#83： Crossfit & the Primal Future of Fitness With J. C. Herz
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we talk with J.C. Herzetz about her new book, "Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of Crossfit and the Primal Future of Fitness," and the culture that goes around Crossfit.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so if you haven't
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been living under a rock these past five or six years you've probably heard of crossfit
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this new workout routine program where you're using barbells and medicine balls and it's just
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high intense whatever you've probably seen people at your gym do crossfit workouts and you
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probably had friends who told you about their crossfit box anyways i've known about crossfit
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but i really didn't know much about it like the history of it and the development of it and all
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like the culture that goes around crossfit because i don't belong to a crossfit box so i was really
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excited when this book came out called learning to breathe fire the rise of crossfit and the primal
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future of fitness it's by jc hertz and it's basically a history and cultural analysis of
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crossfit which was really fascinating i got to go into this world that i i knew nothing about
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so today on the podcast we have jc hertz on discussing her her book learning to breathe fire
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we're going to talk about what exactly is crossfit some of the workouts that you might see in crossfit
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we're going to talk about the guy who started crossfit the political philosophy that sort of
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underlies crossfit that um most people that aren't aware of we're talking the business model of crossfit
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which i think is very fascinating we're going to talk about why crossfit and other workouts like
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crossfit are resonating with americans right now and uh jc has some interesting cultural insights
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on and why that may be why more and more people are turning to crossfit instead of just you doing your
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typical machine weight machine workout uh it's a fascinating podcast i think you're gonna like it
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so let's do this jc hertz welcome to the show great to be here all right so your book is called
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learning to breathe fire it's about the rise of crossfit why did you write a book about crossfit
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about this sort of this new fitness some would say a fad or a fitness uh trend uh why why that
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there was such a big difference between what was going on in the workouts the experience of the
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people who were doing them and what you would see if you just looked through the window at these insane
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people chucking balls up nine feet in the air so the difference between the experience of the people
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doing it and what you would just see looking through the window was so huge and the tribal dynamics going on
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inside the box were so powerful that as someone who does cultural analysis for a living it just
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seemed very ripe to write about also it's really fun to write about because it's dramatic because it's
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high intensity anything intense is inherently dramatic so one of my inspirations was the book born to run
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by chris mcdougall and i gotta take my hat off to chris mcdougall because he made putting one foot in
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front of the other for 40 miles interesting and that's hard making people competing against each
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other to like lift up heavy objects and do stuff they don't know that they're going to be able to do
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or not is relatively easy to make that read really fun and exciting for people yeah you did a great job
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of that um sort of there's yeah crossfit has sort of this competitive nature in it which makes a great
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story and you yourself you are are you a crossfit practitioner i am but i will qualify that by saying
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that i'm an excellent example of what you can do with zero genetic potential for sports so i was kind
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of dragged into it by my husband my husband started doing it he's like really great athlete so he got you
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know he drank the kool-aid and he was thrown around all the terminology so i had the experience that many
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people have which is someone i know will not shut up about this yeah that there's that joke that you
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know the first rule of fight club is never talk about fight club and the first rule of crossfit is
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never shut up about crossfit always talk about crossfit right so i figured i had to try it kind
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of for the sake of my marriage because if i liked it it would be something we both loved that we could
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share as an interest and if i didn't like it and didn't do at least i would get points or credit
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for trying it so that was my starting point and what i realized when i started doing it was that
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for the first time in my life or because i had never been an athlete uh you know i was always
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smaller slower less powerful i'm a year young in school so i was this shrimpy little kid
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for the first time in my life someone actually gave a damn about my physical capacity and my progress
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like i had a coach and i was on a team right so i finally at the age of 38 right you know i got my
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jersey right i got to be on the team and it resolved a lot of adolescent angst for me and what i find is
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that there's two people who love crossfit when they join one is the people who played sports in high
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school and maybe even in college and they thought that they would never have that amazing experience of
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being on a team and being in the weight room again that that was gone and they get that back
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and they get their varsity letter back and the other is the people like me who were never part of a sports
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culture and the athletes were always you know those people who were sitting at different tables in the
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cafeteria who finally get to experience that esprit de corps and it's great it's it's fantastic even if
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you come to it a little bit late in life and and those two groups of people generally love the
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experience of crossfit okay so let's let's talk about what crossfit is because uh before i read the
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book i had a general idea of what crossfit is was you know olympic lifts combined with you know
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throwing the wall ball combined you know this is sort of like multifunctional strength endurance speed
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agility type workout but i i really didn't know the specifics of it um so for those who aren't
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familiar with crossfit workouts can you kind of explain you know what makes it different from other
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types of exercise routines and what type of workouts a person will typically encounter
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so one thing about it is that it's it's functional movement right so a lot of whole body movements
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not you know sort of single muscle isolation exercises no curls um it's high intensity which
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means you're going to be really uncomfortable when you're doing it your heart's going to be going
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you're going full on all out and then it's constantly varied which means you never get the
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same workout twice which is good it's a different form of torture every day so you combine all these
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different things you do them at high intensity and you develop you know strength skill coordination
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all the rest of it and one thing that tends to hook the kind of type a competitive personalities
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is that it's all measurable right they all of the workouts are sort of named and and you do them and
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then three months later you do them again and you can see that you've improved and for people who like
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to see progress you know you are your own avatar you know for anyone who plays you know online role
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playing games you have these different attributes and you know you sort of build up you are your own
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avatar right you get to build up in your speed and you get to build up in your strength and you get to
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build up and you can coordination you can see evidence of all that like hard numerical evidence
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and that progress in itself is really really motivating so it's not like yeah i went to the gym i did 30
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minutes of this i did some crunches it's like wow i actually got better uh you know i put five more
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pounds on each side of the bar or i did this 35 seconds quicker than i did it three months ago and
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that's really awesome we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor hey art of
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slash art of man and now back to the show and one thing i noticed about crossfit workouts after i
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read the book i decided to actually try some the lingo is wad right w-o-d the workout of the day
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workout of the day and uh the one that i tried out was fran because that was sort of oh my goodness i
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tried it out and the thing is here's the thing with crossfit like workouts is that they look they're
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deceptively they look deceptively easy you're like you're like because like okay on paper yeah so
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tell us like what fran is and um you know what what exercises you do in this and then what it's
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actually like doing because i can tell you my experience it was horrible yes it is it is horrible
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it is the most feared workout in crossfit although there's one other workout that i think is actually
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more miserable for for me but so fran is a simple on paper um a a reputation scheme of 21 15 and then
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nine of two exercises one is called a thruster where you have 65 pounds for a woman 95 pounds for a man
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on a barbell and you you basically take it to your shoulders do a full squat and then you launch upward
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and propel the barbell all the way over your head and that's one that's called a thruster so you do
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21 of those 21 pull-ups 15 thrusters 15 pull-ups nine thrusters nine pull-ups and it is awful because
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it taxes your heart and lungs so you're breathing you're gassed and as you're gassed you're also
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having to having to move significant quantity of weight and it in it's really really it sucks
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terrible and and that's why people at crossfit use it as a benchmark because there's this really
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like depending on how you define it like awesome or completely perverse um pride in being able to
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endure discomfort right and just be able to step up and your mind is telling you stop stop stop this is
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this it just feels bad and you manage to keep going yeah yeah so you do this non-stop like it's
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like it's for time right so it is for time so you don't there's no rest between the different sets
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and yeah i thought i'd be like okay i can probably do this in 10 minutes and it just 10 minutes turned
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into 15 and 20 and i had to bring out the the rubber the giant rubber band to put on the pull-up bar to
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help me yep assisted the pull-ups it was brutal um it was yeah it's not a it's not a workout i would
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recommend as a starter workout for i and the workout that i love the most is called cindy
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and it's great for beginners um it's a rep scheme of 5 10 20 so 5 pull-ups 10 push-ups and uh 15 sorry
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15 squats full air squats and you do a round of that 5 10 15 as many times as you can in 20 minutes
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so as many rounds as possible and amrap and the thing i love about it was that when i started i
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could not do many push-ups on my toes actually started doing them on my knees and i couldn't do
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unassisted pull-ups i had to use the big rubber bands and squats i could do right and i started out
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doing them modified that way and then over the course of a year worked my way up so that i did
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more on more push-ups on my toes every single time and i used skinnier and skinnier and skinnier
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rubber bands on the pull-ups and then no rubber bands on the pull-ups and then i could knock out
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five pull-ups anytime i wanted and so i could really see myself getting stronger and moving my own body
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around in this quantitative way and it was a real accomplishment for me and people look at the
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crossfit games and espn and they think it's for these super humans or for soldiers or firemen
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but everything can be modified or scaled on i mean even fran right there are people who are doing fran
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just with the bar right or doing it with rubber bands on the pull-ups and the point is that
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if you really want to be macho you can try it scaled but if you just want to work within your
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definition of intensity like what you're capable of you can always start somewhere and i think that
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that's one of the empowering messages of crossfit especially for women is that you can start somewhere
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and get really strong you don't have to be this super athlete to even begin and but then you can grow
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along with it you'll get better all right so speaking of fran because that is i guess like
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the first crossfit workout i guess in crossfit lore yes in crossfit lore can you talk about the origins
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of crossfit how this whole thing gets started so crossfit was started by this guy greg glassman who
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was a personal trainer who was you know super super smart um kind of rebellious um not very good at
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working for people and he had originally been a gymnast and he wanted to come up with a workout
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when he was a teenager that would be as taxing as a routine on the rings you know they would get him
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out of breath because building stamina was you know really important in gymnastics so he started
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experimenting his dad's garage with all of these different routines and mixing it up and mixing what
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we call weight lifting with what we call cardio and finding out that actually there's not such a big
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division after all you know if you move a weight around enough it gets very cardio so and that's
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what gymnastics is is moving your own weight around very quickly and you know what it's it's pretty taxing
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on your heart and lungs so when he moved to california and originally to train police officers
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um he started doing this with personal training clients in santa cruz and this eventually morphed
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into you know the crossfit gym in santa cruz which was the original crossfit gym of which there are now
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like 10 000 okay and we'll talk a little about the business model because i think that's really
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interesting about crossfit but so what role did you speak you taught about you just mentioned that he
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trained uh leos law enforcement officials um what role did law enforcement military play in
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popularizing crossfit so first responders i guess broadly defined were some of the first early adopters
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of crossfit because these kinds of high intensity bursts of strength and speed were what they needed
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for their job so the archetype of that would be a fireman right and that guy needs to be able to run
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into a burning building carrying all this gear right the the equipment the oxygen mask the
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everything up a flight of steps right because you're not taking the elevator you're a firefighter
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maybe get an unconscious person sling that person over your shoulder and carry them out so you're
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moving heavy weight quickly and crossfit is perfect for that right so if you're a police officer you have
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to chase a criminal you might get into a scuffle with one of them um that's that's very taxing it's
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the kind of high intensity functional movement that crossfit trains also a lot of mma guys right so
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very very early adoption mixed martial arts for exactly the same reasons it was a great form of
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conditioning for these things that you would do where you had to move heavy weights where that would
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simultaneously also get you out of breath uh at the same time we had a you know bunch of people
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moving into iraq moving into afghanistan military guys deploying they didn't have a lot of expensive
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equipment out there to work out so you needed something you could improvise just with yourself
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and then you know fill a bunch of ammo cans with sand and walk them around and or you know there's a
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great chapter in the book about how these guys in iraq were improvising weight training equipment from
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like the shells and husks of exploded cars and you know trees and you know anything that you could
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kind of find to move and you know during fallujah i mean marines were literally you know stepping out
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into the night to hit a workout of the day just to keep themselves primed for what was going down
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in fallujah yeah and a lot of the response that i've gotten back from the book i mean from marines
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and from special forces guys i mean who've told me the book made them cry because it it really did
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speak to the experience of these people for whom you know high intensity movement was not just a way to
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look better naked it was survival survival because that's yeah you're right because like one of the
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emphasis on fitness nowadays is sex right like you exercise so you look good so you can get sex
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crossfit doesn't really have that ethos i mean i guess um the benefit of it is that yeah you will get
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in shape but that's not the primary not you'll look good naked but that's not the primary reason why you
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do crossfit yeah no i mean it's it's a functional it's a functional movement right so it's the difference
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between sexy because you have the six pack and you can flex your muscles and sexy because you can help
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someone survive the zombie apocalypse right so in in a way to you know the art of manliness
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it it it speaks to a kind of deep sexiness which is the ability to help protect people
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in the real world to actually respond and be responsible for your survival and other people's
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survival so you know being able to flex your abs is one thing you know being able to actually you know
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take your lady friend and throw her over your shoulder like a sack of potatoes and run at an eight
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minute mile pace i would say that is more sexy more sexy okay so let's talk about uh some of the
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criticisms of crossfit because it's a it's a hot button topic anytime it gets brought up
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um and one of the criticisms levied at it is that crossfit is dangerous right especially for beginners
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um because you know some people say there's not an emphasis on form and because of that you know
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you're doing these very complex exercises olympic lifts with heavy weight very fast there's a tendency
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to you can you know injury drop a weight on your head um and then there's also some like
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health risks that have been in that always gets brought up in the news uh uncle pukey you can
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talk about that and then like what's the no it's pukey the clown right and then yes uncle rabbo
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uncle rhabdo rhabdo there's this issue about rhabdomyolysis yeah what is rhabdomyolysis so
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it's kind of scary it is kind of scary um it it's basically what happens when
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you do so many repetitions of you know of of a movement of a heavy movement and workout that your
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your muscle starts to wear down and the particles of muscle are released into the blood you call it
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muscle damage your kidneys and the the place where we traditionally see the highest rates of rhabdomyolysis
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which happens in almost every sport but it has very high rates in pre-season football camps
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both in the pro leagues and unfortunately in high schools and what we learn from that is that it's not
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the the weakling newbies who get rhabdo like no person off the street who wanders around who doesn't
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do sports and you know isn't very strong is going to get rhabdo it's the people who are very strong
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they're strong enough to exert significant amount of effort but they're also out of shape so they
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pick up and they go like they just stopped doing it yesterday or last week but they're actually
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deconditioned so it's usually the difference between what you were able to do three months ago
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or a year ago and what you're trying to do now and if you throw in a little bit of heat in there
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um you know it's it it's risky and there are you know there's a risk of of of rhabdo for for athletes
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and for former athletes who go in and hit it like they never stopped and that's real and how do you
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how do you prevent that it happens in sports is there anything you do to prevent it the thing you need to
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prevent it is to check your ego at the door if you think you're billy badass and you used to run
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triathlons and you go and there's a whole bunch of guys around you who are doing crossfit three or
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four or five times a week the the the thing you could do about not getting rhabdo is not try to
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copy exactly what those guys are doing at the weights that they're doing them right when you get
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gotcha okay what about the uh the criticism about form you know that they're crossfit is teaching
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all these beginners bad form and they're hurting themselves as a consequence i have never seen a
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crossfit gym and i've traveled to a whole bunch of them where beginners are not put through a foundations
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class or an elements class where they're taught the proper form for all of the movements that said
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as the number of crossfit gyms expands so does the variation in coaching between crossfit gyms
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right so way back when you know there were only a few crossfit gyms these people were all you know
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very experienced true believers you know very attentive coaches uh and now i mean there's 10 000
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crossfit boxes yeah there are there are going to be some bros who go get their level one certifications
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over a weekend and then they're going to pop up their crossfit boxes and so i think it now behooves
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the individual to look at the coach profiles and say how long have you been doing this and what were
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you doing before and you know it's a sport i mean i think you have to look at it like a sport if you
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go get on a snowboard and you throw yourself down a mountain you're going to get messed up
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and the the the kind of disconnect in terms of the people saying oh crossfit's dangerous
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and people say no no no you know you just have to learn what you're doing is between the people who
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are talking about crossfit in the context of you know exercise like you would get on an elliptical
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at the gym you know all these gym activities are purposely designed to not have any risk of injury
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right there's an expectation that if you get on a piece of machinery in a standard gym that the risk
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of injury is going to be zero versus if you play any kind of sport and i don't care what it is
00:24:53.860
you know whether it's basketball um you know soccer rugby all of these sports have
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injury rates and if you look at the epidemiology of sports the interesting thing you find is that
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the injury rates for practice are about a third of the injury rates for competition
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and so the observation i would make is all right so um the injury rates for practice uh for all of
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these sports are actually a lot of them are higher than the crossfit injury rate that we think
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that crossfit has but then when you go to competition it leaps up and i think the critique
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of crossfit is what happens in a sport when every day is game day right if you're if you're in
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competition if you're in competition mode like you hit a wad and you want to get on the whiteboard
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and you're you know you act like you know this is your competition this is your game day
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you've essentially got a sport where there's no practice it's all competition and the the injury
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rates for competition for any sport are always going to be higher in in competition than they are for
00:26:07.760
practice okay so the risk factor in crossfit it's a feature not a bug that's like just no i i don't
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think it's a feature i think that you just have to go into it understanding that this activity has a
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a skill associated with it a skill level associated with it and so you have to
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you have to treat it like a skilled activity and understand that you're yeah i have to learn how to
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do this at a low weight or no weight before i start piling on weight and that requires a little bit of
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judgment and i think to the degree that there's a legitimate critique of crossfit it's that you have
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this skilled activity where you have to learn form and technique and all this other stuff at the same
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time as you have a culture that says high intensity go go go get on the whiteboard gotcha that's where
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the risk comes from yeah okay um so let's talk about the other criticism that people throw at crossfit
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and you've we've sort of addressed it already um is this this cultish aspect or tribal aspect of
00:27:14.440
crossfit um yeah so you know crossfitters they call their place where they work out boxes they
00:27:20.180
have their own lingo they even have like a way to dress i mean it's almost like a in the way they
00:27:25.700
talk about it it's like they're you know newly converted evangelist or whatever um why why do you
00:27:34.220
think that i mean is it bad that crossfit is sort of cultish or is it something good that there's
00:27:39.060
sort of like this tribal mentality to and maybe has that contributed to its success
00:27:42.820
oh the tribal dynamics and crossfit have definitely contributed to its success because each box is
00:27:50.560
its own little community right and people they make friends with each other right it's not
00:27:55.080
like when you go to the gym and you kind of work out you put on your earphones and you're all kind of
00:28:00.380
trudging to nowhere on the elliptical kind of alone together right yeah it's a it's a group activity and
00:28:07.320
people bond and they bond for the same reasons that marines bond which is you're getting together
00:28:13.960
to do something very physically difficult and uncomfortable and you're proving to each other
00:28:21.760
and to yourselves that you can all do it and you've got this kind of shared suffering going on
00:28:26.220
because you're all on your backs in the end breathing hard and saying man did that suck oh my god that was
00:28:32.720
terrible uh and anytime you make people do this and this is outward bound this is like all the stupid
00:28:39.320
corporate retreat stuff anytime you get a group of people together and you make them do something
00:28:46.260
difficult and physically uncomfortable they're gonna feel like they are a group like they belong
00:28:53.000
together it's like this band of brothers phenomenon in this case it's kind of interesting because it's
00:28:57.640
kind of band of brothers and sisters because it's co-ed um and if you get into you know the military
00:29:05.040
right this is this is the standard experience what's different about crossfit is this is the first
00:29:11.200
thing that allows joanne from human resources to feel like a marine three times a week that's what
00:29:18.860
makes it sort of new is that people who are not part of these kind of first responder you know elite
00:29:26.880
special forces or marines can have that same kind of group bonding experience and that's that's
00:29:34.940
really different yeah i'd like to get your insight onto this um why do you think because you're you do
00:29:41.040
this for a living you analyze culture and uh i mean why do you think crossfit has resonated like
00:29:47.840
it's feeling it's struck a nerve in our culture um why is that why is it that people are drawn to that
00:29:54.280
and feel like they need to be a part of that i mean what's going on do you think well i think there's
00:29:59.320
two things one is just it flat out works in terms of the physical result so you have a whole bunch of
00:30:06.360
people who've tried this you've tried that have kind of bumped along from workout to workout different
00:30:11.800
fads and they find something where they get physically strong and they drop weight and it actually works
00:30:19.620
so you can't really underestimate the impact of that on the other hand you have this kind of
00:30:29.260
combination of this kind of tribal social experience and and and you know rite of passage group bonding
00:30:38.120
marine hooah stuff and also a sense of kind of progress and competence that i can actually do
00:30:46.500
something that i can be you know responsible for myself in an emergency this whole mystique of the
00:30:52.300
unknown and the unknowable and this is part of crossfit is this whole mythos that you never know
00:30:58.380
what life's going to throw at you so you want to be strong and kind of every way and prepared for it
00:31:04.620
and my joke that i make in the book is that you know secretly every crossfitter believes that the
00:31:10.080
people in his box will be the ones to survive the zombie apocalypse right so there's the sense of
00:31:17.140
being competent and capable and tough and in a fairly comfortable plush consumer society i think that
00:31:28.040
this speaks to something primal in people that they want to be you know stronger and more self-sufficient
00:31:35.280
and you see that play out in a whole bunch of places that are not fitness i think if you look at the
00:31:40.400
sort of maker movement right and that could be you know i want to make my own quadcopter or it could be
00:31:46.140
you know the people who are doing their kind of artisanal charcuterie or you know cheese making
00:31:52.020
pickle making jam making nouveau like who would who'd have thunk that like ball preserves would be
00:31:59.420
like the thing and so i think people generally want to feel more self-sufficient and capable and
00:32:05.840
competent and crossfit is one of the ways that you can achieve that in a very measurable fairly quick
00:32:16.680
you know high gratification way that you can feel stronger and i think that that's a general that's
00:32:22.600
something underneath the culture that people feel like a little bit nervous about the fact that we're
00:32:28.100
all hostage to these technologies that we can't see um and we don't know what it's doing to our brains
00:32:35.700
that we're kind of checking in on facebook all the time uh and our cars can't be fixed by a regular
00:32:41.360
human and so it's this kind of return to a sense of ruggedness and resilience which is a big part of
00:32:49.440
like the american frontier culture that's just it's buried below the surface but it's still there
00:32:54.580
yeah yeah and i think too you mentioned the the tribal as i think like i'm a big believer that
00:33:01.540
human beings are social creatures by nature like we want like we're wired for that and you said like
00:33:07.780
most gyms or way society is set up it's you're sort of alone together right and i think crossfit
00:33:13.700
provides here's a a community like a tribe that you can belong to where you actually interact with
00:33:18.380
people and you know the person and i think that's another big and you don't have to schedule it that's
00:33:23.340
the other thing is that people forget you know what we remember about high school and college
00:33:27.120
socializing that was so great was that didn't you didn't really have to plan it you didn't have to
00:33:32.640
arrange uh like a grown-up play date right to be with people and you could just hang out and it's that
00:33:40.940
third place right where you don't have to make such a huge effort to to be around people that you get
00:33:48.820
along with that you have shared experiences with you know people go they hit a wad and they'll like
00:33:53.920
grab a drink afterwards or they'll just hang out and shoot the breeze and you don't have to make such
00:33:59.800
a monumental effort you can just hang out and i think that's a little bit of a relief for people
00:34:06.620
too i mean it's great that there's communities that kind of band together they do fundraisers they do
00:34:10.880
charity stuff all the rest of it but part of it's just nice to be able to hang out with people
00:34:16.920
that aren't necessarily your co-workers because that's the default now is if you want to hang out
00:34:22.120
it's the people at work but sometimes you know maybe you don't want that to be your primary social
00:34:28.880
group maybe you want some other group of people who do other things to be your social group very
00:34:36.040
interesting all right so let's talk a little bit about the the business model behind crossfit because
00:34:40.580
it's really interesting um and i think it's plays a big role in how quickly it's spread um so how does
00:34:48.160
the crossfit business model work and i guess you can talk a bit about the sort of the libertarian
00:34:55.040
mindset that sort of uh filters out into that business model so greg glassman was the kind of guy who
00:35:05.280
really didn't want anyone kind of up the chain telling him the ins and outs of what to do what
00:35:12.420
to charge you know rules here's the color your t-shirt on down and so when lots of people wanted
00:35:20.040
to have a crossfit gym he made this conscious decision not to make it a franchise but to actually
00:35:26.440
make it into something he calls the affiliate model and the affiliate model is you have to be a certified
00:35:32.140
crossfit coach and this is how crossfit makes most most of their money is by certified coaches by
00:35:38.120
having people learn how to be crossfit coaches and you have to pay an affiliate fee every year which is
00:35:44.360
something like three thousand dollars and after that you decide when you're going to be open you know you
00:35:51.640
you are the the captain of your ship right so every crossfit box is a small business run by someone who
00:35:59.460
sets all their own rules and there's no other revenue sharing there's not like oh you know open
00:36:06.500
a juice bar or sell protein powder or equipment or apparel or anything and that gets cut back to some
00:36:12.740
central organization like you know you would in a regular chain gym if you want to sell t-shirts
00:36:19.500
sell t-shirts crossfit hq doesn't really have anything more to do with it so it allows people to be
00:36:25.400
more autonomous and this fits in with glassman's general political philosophy which is you know
00:36:32.840
sort of a radical libertarian you know competition even to the point of if a crossfit gym wants to
00:36:39.700
open right next door to you there's nothing stopping it and the answer to that and there are some people
00:36:44.840
who are really upset right who've had crossfit gyms for a long time and saying hey you know what are you
00:36:49.700
guys doing to protect us from you know the fact that someone could open up right next to us and
00:36:55.440
the crossfit hq response to that is if you're a great gym with great coaches whose athletes are happy
00:37:02.360
you don't have to worry about that just be excellent and you don't have to worry about competition so
00:37:07.740
it really is darwinistic in that way and you know the position there is that crossfit hq doesn't
00:37:18.060
quote unquote want to protect mediocrity like if a gym is not doing well it's losing members
00:37:22.540
coaches aren't that great and everyone wants to go next door that first gym probably shouldn't be in
00:37:29.000
business very interesting yeah i mean so that gives each crossfit box a different feel and so i guess
00:37:35.620
that may be um a suggestion would be if you're interested in crossfit like check out the different
00:37:40.620
boxes before you commit to one because you might find one that fits more with your personality
00:37:46.340
absolutely people say oh well there's five crossfit gyms within two miles of my house where do i go
00:37:52.260
and i i find myself feeling a lot like a college counselor you know it's it's like okay well you
00:37:59.340
have to visit them all and then you also have to figure out what your goals are um if you want uh
00:38:07.580
to if you want what i like which is you know i call it cheers with barbells you know that little place
00:38:13.940
where everybody knows your name um you probably don't want to go to a gigantic hanger size crossfit
00:38:21.300
gym um where with 600 members right because that's that's huge um and it's not going to feel as as
00:38:28.940
familiar and it's not going to have a stronger community however if you want if you are a
00:38:33.900
competitive athlete already or you want to be a competitive athlete or you want to be a crossfit
00:38:38.560
competitor and you need a olympic lifting coach and you you know want to work on gymnastics i mean
00:38:45.600
those large boxes have more to offer in terms of specialized training um and so you you know you
00:38:53.940
have to figure out what your goals are and then also what the experience level is of the coaches and
00:38:58.340
not just the experience level but what their preferences are because a lot of these people
00:39:03.020
come from sports you know some used to be gymnasts some used to be power lifters and weight lifters
00:39:08.860
and you know there are some crossfit gyms run by guys who are old power lifting guys and it kind of
00:39:14.880
makes me smile because 20 years ago these guys would be running a barbell club and this is just like
00:39:21.220
their barbell club except in between barbells people are jumping on boxes yeah but that works for guys who
00:39:28.460
really love barbells gotcha um well here's the thing to point out too is that crossfit is open
00:39:35.260
source right like you don't have to necessarily be a part of a box to do crossfit workouts correct
00:39:40.780
you can go you can go to crossfit.com and you can look at all of the tutorials to the videos of all
00:39:47.240
the movements and you can get the workout of the day from the main page and you can try to do it
00:39:51.360
so there's people in there they just they start a like a little crossfit box in their own garage like
00:39:56.380
just for them right yeah a lot of people do it i mean in the backyard we renovated our um little
00:40:03.980
garage and built a bigger garage and you know my husband works out there a lot i call it shed fit
00:40:10.120
um and yeah a lot of a lot of people do that either because they're still you know far away from
00:40:17.560
a crossfit gym or because they don't feel like paying for a crossfit gym they feel like they can do
00:40:23.100
it themselves or there's a group of folks that at a regular gym that'll let them do that kind of
00:40:28.320
stuff who just want to get together and do that kind of stuff very interesting okay um so one of
00:40:34.880
the fascinating things that one of the interesting chapters in your book was about the businesses or
00:40:40.100
the industries that have grown up around crossfit because like crossfit hasn't been around all that
00:40:44.260
long i mean when do you think a decade right um but in that time there's just businesses that didn't
00:40:51.320
exist that now exist uh can you talk a bit about some of those businesses so the number one would
00:40:56.940
probably be rogue fitness um which you know i think the shorthand for people who aren't familiar
00:41:01.880
with rogue it's like the apple computer of barbells you know they have this combination of like
00:41:06.660
technical expertise and then this kind of design obsession about making the best possible you know
00:41:13.860
gymnastic rings for the people who like to do muscle ups and there's there's a really interesting bit
00:41:20.480
in the book about the rogue factory and how they're actually doing manufacturing there in ohio right
00:41:28.960
so bringing manufacturing back to the united states um but doing it in a smarter way and doing it in a
00:41:35.580
way that where there's a lot of back and forth between you know the factory and the customers the
00:41:41.520
people who actually use the stuff um so for people who are gearheads there's a lot about you know the
00:41:47.600
the kind of the metallurgy of the barbells and i never thought that i would sort of geek out on
00:41:53.160
steel but you know i really caught um bill henniger the guy who owns road his sort of infectious
00:41:59.660
enthusiasm for you know like how you use steel in different ways and how the property of the metal
00:42:08.080
affects the performance of this different athletic equipment so there's there's some gearhead stuff in
00:42:13.820
there and then all the way from that which is literally steel to you know things like beyond the whiteboard
00:42:19.940
and all these apps that are um helping people track their performance um you know all the kind of online
00:42:26.640
stuff and you know apparel companies to say nothing of reebok uh which i mean the the nano which is their
00:42:33.940
crossfit shoe that's their best-selling shoe across the board for for anything and so crossfit sort of
00:42:41.880
saved reebok after they lost the nfl yeah and it seems like reebok is sort of embracing that sort
00:42:48.920
of like alternative fitness sport right so crossfit and there's like the spartan race they're doing
00:42:55.300
stuff with um which i think is yeah they're they're that's really interesting i think it's the idea of
00:43:00.600
and this is again sort of an art art of manliness thing it's the idea that the athlete that you want to
00:43:06.900
aspire to be is actually the better version of yourself it's not the celebrity million dollar
00:43:15.940
athlete on a billboard in times square it's actually the person that you could be in six months
00:43:22.160
if you really pulled out the stops very cool um so let's talk about the crossfit games because this
00:43:28.520
is where in your book where a lot of the the drama and the tension um existed because i i couldn't like
00:43:34.260
whenever i started reading like the crossfit games i couldn't stop reading because i wanted to see
00:43:37.120
what happened yes um it's sort of like their version of the olympics how do the crossfit games work
00:43:44.580
so the crossfit games is this really interesting process where there's tiers of qualifying events
00:43:53.300
right so the the baseline qualifying events called the open it's five separate workouts anyone can enter
00:43:59.480
and they had over 200 000 people last year participate and the workouts are announced on a
00:44:06.040
wednesday or thursday and then people have until the end of sunday to do the workout and they can do it
00:44:13.020
at a crossfit gym with people who are you know signed up as judges to you know authenticate their results
00:44:18.580
or they can do it uh they can videotape it post it someone will count their reps and they will enter their
00:44:25.360
time so anyone can do it of those they take the top 30 men 30 women and 30 teams in every region
00:44:34.200
and those people go to regionals which is a much more serious event for like more badass athletes to
00:44:41.900
actually compete to get the top slots in regionals and those people go to the crossfit games which is
00:44:48.280
the kind of international level competition with athletes from around the world and the fun thing about it is
00:44:55.240
it in some ways is closer to you know the original sort of greek olympics than it is to the modern day
00:45:01.820
olympics and there's just all this ritual of sport and one of the big themes in the book is the connection
00:45:08.260
between the kind of ritual intensity of crossfit and the genesis of sport in ancient human society
00:45:14.840
so part of the book's quest and what makes it fun to read for people aren't necessarily fitness
00:45:19.940
enthusiasts is this question of what is sport why why did we come up with it in the first place
00:45:26.400
why would a bunch of people run out onto a field set rules and expend calories gratuitously when food
00:45:32.960
is scarce like why do we do that and why do we still do that and so the book becomes this investigation
00:45:39.400
into the the ritual power of athletics and the sort of genesis of athletics in in the history of
00:45:48.280
human beings as a species and that mystery that kind of cultic practice the ritual of athletics
00:45:55.360
is something you see in spades in the crossfit games and that's part of what makes it so mythic
00:46:03.080
um to to to view and also to write about my editor was teasing me about the sort of because the game
00:46:09.700
sagas kind of take on this mythic tone so he's like it's like barbells at the gates of troy
00:46:14.560
um but it really goes to that um sort of the ritual sacrifice of human energy that defines sport and
00:46:23.600
this kind of primal competition which is very close even though it's on television right and even though
00:46:30.920
it's a very modern online social media phenomenon it's very close to how sport began yeah i love that
00:46:38.380
that last section in your book about that sort of sport as a an embodiment of you know yeah ritualistic
00:46:45.720
living sack like we're we make ourselves human sacrifice living sacrifices in a sense yeah we
00:46:50.720
sacrifice our energy because when we're hunter gatherers we would sacrifice our animals to our
00:46:55.340
gods so that we would have the animal again in the future and that's what sacrifice is about it's kind
00:46:59.360
of paying it forward and we sacrifice when we hunted an animal two things one was the animal and the
00:47:06.020
other is the energy it would have taken to hunt that animal because hunting takes a lot of energy
00:47:10.640
and then we become neolithic farmers and we still want to sacrifice an animal to our gods because
00:47:16.180
that's what neolithic religion is all about but then we have the animal right there in the pen
00:47:20.560
because we've domesticated animals because we're farmers and this is when things like foot races
00:47:25.940
become associated with religious festivals so we sacrifice the energy of the hunt alongside of the
00:47:32.860
animal and the original olympics the foot race started at the end of the at the finish line
00:47:38.560
the winner would actually take the torch and go up the steps to the statue of zeus and light
00:47:44.060
not an ornamental thing to say yay we're in the olympics but it actually was the animal it was the
00:47:49.400
burnt offering so the energy of the hunt was reunited with the animal as a form of sacrifice
00:47:56.680
and that's the sort of deep mystery of sport that we we deep down kind of know but we've forgotten on
00:48:04.920
a conscious level i love it i love that sort of stuff um okay so last question what do you think
00:48:11.960
the future of crossfit is um you know will it continue to get more and more popular or have we
00:48:16.180
reached peak crossfit i think that it will continue to grow and simultaneously that people will talk about
00:48:24.960
it less and less i think it's like yoga right so 10 years ago everyone was talking about yoga
00:48:31.840
and now no one's talking about it but everybody does it and it's the same about jogging running in
00:48:38.860
the 70s right there was a point in the 70s when running and jogging was all anyone could talk about
00:48:45.620
yeah and then more and more people started doing it but less and less people were talking about it and
00:48:51.200
i think crossfit and things like crossfit become like that we realized that this is a it's it works
00:49:01.300
it has all these benefits you know more and more and more and more people do do it but fewer and fewer
00:49:08.780
and fewer people you know sort of talk about it which is why i think it's a good time to have a book
00:49:14.100
out about it because the history of it is very interesting and already the number of new people
00:49:21.080
doing it completely swamps the people who are around back in those early years who actually remember
00:49:25.900
what happened and so what i've tried to do with learning to breathe fire is sort of do this kind
00:49:31.540
of deep anthropology but also to chronicle sort of the lore for all the people who you know don't know
00:49:38.500
how it began or don't know what was going on in iraq when people first started doing it out there as as
00:49:46.020
as military um and it's it's a really fascinating history it is all right well jayzy hurts thank you
00:49:52.160
so much for your time it's been fascinating and a pleasure and uh learning to breathe fire is on
00:49:57.380
facebook so if you search for it on facebook we've got a very very lively uh and passionate reader
00:50:02.680
community and we have a lot of crossfit humor we come up with uh self-deprecating quizzes
00:50:07.740
about crossfit in case you think that people who do crossfit never make fun of themselves
00:50:12.100
all right so that's all just search learning to breathe fire on facebook very good all right well
00:50:17.180
thank you so much jayce thank you our guest today was jayce hurts she is the author of learning to
00:50:22.380
breathe fire and you can find that book on amazon.com and you can also check out her facebook page it's
00:50:27.820
facebook.com learning to breathe fire where she posts updates about the crossfit community in the
00:50:34.100
crossfit world a lot of fascinating stuff well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness
00:50:41.080
podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:50:45.240
art of manliness.com we have a store store.artofmanliness.com we got a really cool camp coffee mug there we've
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00:50:58.400
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00:51:03.300
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00:51:10.380
and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly