Re: "Let's let the athletes compete" - I don't think there's any single athletic competition format that can stand as the optimal measure of general physical preparedness. Why don't decathlon or heptathlon for example measure up to CrossFit? They test both aerobic and anaerobic fitness as well as strength projected through complex multiplanar movements.

@Ash_Bhaskar Agreed and those are great sports. A couple of points though:

1. Their training is sport-specific. While broad, I think CF is even more so.
2. More fundamentally, CF is not a competition format, it is a methodology. The Games are what many see, but that is a minuscule part of the sport and the athletes.
3. If you are not familiar with it (and I see you have technical skills by profession, so you get data and how to use it) read the classic CF article by the founder, Greg Glassman, about what is fitness and how to measure it.

@Ash_Bhaskar PS [journal.crossfit.com]

@Mitch07102 Thanks for sending me that article! I think the central problem in defining a program for general fitness is that developing those ten general skills necessarily requires tradeoffs once you reach a certain baseline that is easily reachable by most members of the general population with well-planned and consistent fitness routines. For instance, progressing in strength once you've maximized neural adaptations requires building and repairing muscle, which imposes constraints on cardio, stamina, and possibly power due to the increase in weight and the body system demands of building/repairing muscle. The article discusses this, but I don't think it really covers the opportunity costs of developing a skill area. It's impossible to maximize all areas of fitness due to recovery limits, and there will never be someone who has greater ability in all ten skills than any other person has in any one skill.

It's necessary to define standards of general fitness by weighting levels of individual skill fitness to compose them. This is an inherently subjective process, and CrossFit's subjective choices in defining general fitness can be inferred through the relative levels of skill development incurred by following CrossFit workouts and routines. In my observations, CrossFit tends to favor strength, speed, and power and disfavor cardio-respiratory endurance, stamina, coordination, balance, and accuracy. While it favors stamina to some degree, it primarily favors shorter-term anaerobic stamina. This also relates to the ways commercial CrossFit gyms are bound by economics, in particular the need to keep class lengths within certain bounds, which again shapes the choices for which skills are developed. For many gyms it's prohibitively costly to hold a regular class that trains stamina over several hours. It's also personally costly for those with full-time jobs and other obligations that consume significant blocks of time but don't develop much fitness.

Additionally, regarding the article's recommendation to regularly learn and play new sports - certain sports can actually decrease health and fitness. This can happen where performance is bound by strength but not by bodyweight, like in football and sumo wrestling. Other sports cause head trauma by design (many combat sports) or as a very likely consequence of the ruleset (soccer). The prescription to try new sports frequently is a generally good idea, but there are some pitfalls, and that's before considering opportunity costs in trying something new vs. practicing in a field of experience.

I'm not saying CrossFit is a bad way of developing general fitness, more that it's inherently impossible to define a broadest-possible approach. There are some ways that are more broad than others, but past a certain point comparing broadness is impossible, and in some cases having broadness as a goal can result in the adoption of counterproductive training elements.

Regarding the sidebox "World-Class Fitness in 100 Words":

• "Little starch and no sugar" is just plain bad advice for most people, especially those who are trying to build muscle or build aerobic capacity. It also eliminates cultured milk products like yogurts, which are probably necessary for an optimal diet if you're not dairy-intolerant given how correlated their consumption and human longevity seem to be.

• Biking, running, swimming and rowing "hard and fast" ignores the relevance to general fitness of performing those activities slower and over more time. "Keep workouts short and intense" is another implication of subjectivity.

• "As many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow" is a stupendous level of combinatorial explosion that is not reflected in CrossFit routines and cannot be, mathematically.