History and Use of Stall Bars

Stall bars are an excellent tool for developing strength, conditioning, and flexibility. A set of stall bars looks like a wide ladder, typically about three feet wide and eight feet tall, with round steps, mounted to a wall. Good stall bars are heavy and robust, and they are made to handle any person or activity without failing. They are valuable to athletes, gymnasts, physical therapists, military and police personnel, martial artists, weightlifters, and to anyone who wants more function than the “all-in-one” fitness machines can provide. Over 100 years ago, stall bars were common equipment in YMCA and college, high school, and private gyms, but their popularity waned during the middle of the last century. However, growing health consciousness, along with the popularity of gymnastics, has brought about a renewed appreciation for stall bars.

In the late 1700s to early 1800s, the word gymnastics was used to mean physical education and development generally, rather than to describe a specific sport. Johann Guts Muths, who is sometimes called the grandfather of modern gymnastics, started a new movement in physical education for school-age boys and young men in Germany and published a book titled Gymnastics for Youths in 1793. He built a 20-foot-high wooden frame outdoors for climbing, and suspended climbing ropes, a rope ladder, and a climbing pole from it. He had a wooden ladder that was used to climb to the top of the frame when needed.

It’s in the Bag

The real world isn’t filled with perfectly balanced, easy-to-grip weights. Josh Henkin says training with odd objects such as sandbags is one way to build functional strength for use outside the gym.

When the disks I had herniated at age 14 had come back to haunt me, I was devastated. I wasn’t ready to accept that I would not be athletic ever again. Deep down I knew the doctors didn’t have the last say, and I was going to investigate every method to get back to being an athlete. My exploration in trying to find an effective solution to my injury led me to the concept of odd-object training.

I’ve always liked using odd objects like stones, logs and tires as training tools, and kettlebell work eased the pain and strengthened my hips and trunk. Sandbags seemed the logical next step. After all, they’re less expensive and more versatile than other objects.

Sandbags bridge the gap between the weight room and the real world because they aren’t perfectly balanced, calibrated and easy to grip. Sandbags teach athletes how to efficiently co-ordinate different muscle groups precisely because they’re awkward. Used correctly, sandbags can be even more challenging than free weights.

Everyone talks about “functional training” and “core training” these days. Both terms are overused, but sandbags are great for developing a solid core because both static and dynamic strength can be trained. By introducing odd objects such as sandbags, you can create a well rounded strength and conditioning program that challenges athletes in new ways and helps them develop functional strength.

Kelly’s Koffin: Five Feet Over

Larry Gallagher created an adjustable, stable box nearly five feet tall to challenge even the mightiest of CrossFit’s leapers.

Sometime last fall after a workout at San Francisco CrossFit, I was pulled aside by Kelly Starrett. He had a vision of creating the ultimate jumping box, a platform that would be stable and high—higher than anything anyone at SFCF had ever ascended. Confident in my modest but solid woodworking skills, I accepted the challenge.

After a few weeks of head-scratching and sketching followed by a day of cutting, gluing and screwing, I was able to present him with the prototype adjustable jumping box. In the long-standing American tradition of semi-literacy, we dubbed it “Kelly’s Koffin.”

The Koffin has quickly worked its way into the culture at SFCF. Coach Adrian (Boz) Bozman has added a Koffin T-shirt to his line of homemade silkscreens and has also offered a challenge to all CrossFitters: mount the box at the highest setting (58 inches) and receive a free T. Thus far only two SFCF athletes have achieved this distinction.

Do you have what it takes? Planning a trip to the Bay Area soon? The Koffin beckons.

Two Training Aids

It has long been said that necessity is the mother of invention and this month we give support to that adage with two exceedingly simple inventions. Both devices address problems that have long plagued our training efforts.

The first problem in dire need of remedy was how do we bring the pull-up to people who've never done one? Our first and easiest solution was the use of an assisted pull-up device like our favorite, the Stairmaster Gravitron, and we have long made regular use of the Gravitron with all our pull-up initiates.

There are several aspects of the Gravitron, though, that make its use problematic. First, the Gravitron is outrageously expensive. At nearly $3,000 after shipping, few pieces of gym equipment come even close in price. The steep price is perhaps particularly foreboding to someone relatively new to serious strength and conditioning training as are most people working to develop their first pull-up. Imagine if your first weight set had to be an Eleiko; there'd be a lot fewer weightlifters!

The second major problem with the Gravitron and all other assisted pull-up devices is that they are about as portable as your kitchen refrigerator.

Really Cool Homemade Parallettes

Parallettes training is fun and highly developmental. Without gymnastics training we opt out of the most potent neurological training (coordination, accuracy, agility, and balance) available to an athlete, and parallettes training is essential to your gymnastics development.

We hope our fervor for parallettes training specifically and gymnastics training generally will inspire all of you to get hold of a pair of parallettes and begin your gymnastics training in earnest.

To that end we offer this month step-by-step instructions for building a great set of parallettes out of PVC pipe available wherever building supplies or landscaping materials are sold.

Four things inspire this project: 1. They’re dirt-cheap ($10-20), 2. ANYONE could make them, 3. They come out not just good but fantastic – you couldn’t ask for better parallettes; we’re shocked at how nice they are, and 4. It was a lot of fun building them.

Garage Gym II: The Revolution

The CrossFit Journal was launched in 2002 with an issue titled “The Garage Gym.” In that premier issue we decried the lack of efficacious programming in commercial gyms and proffered a solution with the promise that “you can build, rather inexpensively, a world-class strength and conditioning facility in your garage!”

Now we revisit the CrossFit garage-gym concept to report on the successes of what may be hundreds of CrossFit start-up gyms and the aspirations and motivations of the people behind them.

CrossFitters are holding court in London, New York, New Brunswick, Puerto Rico, Baghdad, Afghanistan, and Qatar. CrossFit crews are convening in public parks, garages and carports, basements, barns, deposed tyrants’ homes, commercial gyms, storage lockers, martial arts academies, and universities, under bleachers, and on military bases.

Three years ago we saw the CrossFit movement as an alternative to the prevailing commercial gym establishment and its signature “big-box,” machine-based, bodybuilding approach to fitness. We promoted the garage-gym notion in large part to provide refuge for our more athletic programming, which couldn’t find quarter in the commercial gyms.
Today we see ourselves as part of a wider war between the big-box franchises such as Gold’s, Bally’s, and 24-Hour Fitness and the small-box facilities of which the Curves chain is the best-known example.

The Need

The ideal gym would be located close to home or work, well equipped, clean, and manned by knowledgeable helpful staff. Our ideal gym would also not be overly crowded yet available to friends and family that we'd like to workout with. An ideal gym would be supportive of hard-core fitness, a la CrossFit. As long as we're dreaming it might also play only the music that we want to hear.

Many of us are blessed with gyms we love dearly. If that's your situation, great! For the rest of us our gyms are very different. Often the drive to the gym is 20-30 minutes coming and going, the music is worse than annoying, the staff are less than worthless, the place is packed with selectorized equipment for which we've no use and the few pieces of equipment thatyou want to use are in near constant use...

Foundations

CrossFit is a core strength and conditioning program. We have designed our program to elicit as broad an adaptational response as possible. CrossFit is not a specialized fitness program but a deliberate attempt to optimize physical competence in each of ten recognized fitness domains. They are Cardiovascular and Respiratory endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Coordination, Agility, Balance, and Accuracy.

The CrossFit Program was developed to enhance an individual’s competency at all physical tasks. Our athletes are trained to perform successfully at multiple, diverse, and randomized physical challenges. This fitness is demanded of military and police personnel, firefighters, and many sports requiring total or complete physical prowess. CrossFit has proven effective in these arenas.

Aside from the breadth or totality of fitness the CrossFit Program seeks, our program is distinctive, if not unique, in its focus on maximizing neuroendocrine response, developing power, cross-training with multiple training modalities, constant training and practice with functional movements, and the development of successful diet strategies.

Our athletes are trained to bike, run, swim, and row at short, middle, and long distances guaranteeing exposure and competency in each of the three main metabolic pathways.

We train our athletes in gymnastics from rudimentary to advanced movements garnering great capacity at controlling the body both dynamically and statically while maximizing strength to weight ratio and flexibility. We also place a heavy emphasis on Olympic Weightlifting having seen this sport’s unique ability to develop an athletes’ explosive power, control of external objects, and mastery of critical motor recruitment patterns. And finally we encourage and assist our athletes to explore a variety of sports as a vehicle to express and apply their fitness.

Squat Clinic

Why Squat?

The squat is essential to your well-being. The squat can both greatly improve your athleticism and keep your hips, back, and knees sound and functioning in your senior years.

Not only is the squat not detrimental to the knees it is remarkably rehabilitative of cranky, damaged, or delicate knees. In fact, if you do not squat, your knees are not healthy regardless of how free of pain or discomfort you are. This is equally true of the hips and back.

The squat is no more an invention of a coach or trainer than is the hiccup or sneeze. It is a vital, natural, functional, component of your being. The squat, in the bottom position, is nature's intended sitting posture (chairs are not part of your biological make-up), and the rise from the bottom to the stand is the biomechanically sound method by which we stand-up. There is nothing contrived or artificial about this movement.

What Is Fitness and Who Is Fit?

Outside Magazine crowned triathlete Mark Allen "the fittest man on earth." Let’s just assume for a moment that this famous six-time winner of the IronMan Triathlon is the fittest of the fit, then what title do we bestow on the decathlete Simon Poelman who also possesses incredible endurance and stamina, yet crushes Mr. Allen in any comparison that includes strength, power, speed, and coordination?

Perhaps the definition of fitness doesn’t include strength, speed, power, and coordination though that seems rather odd. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines "fitness" and being "fit" as the ability to transmit genes and being healthy. No help there. Searching the Internet for a workable, reasonable definition of fitness yields disappointingly little. Worse yet, the NSCA, the most respected publisher in exercise physiology, in their highly authoritative Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning doesn’t even attempt a definition.

Crossfit's Fitness
For CrossFit the specter of championing a fitness program without clearly defining what it is that the program delivers combines elements of fraud and farce. The vacuum of guiding authority has therefore necessitated that CrossFit’s directors provide their own definition of fitness. That's what this issue of CrossFit Journal is about, our "fitness."