It was everywhere. If you waded through social media’s megalomania, cries for attention, and narcissism, you may have seen the shouts and whispers about…the terror of CrossFit.

A little article, CrossFit’s Dirty Little Secret (it came out in late September), struck fear in everyone’s heart, whether they religiously hit the WOD (workout of the day) or merely blow their wad watching the CrossFit games on ESPN2. The article, written by a physical therapist who unfortunately doesn’t lift, discusses the danger of Rhabdomyolysis or “rhabdo” for short. In his words from the article:

“So what is rhabdomyolysis exactly? Under extreme conditions your muscles cells explode. They die. They leach protein out into the blood stream, including one form called myoglobin. Ever stalwart, your kidneys take up the job of clearing these dangerous proteins from the blood. Why? It’s just what they do. Unfortunately, myoglobin proteins aren’t designed to be in the blood in the first place and they can easily overload the kidney. This can produce injury or death to all or part of the kidney in a short amount of time, and is potentially lethal. Locally, the muscles are left damaged and dying. Swelling ensues and weakness occurs as pressure builds around the remaining muscle cells. Your body’s systems that normally can assist with this local muscle damage are now offline trying to help you not die. If you get to this stage, you’re in serious trouble.”

Yikes. And the thing is, rhabdo cases are all too common in CrossFit. In fact, back in the early days of CrossFit, it was “cool” to puke when you pushed your body too hard. Getting “rhabdo” was a badge of honor to some, and CF surely didn’t help by putting out the stupid-ass cartoon to the left.

Are physical therapists right to lambaste CrossFit? Is it dangerous, a crazy exercise fad that only hurts people?

I don’t care. Search “CrossFit” on this site and you’ll pull up a number of articles regarding my opinion on CrossFit. Whether HQ is shaking in their boots or greedily rubbing their hands together because of the free press is beyond my fucks to give. What I can tell you is that rhabdo is extremely easy to prevent.

It’s called programming, and it’s not that hard.

Doing even a half-assed job at programming will net you almost zero injuries and progress if you adhere to two main ideas: 1) don’t do anything stupid and 2) condition the bodies of trainees and clients to their workouts via some sort of progression.

I realize the irony in number 1; if you’re stupid, how would you know that you’re doing something stupid? Well, in the case of high intensity conditioning, “stupid” means telling your trainees to do a bunch of shit they aren’t prepared for. That translates to high levels of volume or intensity beyond what they are currently adapted to. Don’t ask for 100 reps of a given exercise if they haven’t done more than 50 in a workout — or if they just showed up at your gym. Don’t ask them to do several hundred reps of anything ever.

Care should taken when programming new movements or exercises that the trainee is unadapted to. In FIT — a general fitness and strength and conditioning book I helped write — I actually provide a repetition cap for new exercises.

“Generally speaking, when introducing a new weighted or ballistic exercise into the program, a strong trainee should not do more than 30 repetitions in any given high intensity workout. Thrusters, Kettlebell Swings, and Box Jumps can cause exceptional soreness if carelessly performed for high repetitions. Calisthenics that haven’t been normally performed as part of a trainee’s previous strength program shouldn’t be done for more than the maximal amount of repetitions the strong trainee could do for one set. This cap will help prevent debilitating soreness by dividing the work into several sub-maximal sets. For example, do three sets of eight repetitions of Dips instead of doing one set of 25 repetitions (pg 168).”

30 reps may seem low, but I’m concerned with inducing an adaptation of improved performance, not excessive soreness or difficulty. Besides, making clients excessively sore will either deter them from coming to the gym or, more importantly, be debilitating for future strength training sessions. And the strength training is what actually matters anyway since it’s the fundamental capacity for conditioning, but I digress.

30 reps is an arbitrary number; it was chosen to give readers a quantifiable marker to prevent them from doing something stupid. And that’s much more than what CrossFit has done for their coaches or trainees. I remember a year or so ago when the CF Open WODs (competitive workouts that select competitors for regional competition — it’s the gateway to the CrossFit Games) had a lot of jumping movements and achilles ruptures were unfortunately common. While CrossFit explains how to scale their workouts on their website, they also foster a “tough guy” mentality and many trainees don’t know when to quit.

But this shouldn’t be about CrossFit, this should be about the coaches. It’s up to individual coaches or trainers to be able to determine the current adaptive state of their clients and structure their exercise regime in a way that isn’t injurious. It’s really not that hard as one of the oldest affiliates can attest.

Preventing rhabdomyolysis isn’t hard, but it requires actually programming training instead of randomly choosing exercises and workouts. If you or a coach you know are completely in the dark on this, then start consuming strength and conditioning literature. FIT is a great resource — especially for programming high intensity conditioning with strength training (and not just because my name is on the cover) — but there are plenty of decent resources available for free.

Hopefully the news about rhabdo will push many coaches to educate themselves on effective programming. There’s no excuse for sending trainees to the hospital.

Mike: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Andrew: I am a 6’5”, 375 lb., 33 year old Software Engineer.  I was born and raised in Burbank, OH but I live in Seattle, WA now.  I also spent a few years in Dayton, OH and Louisville, KY.  As of now though I consider Seattle home and can’t imagine leaving.

Mike: Have you always been into strength sports?

Andrew: Sort of. I grew up watching World’s Strongest Man all the time as a kid and I loved lifting weights in high school but I never had any interest in competing or following it seriously until years later.  It took me getting tremendously out of shape after working 18 months of 60 hour weeks at a job in Louisville to get me off of my ass (literally) and into the gym with the goal of competing in my first strongman contest.

Mike: How long have you been a Pro and how did you get into strongman?

Andrew: As I said above I was really out of shape and just decided to pick a sport I thought my body would be OK at and start training.  I got my pro card almost exactly 2 years after starting to lift weights again, and 18 months after my first contest. I worked insanely hard those first two years doing tremendous, and arguably stupid, amounts of work.

Mike: What kind of training split/program do you use for training? What are some of your PR’s?

Andrew: My training split will vary a lot depending on my goals at the time.  If I am aiming to bring up my deadlift or press I may do only 3 days a week with a fairly standard powerlifting split.  If I am trying to fix a strongman specific implement I will restructure toward that.  I try not to talk about PR’s, they only matter in contest and always vary between training and contest.  I will say this though, the last year every single number of mine has continuously either risen or gotten faster and I plan for that to continue for a long time.

Mike: Where do you train? Do you train alone, with a steady group of people?

Andrew: I train at Seattle Strength and Power, Todd Christensen’s gym in downtown Seattle, WA. I don’t have specific training partners on a daily basis but I am always getting help, spots, advice, or knowledge from Todd C, Pete Marcoff (who taught me every event, especially stones), or the other ladies and gentleman who train there.

Mike: What is your diet like?  

Andrew: Big. I try to eat healthy most meals but I start to lose weight eating 6 large healthy meals so I tend to mix in some serious food that most people would be horrified by. Think a quart of ice cream with a cup of peanut butter on top of it.  I like to take healthy meals and just add tons of PB and call it a day.  I tend to eat tons of ground beef and chicken breast, along with some pile of tasty veggies and maybe some cheese and a tortilla or some rice for most of my meals.

Mike: What has been your favorite moment as a competitive strongman?

Andrew: California’s Strongest Man June of 2009.  The stone load.  No one else had even come close to finishing the 300-470 stone series.  When I loaded it (fairly easily) the crowd lost its mind.  The contest was in a beer garden so the crowd was especially loud.  All contests should have alcohol being served to the crowd.

Mike: What are your goals in the sport? 

Andrew: To get better, to win, and to get as much attention to the sport as I can.  Other than those goals I don’t see any reason to compete.  I also make it a point to have fun, which can be tough when you are beating the hell out of yourself day on day for years.  Thankfully, it is fun to get really, really good at something.  More people should try it.

Mike: You’ve mentioned a desire to compete in powerlifting, when are you planning on doing a competition? Any other strength sport aspirations?

Andrew: I have plans to do my first powerlifting meet within the next year.  I expect I will be moving around some big numbers with the way things have been progressing, but I will let my numbers do the talking once I actually compete.  I also did my first Highland Games contest this summer.  They asked me to compete in B class and I won all but one event and set several A class field records in the process.  I loved it and I will be doing more of these schedule permitting, but strongman still comes first to me.

Mike: If you could give any advice to anyone wanting to turn strongman from a hobby into a lifestyle, what would you tell them?

Andrew: Don’t.  Keep it a hobby.  Right now the odds of a person making a living doing strongman is effectively zero.  Get an education.  Get a career that pays well.  Work hard at it.  Strongman is still a hobby for me, one I love and put many hours and dollars into, but it is still a hobby.  Someday that may change but for now it stands.  The amount of work I put into maintaining my career, my strongman training, and my social life would astound most people, but it is also what has gotten me this far.  And seriously, don’t ditch the social life to live in the gym people.  Make friends, date, have fun.  It will blow your mind how much that stuff can help your training even if it does cut into it a bit.

Mike: Rumor has it you beat Robert Oberst by a fraction of a second on the Yoke at America’s Strongest Man due to the length of your beard. Fact or fiction?

Andrew: Fiction.  We actually tied with the exact same time in the yoke.  That is the second time this year that we have had the exact same yoke time down to the hundredth of a second.  However, in both cases, the crowd unanimously agreed that my beard was prettier, manlier, longer, and made his beard feel like it had just turned 13 and still not gotten its first chest hair.  I’ve heard it from reliable sources that his beard was rather embarrassed after mine showed up and proved itself the best beard in strongman.

Mike: Anything else you would like to mention?

Andrew: Keep your eyes open all over the web and in magazines for me in the new Car2Go ad campaign.  I’ve been spotted all over North America and the ad is pretty rad!