Today’s post is a before and after example about one person’s journey towards elite fitness. This is a story of how effective CrossFit is. That the proof is in the pudding (even though we shouldn’t eat any of that stuff)! A really good friend of ours (Gregg) gave us permission to share his story because I asked. You may have seen him comment on our blog or post on beyondthewhiteboard.
Gregg is a CrossFitter. He has achieved what I would call elite fitness. He is not a specialist, he is a generalist. He is more than fit enough to tackle most things that if you threw a bunch of activities into a hat and drew out a handful he would outperform most others. He has been exclusively doing CrossFit since December of last year at an affiliate and then solely in his garage gym since April of this year. Prior to that he had trained off and on either at a globo gym or on his own. He also has in the past two months drastically altered his diet to follow a Paleo diet. Is the diet purely strict? No, but it’s pretty darn close. What Gregg adopted was CrossFit, intensity, and real change in his eating habits. What he has realized is powerful evidence of what happens with doing it consistently, putting in hard work and having fun. This example shows that CrossFit is evidence based fitness.
Here’s his before pics:
Gregg’s after pics:
I think his story is compelling proof that going to (insert globo gym name here) every day for an hour or two and plunking down on any piece of cardio equipment followed by the same recurring circuits of machines and free weight isolation exercises doesn’t work. Mixing it up with the latest and greatest fitness trend like (insert fad or trend name here) doesn’t work. Adding in the hottest diet such as (insert fad diet name here) may give immediate results but is only temporary and usually results in yo-yo-ing back to old eating habits or worse yet to gaining more weight than pre-diet.
This is an example of what many of us (me included) have experienced at some point in our lives. You want to get “in shape”. You used to be athletic or “fit”. You know you need to get started so you a) join a gym, b) buy an exercise magazine, c) follow a program or cycle that you used to do or is spelled out for you d) learn new exercises as you go or emulate from what others in the gym are doing too. What you forget is most of those people in the gym are in the same scenario as you. Thus begins the cycle: you stick with it for awhile, make some progress, hit a high point, grow bored or busy, put it off, and get back to the starting point. Along the way you may get injured, or heavier, or eat terribly, and so on. That all changed for Gregg when he found CrossFit, started paleo and lost 30 pounds lost in 8 months…
Here’s Gregg’s story in his own words:
Continue reading “Got Results?”
