This is an interesting article in Vox, CrossFit is amassing an army of doctors trying to disrupt health care. Crossfit Health is the company’s blog and about what’s wrong with healthcare.
A Crossfit gym membership is quite expensive – The Economics of a CrossFit Gym – Investopedia :
Perhaps the biggest difference between a CrossFit gym and a traditional gym is the price. While traditional gyms frequently offer membership specials for as little as $10 or $20 per month, a typical CrossFit membership tops $150 per month.
There are aspects of the CrossFit Program that undoubtedly could be incorporated into other innovative healthcare practices.
The following is from the Vox article above:
CEO Greg Glassman believes his program could end chronic disease — and he wants doctors to help him.
[Tired of caring for life-style induced chronic disease] In 2013, eager to try something new, [family physician Dr.] Rockett decided to quit medicine and close up her practice. What she did next, she says, is the most meaningful contribution to health care she’s made to date. She opened a CrossFit gym.
CrossFit is a high-intensity interval training and resistance exercise routine known for instilling a cult-like devotion among followers and promoting the low-carb diet. By the time Rockett opened a gym, she was already a devotee.
“It’s exciting that I can treat and cure medical problems in the gym,” she said. “Just in the last week alone, I’ve gotten three different texts from people saying, ‘I don’t think you understand how much this has changed my life.’”
That CrossFit could be a substitute for, or an extension of, health care in America may seem like a stretch. But this is precisely the vision of CrossFit’s charismatic, contrarian, and often combative founder and CEO, Greg Glassman.
“Medicine is supposed to be about helping you through the accidents — the misfortune of a genetic disease, the misfortune of a trauma, the misfortune of some pathogen,” Glassman said. “Nobody went to medical school to babysit someone through a life of self-inflicted misery because of two deadly habits: sedentarism and excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates.”
CrossFit, meanwhile, is a radical intervention, the “elegant solution” to the chronic diseases of obesity and diabetes ailing so many people, he said.
Since January, he’s hosted 340 doctors for weekends of networking, lectures, and a free two-day level-one CrossFit training course — the minimum requirement for anyone who wants to open a CrossFit gym.
“[Doctors have] gone back [from the training weekends] a little bit militant. More eager to talk to one another and their colleagues; more likely to take a patient by the hand and bring her into the gym,” he said.
When asked what he hoped might come of the doctor trainings, Glassman was vague. “We thought it would just be nice to network [the doctors],” he said. When pressed, though, he articulated a big wish: While he wasn’t interested in drawing doctors away from medicine, he hoped they’d feel empowered to think about prescribing CrossFit to patients, incorporating it in their medical practices, maybe even opening up CrossFit affiliates.
Doctors, Glassman says, can see that CrossFit “works.” And he’s become an unlikely advocate for solving an inconvenient problem: With the exception of bariatric surgery, doctors have few tools for treating, let alone preventing, obesity and other lifestyle-related diseases.
Glassman is working off a big and dubious assumption about the solution, however. He presumes obesity and diabetes are self-inflicted and that individuals can make changes — at a time when most researchers would argue these epidemics are driven not by a failure of willpower but rather by our calorie-drenched, obesogenic environment.
Helping people reap the benefits of any exercise also means getting them to do it regularly. And according to McMaster University kinesiology professor Stuart Phillips, nobody’s solved the exercise adherence problem. Not even Glassman.
So whether CrossFit-trained doctors really can be the revolution that vanquishes chronic disease is still very much up for debate.
What is CrossFit
[First, CrossFit is very expensive for a gym membership costing up to $250 a month.]
The hour-long workout — a rapid-fire series of movements, drawn from weight-building, gymnastics, and calisthenics — definitely veered closer to an Army drill than a hatha yoga class.
[The CrossFit Program consists of both cardiovascular (aerobic) excercise and resistance exercise. Both are known to be beneficial for health.]
[CrossFit has a reputation for promoting healthy diet as well as exercise.]
For me, what really set the class apart was the sense of community. Other members, recognizing I was new, repeatedly asked how they could help me and offered tips. Rather than isolating themselves with headphones like gym-goers normally do, my classmates were communicative, talking, joking, and encouraging one another throughout the workout.
There were no mirrors in sight. This matched what scholars who have studied CrossFit have concluded: It is akin to a religion. CrossFit “boxes,” as the gyms are known, are spaces where like-minded people can gather and experience a sense of togetherness.
His personal philosophy is also reflected in the brand’s business model. CrossFit is structured around a loosely affiliated network of gyms, or boxes. Anyone who wants to open a box simply has to attend a two-day level-one training course and pay a $3,000 yearly fee, among other minimal barriers to entry. Each box is independently owned and operated, with little interference from headquarters. CrossFit makes its money by accrediting trainers and licensing its name to owners.
Altogether, Glassman’s worldview and business model have proved a major success, as he reminded me a few minutes into our first conversation. He pointed out that he’s regularly invited to lecture at Harvard Business School because CrossFit is now “the fastest-growing chain in world history.”
. . . the standard prescription on offer in America for patients with diabetes and obesity has simply been to tell them to clean up their diet and exercise more. And that hasn’t worked. The CrossFit-supporting doctors I spoke with for this story, who attended the weekend training courses, acknowledged that fact. They seemed to have something more radical in mind.
They spoke of taking patients to the gym with them, or opening CrossFit boxes right in their hospitals. Like Ronda Rockett, they all expressed frustration with their inability to prevent and treat chronic disease in their practices.
[Some medical experts are doubtful that CrossFit is the answer.] “[The people] who are in most need of correcting metabolic disorders — overweight, out of shape, busy, stressed — are very unlikely to be able to do what CrossFit wants them to do, physically, emotionally, lifestyle-wise.”
Jensen was getting at the question of whether CrossFit can truly help those most in need: the non-exercisers. “The biggest reduction in risk for every single known chronic disease when it comes to physical activity happens when you get somebody who does nothing to do something, and I mean anything — going for a walk,” said McMaster University’s Phillips.
There’s no substantive evidence — at least not yet — that CrossFit can transform these folks over the long term, he added, even with doctors prescribing the program.
Although the above criticisms of the CrossFit Program are valid, there are features of the program that could be incorporated into other innovative health care programs.
