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Do you speak CrossFit?

There are days when CrossFit hurts my brain more than my body! Just when I think I’ve got the hang of the moves I realise I’m lost in the endless acronyms. In fact, I start many classes in mental agony, trying to decipher everything Julian’s written on the whiteboard, using the mental agility of a WW2 code breaker, hoping the rest of the class won’t think I’m as dumb as I feel.

Following hot on the knee-socked heals of the acronyms in terms of causing confusion and panic is the jargon we use for the moves themselves. Like someone named Labuschagne who insists on introducing herself La Bu Shay; no one would dare call something: “bending-over-to-pick-up-something-bloody-heavy” when they could call it a “dead lift”. Presumably because you work harder when the very name implies – even threatens - bodily harm if you don’t buck up and do it properly 

So in a charitable effort to save fellow CrossFitters from bursting into tears simply from the exertion of unravelling the acronyms or deciphering names of moves, today’s little blog is dedicated to understanding the language of CrossFit.

 What WOD you like to do today?

Finishing first in terms of reps are CF, WOD and box; all pretty obvious when you think about it.

CF: CrossFit (doah); the sport and of course, the addiction.

BOX: A functional sounding name for a CrossFit Gym. And no, despite all the ads you don’t need to worry that we’ll ship you off to a foreign country while you’re training. You need to qualify for that.

WOD: since you’ll use it every day, take note that it’s not in fact pronounced doubleyou-oh-dee, even though I said it that way for months. (Probably because I frequently have pee-oh-doubleyou in my mind when I’m trapped at the back of the class grunting through my warm-ups.)

There are of course many interpretations the new, suffering CrossFitter is likely to assign to WOD. For example, at CrossFit Platinum where a warm up isn’t a warm up unless you’ve done so many military style pushups that you find yourself yearning for a crew-cut, it’s a common misconception that WOD means Warmup Of Death.

Even I didn’t have it figured out until a few months ago! Before I joined CrossFit; way back when I was still sprouting roots on the couch while listening to my girlfriend rave on about CrossFit with glazed eyes and a kind of zealousness that suggested she might wait on the top of a hill wearing only her Vibram Five Fingers, for a comet to take her to that big box in the sky; I assumed it meant: Way Of the Demented. (Actually I might not have been that far off there.)

But no, it’s just: Workout Of the Day. That simple. Learn to love it … and sometimes to fear it.

WTF?

Once you’re WODing at your CF box you’re ready for the next exciting step in the CF name game.

AMRAP: not a pyramid marketing scheme involving carpet shampoo and fabric softner. It means you need to do As Many Reps As Possible within a given time. A possible equivalent being: SWD; Stop When Dead.

RFT: Reps For Time. It’s just you in a race against time as your see how much of something you can do before the egg timer sounds. If, like me, you’re still at that point where you manage 2 sets of a 5 set workout in 20 minutes while someone else (let’s call her Christa because, well that’s her name) manages all 5 in 13 minutes, you’ll want to amuse and motivate yourself with non WOD related benchmarks. Like how many spots are swimming in front of your eyes at the 5, 10, 15 and 20 minute mark.

Rx’d: in the great tradition of things that make zero sense but that you accept anyway (like waxing on and waxing off) you need to accept that Rx means doing a WOD as prescribed. In other words, when you use a 5kg ball and do jumping pull-ups instead of the 20 kg and strict pull-up; you didn’t Rx it. Just a reminder to the new peeps who seem to have dropped a 0 off the 800 m run: faking it is not the same as Rxing it.

I like to move it, move it. I just don’t know how.

As soon as you’ve got the acronyms sorted, you’ll have to master the different moves. And although there are so many you can go through a month of WODs without repeating them, these are a few of my confusing favourites:

Double Under. This is not in fact the CrossFit equivalent of a missionary styled threesome. It’s a daring skipping move you can only attempt when you’ve been at your box for a few months, by which point you’ll have imbibed enough of the superhero DNA we spike our water with to actually make a go of it. A Double Under involves the skipping rope going under your feet twice for every one time you jump. You’ll know you’ve mastered it when you hear the sonic boom.

Clean. A nifty little move designed to keep orthodontists in business. It’s a lift that ends up with your elbows bent forward at a karmasutric angle, with the bar resting across your soon-to-be bruised clavicles. You don’t really understand the meaning of the phrase “beat yourself up” until you’ve unwittingly gone chin-to-bar with this one.  

Renegade row. Although it calls to mind weekend picnics in a colourful rowing boat with a handsome, exiled freedom fighter, it actually means doing pushups on weights and then hoisting one weight at a time up next to you. Because of course regular pushups aren’t hard enough. (Ps: Cindy; it would make the rest of us feel better if you could use smaller weights with this one. Or no weights. Hell if you could do it on your knees, that would be perfect!)

Sumo Deadlift High Pull. Sounds like very small, very tight underwear for a very large (or alternatively, very well hung) man, but it’s really just holding the bar in the middle and hiking it up under your chin as your arms flap up like chicken wings.

Annie/Fran/Cindy etc. You can imagine my distress when my girlfriend first arrived home, sweating and smiling broadly, and announced “I did Annie.” It seems CrossFit decided that if we could name hurricanes after women, we should do the same with WODs. CrossFit HQ won’t confirm that they’ve used names of famous dominatrix for this purpose, but I suspect that’s because they’re avoiding the bad publicity.  

*Burpee!* You’re excused.

You know, for boxy little gyms, CF boxes have so much going for them! They’re bursting at their reinforced seams with stuff that makes us laugh (especially at ourselves), stuff that makes us feel like we’re part of a team and stuff that makes us feel like we’re in on something special, something that the rest of the world doesn’t know about. And it’s incredible how something as simple as an acronym can reinforce those things.

So what if we don’t have a secret handshake? We’re slowly developing a secret language. A handshake would be nice though. Maybe also midnight meetings and a password. But at the very least a handshake.