The How and the Why

I am going to write on this blog with the understanding that about a dozen people will read it and 10 of them will be from CFW. When Jen and Carl said we needed to start keeping blogs and actually updating them I was all for it, but having something to say...that's a different beast entirely. After thinking about it here and there I have decided to use this blog to post my thoughts about crossfit, olympic lifting, programming, training in general and whatever else jumps into my head. I will also use it to highlight members of the gym who warrant some recognition...this might be Liz getting her muscle-up (soon!) or Keith losing to me on the quest to 50 pull-ups, or Raymond's dodgeball cannon of an arm that he unloads on people with extreme prejudice. Pretty much anything that strikes my fancy.

To kick things off, I am going to give anyone with the stamina to read it all a brief history of how I found crossfit and functional training and why I love it so much.

Here goes: I first started reading seriously about fitness and training my last year of high school ('03-'04). I say "seriously" because I was moving beyond the bodybuilding magazines and starting to stumble across coaches who actually believed in squatting and functional movements, not body part splits and 3x15 for 2 hours. I was interested in training because I was all of MAYBE 155lbs, probably 150. At about 6'1". If I turned sideways people would lose sight of me. If a strong wind kicked up I would find myself three blocks away in an instant. I was constantly injured while playing soccer and snowboarding/skiing growing up, and looking back I think it was a combination of me having no inner voice saying, "You probably shouldn't try that..." and being too weak to protect my body. I wanted to get bigger and stronger and so I started learning how that should be done.

In the first year of college (maybe a big before) I found Alwyn Cosgrove and thought his ideas and programs were something worth following so I read as much of his stuff as I could. I also read anything ever written by anyone else who thought he was quality. I was unknowingly working my way through most of the editors of what T-Nation. Around this time I learned who Dan John was, who Bill Starr was, stumbled onto Ross Enamait, Mike Robertson, Eric Cressey, the list goes on. I started collecting books on training and diet and reading them all. I became fascinated with programming and got a hold of Cosgrove's program design manual and ate that up as well. I learned what tempo was, the history of "good" training, what "super squats" was, the difference between eccentric and concentric, what a mesomorph is, what hypertrophy is, etc. Looking back, these couple years of reading were when I taught myself enough to actually have a conversation with someone or understand any given article on training.

During this time I was, of course, still weak and small. I remember searching for "pull-ups" or something similar in 2006 and coming across crossfit's main site. The workout was something with L-pull-ups and the picture was of Brendan Gilliam cranking one out. Shirtless. With a hat on backwards. I immediately thought, "What the fuck is this??" and back pedaled quickly to google search to find another site. I never thought about it again.

While sucking up Cosgrove's stuff I saw somewhere that he required his trainers to read Rip's "Starting Strength" so, of course, I bought it. One way or another this lead me back to the crossfit main site in spring of '07. This time I gave it a shot. For me, that doesn't mean I jumped in on the WOD that was posted, but instead read every journal article I could find. I read EVERYTHING. A week or two later of reading for literally hours a day, I gave it a whirl. I was sold. I did "Cindy" and got something like 5 rounds. Other than the occasional focus on olympic lifting, I haven't looked back since.

That's the "How", more or less. Next post will be the "Why"...