn’t gotten around to asking, or didn’t ask because you didn’t want to offend me (or the CrossFitter you love), here it is: I love CrossFit because it offers me a simple, achievable badassery that I haven’t found anywhere else.

My life is better for it.