Crossfit Image: Lyndon Marceau / Incite Images

When you join Crossfit, you don’t so much join a gym as join a “team”.

The sport of Crossfit is a gym workout turned into a race against the clock, and against other Crossfitters – a new breed of fitness buffs who shun expensive machines in glitzy surrounds in favour of more basic  gym activities in converted warehouses and garages around Australia, and around the world. They say that when you join Crossfit, you don’t so much join a gym as join a “team”. Utilising social media to form associations and record progress, this new band also gets together in a series of competitions that lead all the way up to World Championships, held this month in LA (July 13-15). Inside Sport recently witnessed the Reebok Regional  finals at the WIN Entertainment Centre in Wollongong, which decided our contenders for the title of Fittest Man/Woman on Earth. Its basic philosophy is summed up in 100 words by its founder, Greg Glassman: “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practise and train major lifts: deadlift, clean, squat, presses, clean and jerk and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week, mix these elements in as many patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.” And that’s it. But we asked our winner, the “fittest woman in Australia”, 22-year-old Kara Gordon, from Brisbane, to expand.

BEGINNINGS

“I was very sporty as a kid. I was a swimmer all through primary school and on my way to a higher level but sort of lost interest. I guess I thought I was too cool and wanted to hang out with friends instead. I always had a competitive sporting instinct, definitely, but I got a bit sidetracked and a bit lost. So when I was 19, I went back and joined a regular gym. I spent a lot of time running on the treadmill and riding the bike – because all I was interested in was losing weight and toning up. Typical girl stuff.

“Then I met a personal trainer, Brian Bucholtz. Brian wanted to get me into everything, so I tried a kickboxing class at his suggestion and loved it. That brought out my competitive side. Then Brian opened his own gym, Crossfit Roar, in February last year, and that’s when my

life really changed.”

CROSSFIT

“We have a poster up in the front of our gym, and it’s Crossfit all over: it says, ‘Motivated people only. Leave your ego at the door. ’ Crossfit is about people of every age, both genders, every size you could imagine, all coming in for the one purpose: to challenge yourself and make yourself feel better. There are no mirrors in our gyms. Looking at yourself in a mirror is not going to achieve anything; we want people to focus on what they’re doing. We don’t use a whole lot of equipment – the idea when you come in for our workouts is to be prepared for anything.

“We try to move functionally – how our body is supposed to move. We actually use our bodies as the tool. Though we do add weight, of course.

“It’s like joining a club rather than joining a gym. We don’t even like to call it a gym – we call it a box. It really does feel like a club, a sport, where you come together on the same team. We’re a family. We all see each other just about every day, and we help each other, because we’re all on this path together.

“That’s the whole idea of having one set workout a day, which we all do together. That’s not to say newcomers do all the exercises as prescribed: within that workout we have scaling options, so you can scale down: someone might have an injury or be not quite as strong, and maybe not as fast or a different age – whatever the reason there’s the option to scale back. That’s why it’s good – we’re doing it as one, but always to our own ability, so you’re competing against yourself.”