CrossFit: Crazy People or Good Workout?

In what is sure to become known as legendary post, our friend Captain Power put out a "Challenge to CrossFit Herbs". Captain Power and our other friend from Fitness From Ground Zero are staunchly Anti-CrossFit. While many other people have raised concerns about the potential pitfalls of a group that uses a clown on a dialysis machine as their mascot, they are not concerned about this workout being too intense. They simply come from a more old school workout mindset where CrossFit doesn't make any sense. As Captain Power points out in his elaborate thesis, among other things:

• They don't use heavy enough weight. So you won't gain muscle
• They do too many sets. This will make you LOSE muscle
• They "time" everything. Annoying, unnecessary and possibly detrimental
• They mix exercises together that don't belong together
• The exercises should smooth you out and prevent "cuts"

As I mentioned earlier, many other people have concerns about the serious medical issues some people have encountered as a result of ramping up to crazy crossfit workouts. This has been documented in recent articles, but to give you a sample here is a blog post that came up when googling "crossfit hospital"

"Hello everyone. I've been doing crossfit for about 6 weeks and loving it. It completely suits my style to push hard and improve. Lost 16lbs already. Unfortunately I've overdone it. Pretty sure it was the GH situps last week that got me. The trainer discussed how careful to be about damaging the soft tissue and scaled it back since I hadn't done that move before but still got in trouble. (followed the next day with FGB makeup day!)

Anyway, a couple days after that workout my urine looked like coffee and I was concerned something could be wrong with my kidneys."

Sounds like fun!

On the other side of things, I have friends like the one who responded to Captain Power's blog post who swear by the conditioning that Cross-Fit provides. Already an avid runner, he says that only two months of CrossFit have gotten him ripped and counters some of Captain Power's arguments by saying that you can always increase the weight used in the program. He also claims that it is "total body conditioning and flexibility". Bottle, another PTU contributor, also supports the idea of CrossFit saying it sounds like fun and would be a great full body workout. His only concern is that you put a lot of effort in and don't gain that much mass. 

PTU, what do you think about CrossFit? I'll put up a poll shortly...