Today we bring on guest, Simon Bachofner, Crossfit owner/instructor at HubCity Crossfit. He is not only a Crossfit owner and instructor, but also a registered nurse working on a Master's to become a nurse practitioner.
With the Crossfit movement and background, let's dive into a few questions that can help you guide what kinds of exercise you'd like to pursue in 2020.
Meredith: What' got you interested in fitness?
Simon: I've always been a fitness enthusiast at heart. Through the course of my fitness journey, I've traveled many different directions. I started as a high school athlete playing baseball. I often tell myself if I had a program like Crossfit in high school, I would have been a much better player. I journeyed into endurance sports for a while . . . things like Triathlons. Through nursing and being a health professional . . . I'll be honest, my wife got interested first. That's usually how it happens; my wife get's interested first. I was skeptical at first; I always thought it was competitive exercise back when it first started, but I've come to see the value in it. We'll get into that later. There were things I found about Crossfit to be really positive early on and I've been doing it ever since. It's a passion. It got to the point where I ended up opening my own gym. If people can drum up the courage to walk through the front door, it's really not as bad as people make it out to be. We'll get into that later too. I believe in it strongly, and I don't think I'll do anything else.
Meredith: I really appreciate your Crossfit and healthcare backgrounds. I run into the question every day of "is Crossfit for me? Is it good?" What do you think about the rise of Crossfit in general? Who is it good for?
Simon: In level one (coach training), they teach you that Crossfit is for everybody. Whatever workout or movement you are doing is infinitely scalable. I have a class; it's my favorite class. It's a group of ladies who come in Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8 AM. They are all over 65; I think the average age is 72-74. These ladies come in and crush it. They do whatever I put infant of them; of course we modify and scale to every individual athlete's need.
With the rise of the Crossfit games and individual competitors, we have to remember that that's the one percent of the one percent. Crossfit, at its core, is design for general physical preparedness for your average human being. That's the philosophy at my gym. That's the way we program the daily workouts. They just had an open workout this past week on handstand walking. Yes, we use functional movement; that's not a functional movement; we're not going to program in handstand walking for the general population. Yeah, it's cool. If you can walk on your hands, you can probably do a whole lot of other things. It can be a marker for your own fitness, but that's just something that our general population is going to see. Crossfit is for everybody. What you see on TV shouldn't be what's stopping you from walking in the front door of your local Crossfit gym.
Meredith: I like that. So many times we see social media, or the Crossfit games and assume that's what we're going to be asked to do on day one. We're going to be asked to do a PR of some kind of a lift, or monkey bars, or walk in a handstand. When people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s that have spent a lot of time in the corporate world think they want to start fitness, what tips would you give them? How do they get started with fitness safely again?
Simon: From a Crossfit perspective, number one, you have to assess and meet them where they are at. I offer a free one-on-one fundamentals session for everybody. Crossfit has nine foundational movements build into it. I generally screen each new athlete coming in. Where they are at with those basic movement patterns of overhead pressing, squatting, and pulling movements. We run them through those movements and see where there might be faults. We don't start by loading anything. We start with a PVC pipe.
There is a great picture I found and re-posted on Instagram of a baby bending down to pick up a ball. It maps out their angles. That's how we were meant to move. Over the course of doing all the things that we do as human beings, like sitting in chairs and being hunched over at computer screens, things change. Our goal is to get as close to the native movement pattern as possible. We may not get there. We're going to get as close as we possibly can, safely. You gotta be gentle; you can't force somebody just because the workout says we're going to work up to 1 rep max on the board; You have to know your athlete and where their limits are and work things to their relative potential.
Meredith: Sounds like you're doing a great job of making things scalable and relative to each individual. I think sometimes people get into the Crossfit box (and I see this in my neighborhoods too) and are excited by what is going around them, but they are new to fitness. How do you help people that are new avoid doing too much too fast?
Simon: Good question. That comes down to coaching. We get a lot of folks who may have been athletes early on in their lives, but over the past 10 20, 30 years have devolved into obesity, poor movement patterns, poor range of motion and flexibility. It's up to the coach to know. Those athletes are going to come in and think they can just go right back into doing what they did in their 20s, and that's just not reality. You can pick those athletes out when they come through the door and have been exercising for zero minutes in the past 10 years thinking they can go right back to where they left off. You want them to come back the next day. When you let them go too hard, they're not going to. That's the "check your ego at the door kind of thing." No matter where you came from, or what you used to do 20, 30, 40 years ago, you gotta ease into it.
Meredith: I like how you included the screening process. Even if people aren't ready to start Crossfit, it sounds like everybody needs with a goal and a motivation; we can't just pick up a barbell and throw it overhead because we could 20 years ago. We have to work back into it. I'm wondering if you can share any success stories, whether it is for yourself or people you coached where you saw a major transformation in some part of life.
Simon: I've got so many. When I first started, I worked with a gal named Diane. She's now doing her 2nd Crossfit open. She has PR-ed every single one of her lifts. I couldn't quote you off the top of my head how much weight she's lost, but she keeps her pair of jeans in her gym bag that she used to wear when she first came in. She's on fire now. She crushes just about everything. We did a challenge the other day, a bingo community building thing, and she did every single one of the spaces on the challenge. She's gotten excellent results.
There's another one that, from a medical standpoint excites me, a guy with a traumatic brain injury in 2004. He still has some residual instability with gait/walking. I don't love when docs cap out rehab potential on patients and say "this is as good as its going to get." This young man came in with a cane. I don't believe I've seen him walk with a cane now. He started four months ago, and I don't think I've seen him walk with a cane after his first month here. Pull ups, push ups, squats . . . he can even do some of the more complicated Olympic lifting movements, which is really taxing neurologically and neuromuscularly. He comes in and loves it. He's doing great. That's the kind of stuff that gets me going. He was told he's walk with a cane for the rest of his life, but now he's doing great.
Meredith: Yeah; that's the kind of thing I share with my patients. They'll ask "can I . . ." followed by something from the Crossfit Games or Wounded Warriors. I respond with "I'm not going to tell you that you can't, because you're just going to prove that I'm wrong." A lot of that inspiration has come from Crossfit.
How is Crossfit different from other workouts? This is a common question when people want to workout, but don't know how they want to workout.
Simon: This goes back to the question, "how do we optimize health?" My philosophy is not just developing a workout program. You can't out-fitness a bad diet. More than that, we're not just lumps of flesh and skin, we need to have human connection, a tribe, and the psychological piece as well. That was one of the things I noticed early on about Crossfit that was unique. It was unique in its ability to provide real human connections with other people that had a common goal. Caveat is that you have to go to the right gym and find the right people, and have the right ownership that will cultivate that community because it is important to them.
At our gym, we are not trying to send people to the Crossfit games, and that's never what we sought out to do. We sought out to make our community healthier and build a strong social network of folks that just wanted to be the best versions of themselves.
The physical stimulus is built into the workouts, but the psychological piece . . . you get to come in, and let's just say you are lifting heavy and trying to PR a 1 RM, but you just don't have it that day. Crossfit is a safe place to come in and fail, and that's important to being human. You have to be OK with saying, "I didn't have it that day." That's alright.
Personally, for me, having a wolf pack, having your guys, having your squad . . . that's a really valuable thing for men that are trying to stay healthy or regain/reclaim their health. We're not an island. We are social beings. Evolutionarily speaking, you didn't go out and hunt alone, you hunted in a party. Being stuck in a cubicle by yourself and then going to the gym by yourself and putting your headphones on . . . I'm not surprised you're not motivated to get your workout in. If you come in and show up with your boys and we're all doing the same thing, it draws a parallel to how we used to go about doing things as men. All those things are inherently built into Crossfit. When it comes to health, I think that Crossfit hits optimization comprehensively.
Meredith: Absolutely. When people are looking to join a Crossfit gym, what are some questions they should ask to try to figure out where their wolfpack is? Which one is the right one to try?
Simon: You won't know until you get in there and try. It's a trial-and-error process, but I think you'll know right away. Does somebody greet you and shake your hand? Does the coach come up and talk to you and try to just form a relationship first and foremost? What that tells me is that that gym is about people; its about helping you reach your goal; helping you reach your potential; getting to know you; getting to know your strengths and weaknesses, and working together to get you to where you want to be.
Meredith: I appreciate you sharing, as so many people coming back to fitness don't know. Just having this as a frame of reference is a great place to start. When people are adults in their 40s, 50s, 60s . . . what are the first steps you give them, other than "come to class?"
Simon: I think that you have to develop a pattern of consistency first. I haven't seen anyone that was inconsistent get the results that they wanted. It is a little bit different with older populations. Make sure that they space out their workouts and get adequate rest in-between. Especially early on. Every other day works well. For new athletes and for older athletes this works well. Even for myself. If I go five days in a row, it takes me two days to recover. Optimizing for recovery is important.
Then we get into nutrition; first and foremost, I want the athletes to stop eating garbage.
Meredith: What is garbage?
Simon: Garbage is anything in a bag or box. I want them to eat things that if left on the counter would die and have to be thrown away. I want most of those meals to consist of real plants. Rule number one: eat real food. The Crossfit way of doing things is eat Paleo, meat, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar. If you can stick to those things, you're 90% of the way there. As you progress in your training, we can tweak nutrition to optimize performance.
To summarize, I want them to find some pattern of consistency with training and rest. The second thing would be to dive into food and nutrition. If there was a hierarchy, sleep, then nutrition, then training, then sport specific movements.
Meredith: Thank you. That really helps hi-light the link between health and Crossfit. Is there anything else you were hoping I would touch on as it relates to healthy lifestyles for busy people?
Simon: I need to mechanically move soundly with consistency before I add any intensity. Intensity can be defined as speed or weight. Slow down and revert back to good mechanics consistently. We do ask you to do challenging things, but Olympic lifting—they give gold medals for that; don't expect to go into a Crossfit gym and ace your first snatch workout. There are certain positions and movement patterns that people spend years just to add one or two kilos. They give big gold medals for that. You have to go at your own pace with mechanics first and check your ego at the door. Be there for the right reasons; be there for the community; be there for health and your own well-being. If its not working for you at your gym, there are plenty of others. Crossfit is going back to why they started in the first place . . . for the person on the couch; getting off the couch and into the gym. I wouldn't be scared; the hardest part is stepping through the front door.
Meredith: I really appreciate how you bridge health and fitness with what a people can find inside a Crossfit box should they have the bravery to walk through the door and take that first step.
Closing thoughts form Simon:
The farther you move into fitness, the farther you move away from illness.
Simon's contact info: HubCityCrossfit.net in Albany, Oregon. You can reach him on Instagram and Facebook as well.
