Core Values
The common crossfitter relishes in the ability to jump into a road race, participate in an intramural sport, or keep up with their kids with no prerequisite training required. This ability to plug and play is just one of the many wonderful side effects that come with the adoption of the Crossfit lifestyle. While Crossfit forms the sturdy base for your personal fitness goals, whatever they may be, this foundation starts even before air squats, pushups, and pullups. Fitness starts at your core.
Like your grandmother always said, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Crossfit adopts this same mantra of building athletes from the inside out, or more specifically from core to
extremity. It begins to sound like a broken record but being able to keep your core properly engaged through every movement will pay dividends down the road. Proper core engagement means avoidance of injury, increased efficiency, and more adaptive body mechanics for whatever life may throw at you.
We all know that the name of the game is to increase work capacity across broad time and modal domains. However, attempting to move faster in a way that compensates core engagement is much like upgrading performance parts of a racecar that has no engine. Imagine an athlete who cannot yet maintain a hollow body hold. Even if this athlete is capable of pulling a 400 pound deadlift off the ground, do you think they would do so in a safe manner?
The beauty of Crossfit is that all movements are infinitely scalable. This means that every movement can be tailored to an individual athlete in degree of difficulty, but still maintain the same intent. Building core proprioception, or a sense of body position with core engaged, is the first and most important scale for any and all movements that we do. Take for instance, the handstand pushup.
While it may be true that a standard pushup is a precursor to this handstand version, the movement is actually built around a more fundamental core engagement exercise, the plank hold. How could an athlete be expected to complete a perfect pushup without first having the ability to maintain a static plank hold in the pushup position? Very often work completion gets prioritized ahead of work quality but it is inevitable that the athlete who turns into Quasimodo when pulling 400 pounds off the floor will run out of luck sooner or later.
A standard warmup at IBCF will include core engagement exercises that help to wake up your core which has most likely been turned off for much of the day (especially if you sit down all day). This idea of core to extremity means that by waking up the core we can then go forward with mobilizing specific muscle groups required for the prescribed workout that day. An easy way to get ahead of the game is by completing the daily programmed ready state work. This work is intended to be for completion, not for time, which makes it a great opportunity to focus on core engagement through the movement. Chipping away at the ready state work throughout the day will help to build proprioception of core engagement faster because it will be worked on for more than one hour of the day.
Virtuosity is defined as performing the common uncommonly well. This speaks to the importance of quality of work, not just completion of the work prescribed. An athlete cannot master the barbell until they have mastered the PVC pipe, and this mastery starts with understanding the very basis of all the movements that we do, which is the core. There is no shame in scaling a movement to a more appropriate substitute. Taking initiative in setting yourself up for the future is a decision you will not soon regret.
Written by: Coach Seth (see more on Coach Seth)
