Tip: Avoid This Dumb Workout Trend

Crossshitty Workouts

A couple of years ago, CrossFit and HIIT went out on a date and drank a lot of fermented paleo drinks. One month later – because CrossFit and HIIT people do everything more fast and more sweaty – they gave birth to a bastard, sexually ambiguous offspring with webbed feet. It was so awful and terrible that no one even bothered to give it a name.

It's Not CrossFit or HIIT

I describe their offspring, or more accurately, what their offspring do, as "Crosshitty" workouts because it's neither CrossFit nor HIIT. You might not have ever used the term, but you've sure as hell seen it being done in your local gym.

Crosshitty-type workouts consist of short rest periods, randomly chosen exercises (but always including those stupid battling ropes, for some reason), indeterminate, pulled-out-of-their-ass rep ranges, breathing hard, lots of sweating, and an inexplicable air of smugness, as if profuse sweating and a pounding heart were the only determinants of a "good" workout.

They rarely use any significant weights and never really do anything seriously difficult. It's sort of like CrossFit, but without the Olympic lifts or squats or deadlifts or any attempt at fulfilling the ten recognized "fitness domains." And it's sort of like HIIT, but there aren't any active recovery periods. It's just frenetic, neuroses-fueled, non-stop activity with a puzzlingly superior attitude.

Part of me understands them. It harkens back to the early days of fitness when millions of Mad Men type Americans in the 1960's would get up and do their naked push-ups and jumping jacks to get that old blood percolating before they marched in and tackled the Peterson account.

Part of it was for health, and part of it was out of guilt because they were white-collar guys who didn't have calluses on their hands and often made their money on the sweat of blue-collar guys.

Maybe it's the same with these people today, but they bug me because the nutballs who do Crosshitty workouts take up multiple stations in non-CrossFit gyms, occupying vast swatches of territory like the Nazis in 1941. They blitzkrieg from one station to the next, getting in everybody's way and strangling women and children with their flailing battling ropes.

Go Away, Crosshitty People

Start your own gyms, or pick a discipline and run with it, be it CrossFit, legitimate HIIT, or science and technique-based powerlifting or bodybuilding.