Crossfit is gaining momentum in India and Bangalore is one of the leading ground. At this point, there are at least 20 crossfit gyms in Bangalore and at least 100 gyms which have crossfit as one of the training programs. Because of the massive branding of crossfit, these gyms manage to charge as much as 10k INR a month from the fitness enthusiasts in Bangalore who don’t worry about the pocket. But do they provide a wholesome fitness?

But are the creators of Crossfit gaining from all these? Let’s look at the cost of getting certified into a Crossfit trainer. It costs as much as 1 lakh if done in India and even more if from abroad. One advantage it certainly has from business point of view is that it doesn’t need a lot of fancy expensive equipment’s. Just few barbells and weight plates are good enough to start a crossfit gym. This makes it even more lucrative as business.

Here is the take of calisthenics expert and YouTube star training pal:

Spending lots and lots of time with other people from calisthenics community made me realize this commonly shared viewpoint: what the hell are cross fitters doing? Although overall I think that is a good approach, sometimes we need to look on things from the perspective of others and try to understand how they think. Big part of crossfit is competing and trying to do the workout as quickly as possible. Winning in any competition is not only done by training harder, but also smarter than others. Crossfit Games are trying to find out who is the strongest, the fastest and the fittest but to be able to compare anything, there has to be a strict set of rules. Training smart means optimizing the movements as much as you can, but staying within the rules. If you are trying to do the most pull ups in 60 seconds you need to know what is considered a pull up by the rules If getting your chin above the bar is all you need to do, there's no point of going any further than that. It wouldn't be optimal and would make your result worse. From a perspective of bodyweight purist, the pull ups that they do are cringy. However we have to look into the rules of crossfit games and what they consider a pull up. If all they care about is bringing your chin over the bar and extending the arms at the bottom, then butterfly pull ups are the most optimal way of doing that. You keep the momentum, by doing the pull up in a circular fashion and this way you can do one after another without stopping. Regular pull up looks more like that. Your center of mass goes up and down and at the bottom you need to slow down the body, stop, and then go back up. It is not as optimal as circular motion. The same goes for other exercises, for example, handstand pushups on rings. It is extremely difficult skill and I was surprised to see it as a part of the workout. You can see most of the athletes struggling a lot to do couple of reps, but some were just flying through them. It looks kind of ridiculous the way they're doing them, but if the rules just say that you need to extend your elbows at the top, don't bend your knees and don't use legs to help yourself, then curving your body like crazy and doing almost a bench press-like move will be the easiest way to perform the exercise. It is all about finding a loophole in the rules and using it to do the reps using the least energy. I was trying out that method you can see that I did 5 reps without much struggle, but when trying to do the push up without bending too much I barely did one rep. And it wasn't perfect form either. If both would be counted as correct rep, why would you go for the perfect form? Swinging and kipping is another thing, whether it's muscle ups or handstand pushups on parallettes. As far as rules are concerned a rep is counted when you extend your arms at the top of each move. So you want to use your legs to help you as much as you can, this way you use less energy for each rep and can go through the workout quicker. Those micro adjustments in the technique are often what decides whether you win or lose, so it's super important to learn to optimize as much as you can, even if it means cheating the move. So basically, what I'm trying to say here is 'don't hate the player, hate the game'. So basically, what I'm trying to say here is 'don't hate the player, hate the game'. If the rules of the games would say that only perfect form is accepted, we wouldn't see people training kipping or swinging, because it would be unnecessary. These guys are beasts and super athletes and they try to learn how to perform the moves in the most efficient way, even if they aren't aware of it at the beginning.

While the branding has made Crossfit the next big and cool thing to do, it’s actually providing incomplete fitness which is highly prone to injuries. Calisthenics on the other hand focuses on the form and develops wholesome fitness by facilitating working on the weaknesses and bringing balance in the physiology in the right proportions ensuring the functional abilities of the body are enhanced progressively. Bangalore remains the hot market for these cross fitters. I have seen more guys injuring themselves in crossfit gyms that benefitting from it the primary reason being competition which induces the pressure to perform and hence compromising the form and safe limits. Slip disk is common among cross fitters.