CrossFit: Community, Overtraining, and Rehab Nutrition

What are your thoughts on CrossFit as a whole? I mean, you know what, it's just like anything else. It depends on what box you go to, right? So it's just like this, man. If I go into fitness first and there's 20 trainers there, they're not all going to be good. Most of them are going to be pretty shit, to be honest. There's going to be one or two guys that are really keen, and then the other ones are just going to be terrible. Same thing with CrossFit. If you have somebody that only does CrossFit education, they're probably not going to be that good. If the guys that come to our courses or they go to Kilo Strength Society and they learn their programming, if they're seeking people outside and kind of blending that together, that's where you're going to find the best, most well-rounded CrossFit coaches, and they're typically going to have the most well-rounded CrossFit athletes. I think one thing that, like I said, there's a lot of good and bad. One of the things that I noticed with CrossFit is it tends to attract a lot of people that have addiction issues, and what I mean by that is they're addicted to exercise, right? So you get people, especially they think they're going to be the next championship CrossFit guy, and they'll train three hours a day, twice a day, and they don't realize that that's probably not all that necessary, that they need to really streamline and work on the stuff they're really bad at and even everything out and bring it up together. And they also tend to overtrain a lot or overexercise a lot, and they don't feed it, especially the women. they will train 6-7 hours a day and they're eating fuck all calories and they want to know why their performance sucks and why they keep getting injured and if you keep getting injured and you're dieting you need to really stop dieting and work on fixing yourself up even from our clinic perspective the majority of the athletes that come into our clinic we give them rehab modalities they've been to a chiropractor They're all diagnosed with the same issue. They've all given them roughly the same treatment plan. None of it's ever worked. So they come to us and they tell us, yeah, I've been to this person, this person, this person. They all basically told me the same thing. We put them on the table. We're like, we're going to tell you the same thing. Like your diagnosis is correct. All these rehab exercises are correct. So now we need to find out why the rehab stuff isn't working. And almost 9.9 times out of 10, they're dieting and not eating enough to support the rehab. and the minute we get them to double their calories, all of a sudden all their injuries magically go away and all of a sudden the rehab works, right? But when you're working on high-level athletes, nutrition is the hardest thing to get them to understand, especially when it comes down to weight class athletes. Weight class athletes, they know that to keep their weight down, they under-eat, but they under-eat way too much. rather than making it just that happy little medium under eat just enough make sure your TD is enough and you'll be absolutely fine they're scared to death to eat more because they think they're going to put on weight but most of them are eating so far below their TD EE that even if they doubled or tripled their calories they would still be in a deficit so we put them on higher calories they never gain weight but they get better but those are some of the issues I see with CrossFit but I like CrossFit as a whole I think if you don't have enough time and you get to it, you can find a really good CrossFit box. They're very efficient with what they do because they work really hard, really fast, and then they recover. Or that's how it should be done. When you kind of first walk into a CrossFit box, a lot of the CrossFit facilities I've gone to and kind of like joined in the workouts, you'll have a really nice concurrent model of a workout where the first 20 minutes, they'll say, okay, we're going to work up to your heaviest five reps on a squat. You've got 20 minutes to get there. Then the next 15 or 20 minutes might be like a really brutal Metcon. And usually now they're pretty well-rounded, and in the last 20 minutes, well, they'll practice gymnastics or they'll do some other conditioning or something else. So I've been really impressed in the last couple of years with some of the places I've gone to because it seems like they're really dialing in what they're doing, and it's making a lot more sense than it did 10 years ago. Is it, I guess, quite an efficient training modality to have the strength and the condition in the same workout? I guess you're not going to get the best of both worlds. You'll get somewhere in the middle. Is that right in thinking? Yeah, I think it depends what you're looking for. You'll have a lot of people talk about interference effects between strength training and conditioning and all that. I had some talks of me and Mike T Nelson and some other guys and when we start thinking about that interference effect is so such a low percentage it not really something people need to be worried about because people seem to think that if they go do an hour-long weightlifting session and then do 20 minutes of aerobics after it oh you just wasted your whole session realistically that's not true and it's probably not worth worrying too much about what I've noticed over the last 10 years is the majority of it comes to their food if they just feed for performance instead of focusing on feeding for fat loss or feeding for hypertrophy feed for performance that usually overrides a lot of this a lot of the things that people see and the thing is like most of the people that go to CrossFit they don't want to build slabs of muscle right there you look at most gen pop people they don't want to be dick skin lean they want to be unfat um they don't want to they don't want to bench press 200 kilos they just want to look be a little bit stronger so i think crossfit fills in a lot of that stuff where it's it's group training everybody's having a good time they've got their community they they've got their friends there they all do it together they've got support and i think that's what they do really well um something that that my wife zoe said to me once is that you know it looks like people go to people go to crossfit to get more fit but they stay because of the community and that's something that crossfit does really well is they've built this amazing community that you don't see in this industry anymore because everybody wants to be solo lone wolves and they're they're scared of opening up and building that yeah and i think one thing crossfit do really well as well is they everyone in there will train hard like they will build that mental capacity to go i'm here to actually work yeah yeah and then the only i mean the only downside of that is sometimes they you get caught up in the moment and you start trying to do things you're not qualified to do yet and train at a level you're not qualified to train and then you get injured but you know as long as you're at a really good um a really good facility with coaches that have been in the industry for a long time they're going to know to tell you to chill the fuck out is there anyone in the CrossFit world, I guess, companies that are doing it quite well, do you think, like programming quite well, and they really know their stuff? As far as CrossFit, you broke up a little bit there, so, yeah, you know what, I'd have to remember, because there's so many different names to these CrossFit places, I'd have to look up what the names are, I will tell you this, like, one of my mentorship students is one of the guys that kind of runs CrossFit Wanderlust in Bali. His name is Matt Bolton. Hold on a second. He actually just came and stayed here, him and his partner, and did like three days of intense mentorship. He does online mentorship swimming too. So a lot of the stuff they do there with their training is a little bit different because it tends to make more sense and it tends to flow a little bit better. So they've also opened up a thing called Macro Kitchen, which is pretty cool. They make pre-done meals, but they also, if you just go in there to eat, you can tell them what you want your macros to be, and they'll prepare your meal right then for exactly what macros you want. So his partner, Henim, does all of that. And he was here learning for three days, and all she did was sit at her computer and create meal plans and meals and all the meals that they're going to start eating and serving at Macro Kitchen. So if people are in Bali, I highly recommend they go by CrossFit Wanderlust and that they go by Macro Kitchen. Because a lot of the followers on this podcast are Australian, I think Aussies spend a lot of time in Bali anyway. So guys, please go there. Yeah. Man, I haven't eaten today because I'm intermittent fasting right now and it's well past my eating window. So when I was trying to remember Matt's name, his Instagram is Boltz. So I was like, Matt Boltz, Boltz, oh shit, shit, Boltz, Matt Boltz. Sorry, Matt.