Is CrossFit a Legitimate Exercise?

What Mercuriale would have made of it

CrossFit is best understood as a military or athletic exercise, not a pro-health one.

This is a follow-on from last week’s piece on ancient Greek training and Girolamo Mercuriale’s 1569 De Arte Gymnastica, where he divided exercise into three categories: legitimate exercise for health, military exercise for preparedness, and athletic exercise, competitive and dangerous by nature. Using this framework, CrossFit is not hard to place.

CrossFit is built around intensity, time pressure, standardisation, and comparison. These are performance variables, not health variables. Even when no one is officially competing, the structure encourages urgency and limit-pushing. That alone disqualifies it as “legitimate” exercise in Mercuriale’s sense. Health does not require racing the clock.

At its best, CrossFit can build confidence and broad physical capacity, especially in people coming from inactivity. But the system does not encourage de-escalation. Progress is defined as more load, more speed, more volume, more tolerance for discomfort. More, faster, now. This is the opposite of training conservatively enough to still be functioning well years later.

That logic is military. The ancient Greek equivalent would be running or swimming in full armour. Useful if you are preparing for war. Entirely reasonable when the survival of the city is at stake. Longevity is not the goal in that context, effectiveness under stress is.

CrossFit’s injury profile is not an accident. It emerges from a specific combination of factors: complex movements performed under fatigue and time pressure, repeated session after session. Even when acute injuries are avoided, joint wear, connective tissue stress, and nervous system fatigue accumulate quietly. This is not a failure of discipline or intelligence on the part of participants. It is a structural outcome.

In Mercuriale’s terms, CrossFit sits firmly outside “legitimate”, preventitive care type of exercise. It can produce impressive humans, just as Greek military training once produced impressive warriors, but it does not optimise for durability. The CrossFit culture doesn’t ask, “Will this make me more capable in ten years?” Its implicit question is, “Can I survive this today?”

CrossFit could only become “legitimate” exercise if it were heavily modified: lower intensity, no time pressure, no leaderboard logic. At that point, it would barely resemble CrossFit as marketed. Competitive CrossFit besides being “military”, by definition, also belongs in the athletic and dangerous category.

CrossFit is often defended as “scalable.” This is true in theory but weak in practice. Scaling does not change the incentives. The structure still rewards urgency, comparison, and doing slightly more than you should, slightly more often than you should. Injuries are not the result of recklessness. They are the predictable outcome of the system.

When training meant for defending civilisation is sold as routine health maintenance, people pay the price.

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Notes

The illustration comes from Girolamo Mercuriale’s 1569 De Arte Gymnastica.