81718 CrossFit Politics Condensed
MetCon//
32:00 AMRAP with a partner or alone
30 Pull-ups
50 Kettlebell Swings 53/44
96ft Handstand Walk (192ft bear Crawl)
If CrossFit, as in the global company, was just a house in your neighborhood, the affiliates would be like a friendly grandma inviting people in for lemonade. CrossFit’s founder and CEO Greg Glassman is like a protective father who answers the door with a shotgun and says, “have my daughter home by 9:30.” He’s also holding the chain of a big snarling dog who just smells trouble and is ready to wreck. That’s CrossFit’s legal staff.
In 2013, the NSCA (National Strength and Conditioning Association) published a study that concluded really unfounded injury rate data from a CrossFit gym in Ohio. It’s infamously know as NSCA’s Ohio CrossFit paper. Long story short, the study was published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, CrossFit sued, won. Actually CrossFit won big initially, and continues to win in court. Not only was the NSCA found guilty of knowingly publishing bogus stats to deliberately hurt CrossFit’s influence in the fitness industry and protect their own, but then later found guilty of intentionally tampering with evidence and other documents to hinder the legal process as well. They owe CrossFit a pretty gross amount of money, and because these are official legal sanctions, their own insurers are off the hook for paying. Really bad news for NSCA.
Ok so what’s the big deal, CrossFit won! End of story right?! Actually I’m personally pretty satisfied with that. Truth is, you’ve probably already experienced the far reaching influence of the study though. The Ohio paper was immediately cited by who knows how many fitness articles. Too many to even track. Your aunt who heard you started CrossFit and lectured you about the safety because of something she read, likely read an article referencing the Ohio study. The influence is still pretty damaging to CrossFit, not really to HCF in our experience, but it’ll come full circle if you care to read on.
So the NSCA and ACSM are/we’re America’s authority on health, fitness, nutrition etc. If just because they’re University and research organizations. Every State school has an exercise science program and you’d think that those organizations should be there to deliver information to the masses about what is healthy, right? They do research carried out in America’s universities. After the Ohio study debacle it becomes pretty apparent that, maybe there’s some other shady dealing going on in these institutions.
Sure enough that’s where we find the Coca-Cola/ACSM and NSCA/Pepsi connections. These two American institutions controll multiple scholarly journals and do the bulk of nutrition and fitness research in America AND they receive big bucks from big soda. It’s no surprise that Coke and Pepsi are such big corporations that they can fund and influence a lot of nutrition research. You just won’t find any studies in their journals linking sugary drinks to diabetes or heart disease. Cleverly, you’ll see intitiatives popping up like the Energy Balance Network which puts labels on the super-market drink cooler telling kids to match their soda intake with increased activity. To the typical consumer, or child, they think “we’ll that’s responsible! I can still buy this soda and feel good about drinking it.” It’s like when tobacco companies started putting filters on cigarette’s to say, “Look we’re healthy!” Don’t drink soda, drink soda, whatever, but Soda probably shouldn’t be paying for nutrition research! So there’s that- CrossFit, “get soda out of nutrition research.”
The other political challenge our community faces is Licensure. The ACSM and NSCA also uses this big soda money to lobby state governments to eventually require lisences for fitness professionals like your coaches at HCF. They’ll use language like, “exercise is meicine,” and I realize that it sounds logical that something as powerful as exercise should maybe be regulated, but if laws like that were to be passed and by the ACSM/NSCA, you can’t think CrossFit gets included in the list of noted licenses. It’s clear as day that exercise is medicine is less about protecting your health and only about collecting money from the NCSA or ACSM certifications. And when people go to the polls, they’re likely still remembering the bogus Ohio study or some Facebook feed article that your aunt read that referenced it. Lisencure essentially means the government is going to be the ones telling you how to squat and that it’s ok to feed your kids soda as long as they go outside and play a little extra. As though that’s been working for the past 20 years.
I don’t know the status of things in Oregon right now. Maybe CrossFit Health (www.CrossFithealth.com) will do enough to end all this before it starts but there might be a day where the gym is closed because we’re all carrying signs at the capitol!