The media portrays CrossFit trainers as uneducated and dangerous. Is it true?

Do CrossFit coaches lack the knowledge to appropriately train normal people without causing injury or do they simply not care?

Through the Atlanta Affiliate League I have conversations with affiliate owners everyday from around the world. Here’s my opinion on trainers:

Awesome CrossFit Coach

Like any profession there are good ones and there are great ones. But your impression of a coach is subjective. Similarly your impression of a chiropractor might be that they are the best in the area yet there are probably several local patrons who dislike that same chiro. Simply because a chiro, physical therapist or trainer has unhappy clients does not make them a “bad” chiro, PT or trainer.

Some trainers are more motivational, others are more instructional, all are a blend of both. I know my style of coaching polarizes people. I regularly receive emails from members unhappy about my coaching style and equal amounts of emails from current & previous members lavishing praise on my awesome coaching ability. So which is true? Both!

Sometimes I cringe when I see a CrossFit coach teach a movement slightly wrong or answer a member’s question with complete bullshit, but I also understand that three important points to remember about that coach:

1. He/She probably knows way more than the client so the insight is still valuable.
2. Teaching a movement slightly wrong is often times not dangerous. Rather, it’s just not the most efficient way to move.
3. Every teacher, instructor, parent, and boss gets questions they can’t answer. So they learn for the next time.

You could argue that with the number of ACL tears going on in College Football that the Strength & Conditioning coaches at Div I schools are uneducated or lack knowledge. But with 10+ years of schooling and experience, we all know this to be false. Div I Strength & Conditioning coaches are extremely educated and experienced yet we still see a high number of injuries in college athletics.

Similarly, seeing injuries in CrossFit does not implicate the trainers nor does it illustrate some kind of inherent danger with the program. Just like in professional training environments for the NFL, Olympics, or Div I athletics, CrossFit puts people in motion using a variety of movements. This is dangerous even with the World’s Greatest Coach. Running is dangerous, sports are dangerous, playing with your kids is dangerous all because the body is in motion.

Writes Negative Articles About CrossFit

I do not believe most CrossFit coaches are uneducated. In fact I believe most of them to be considerably more knowledgeable than others in the fitness industry. We train more chiropractors and physical therapists, more clients in more classes doing more movements than any other type of coach/trainer. Don’t believe opinion articles bashing CrossFit trainers written by a people who have no background in Strength & Conditioning. Peers in the fitness profession have motivation to speak out negatively against CrossFit coaches when they lose clients. A trainer with an agenda can use fear as a final tool to keep people from switching to CrossFit. It’s unethical, but it’s common.

Resist the temptation to join a CrossFit based on membership prices. Do not go with the cheapest option or buy a CrossFit Groupon. Instead evaluate whether the coach and program can help you get in shape and keep you safe. Also take a long look at the culture and environment in the gym. Does the group workout together or is it a group of individuals in the same room? Do you want to stand in a corner doing your workout or do you want to be involved in a community and learn from other members? Ultimately price should be the least important of all the reasons you join a CrossFit gym.

At CrossFit Addiction, we’ve trained more than 600 clients in the 6 years we’ve been open in Acworth/Kennesaw. We’ve had multiple Physical Therapists and Chiropractors as members and see referrals from these professionals every month. Bottom line: We know how to coach, train, and write programming. Newer CrossFit gyms simply don’t have the experience we have.

Every CrossFit gym has injuries and any coach that tells you otherwise is being shady! Ask questions in your free session to ensure the coach has enough experience to make you comfortable. Then trust your coach and use common sense when you workout.

The Jerk Dip & Drive
-via Coach Dan Bell

The dip & drive is the part of the jerk that elevates the bar and puts it in the right place to complete the lift. Weight magnifies error, and the clean puts more weight on your chest and shoulders than any lift you’ll ever do. Little errors in the dip & drive have big consequences. If the jerk dip & drive are done well, everything that follows is faster, more precise, and has better timing.

The place to start is right at the beginning: the dip. A lot of lifters lose their jerks right here. The cue to “stay on your heels” is nearly universal, but people still screw this up. But how? Besides the usual mistakes–such as allowing the hips to follow the knees forward on the dip–many lifters dip too deeply.

The dip for the jerk is not a quarter front squat. Two very bad things happen when you drop your hips too far down. First, the deeper your dip, the greater the tendency to have your hips and center of balance travel forward in the foot. This causes the bar to travel forward as well. From here the forward momentum of the bar bar will almost invariably carry forward on the drive. If you watch from the side, the end of the bar traces a “checkmark,” down and forward, then up and forward.

The second detrimental effect of dipping too deeply is a slow turnaround of the center of the bar. A good weightlifting bar is made of high-end spring steel. Good lifters know how to use that spring to their advantage in the jerk. At the bottom of a good dip, the bar bends and “wraps around” the lifter, ready to spring straight and off of the lifter’s shoulders.

You don’t need this much weight to get some bar bend and “whip.” A great lifter can do it with an empty bar.

This effect can be accentuated by a fast turnaround and aggressive upward deflection of the center of the bar. This fast turnaround is best done with a shallow dip, maybe three or four inches. The deeper the dip, the more acute the knee angle and the less the mechanical advantage at the knee. With weaker mechanical advantage at the knee, it is more difficult to quickly reverse the downward momentum of the bar’s center. That is why I teach a relatively shallow dip that retains more mechanical advantage at the knee, maximizing your explosive leg strength in the drive. Ilyin’s dip (above) is about as deep as I find acceptable. Don’t think of setting yourself up to “throw” the bar in the air. Think of making yourself a solid column that the bar can wrap around.

Sometimes a coach has to be creative. I’ve had some trouble getting the stay-shallow-and-on-your-heels message through to lifters who cannot seem to control the depth of their dip. I combined a couple of different drills to try to address this. The Back Half Push Press seems to work well. Like the Back Half drills I sometimes use in the pull, putting the lifter’s heels on a board and floating the balls of the feet off of the edge takes away the front of the foot. The lifter cannot cheat forward.

With no front of the foot to use, the lifter automatically stays on the back half of their foot and takes a shallower dip. I keep this drill relatively light by having lifters do sets of three. We use enough weight to teach the right “feel” to the movement, but we are not trying to build strength with it.

If you get the depth and the position of dip right, things can still go wrong. In my opinion, too many lifters do not completely commit to the jerk drive. That means complete commitment to using the body to drive the bar all the way to full extension, and not engaging the hands and arms at all until that point. I tell lifters to think of punching the sternum up past the bar or, dip 3″ and drive up 5″. What does that look like?

That’s Holley Mangold laying the wood to the jerk that put her in the Olympics. The bar is still behind the balls of her feet, not over them. Her body is completely extended, but the balance is back so foot movement is easy, almost automatic. Everything that follows this kind of jerk drive is more likely to be fast and precise.

It’s a damn shame to waste a PR clean with a bad fist move in the jerk. So stay back, dip shallow, and completely commit to the drive.

3:00 – 6:00
2 Rounds of:
12 Overhead Squats, 95# / 65#
12 Chest-To-Bar Pull-ups

6:00 – 9:00
2 Rounds of:
14 Overhead Squats, 95# / 65#
14 Chest-To-Bar Pull-ups

The ladder will ascend every 3-minutes until the athlete can not complete the ladder.