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!

Between September 8-22 I spent some time in California just hanging out, eating, and lifting with a bunch of different people. Most of the time I lift by myself in my garage, so I wanted to wisely use my time off between the military and the next chapter of my life to do something cool. It was definitely an awesome experience, and since I divided the majority of my time between Sacramento and Monterey, I’ll make this a two part write-up.

On September 8, Ben “the biggest arms in weightlifting” Claridad picked me up from the airport, and we went for some all you can eat sushi. Things were off to a good start. If you have never checked out Ben’s blog alongthelinesof.com, you might not know that Ben is the coach of Midtown Barbell’s weightlifting team, as well as an accomplished weightlifter in his own right (he recently went 140/177 at the Caffeine & Kilos invitational). It should be pointed out at this point that Ben and I had never met, and only knew each other through Justin and 70’s Big. Ben was kind enough to let me stay with him at his house, despite not knowing if I was in fact a serial killer, as Brent Kim says. Good dude.

Anyway, Monday morning came along and we went to Ben’s normal coffee spot, and headed to the gym. Monday I primarily worked on learning to power jerk out of the rack, and Ben adjusted my push press grip. One of the main reasons I went to California, aside from wanting to just hang out and eat, was to work on my overhead lifting. I wanted to make a transition from push pressing my axle, to power jerking, because strongman doesn’t really care how the weight gets over your head. It was a productive effort, and after about 30 minutes I knew what I needed to work on in the future.

The cool thing about Midtown is that it’s divided between the weightlifting/strength and conditioning side, and Mark Bell’s SuperTraining. Even though Tuesday is not when I normally deadlift, I decided that I would hop in with them and pull against bands. The atmosphere when all of them are lifting is pretty intense; I have never been in a gym with that much energy before. There were a ton of people crammed into a relatively small area, and as soon as one person left the bar, the next guy was up. Once I saw how they were making jumps with the weight I decided to pull 445×5 against the bands. And since I’ve only been pulling with a hook grip for a while, and it wasn’t holding up, I opted to use straps. Having never pulled against bands it was somewhat challenging, but since my lockout has always been weak on the deadlift, it’s definitely something I’ll consider using in the future.

Wednesday I decided I would high bar squat in the morning and front squat in the evening. In the morning I HBBS 420 5×3 and came in that evening to work up to a heavy single on the front squat. At first I felt a bit tired warming up, but once I got going I felt better. I definitely see why weightlifters benefit from multiple sessions per day. My previous PR was 405, so after some consideration Ben and I decided on 407. Well, the first rep felt really good, so I did a double. I’m not going to complain.

Thursday is Bench night at SuperTraining, so of course I jumped in again. Again, the atmosphere was incredible. I spotted Mark Bell on a 505×2 double that he absolutely destroyed. I actually laughed because I had never seen weight like that move so damn fast. It was my SlingShot week anyway, so I stuck with the plan (sort of) and threw that on. I ended up benching against chains, which took some getting used to. But after a few feeler sets I was good. I’m not sure that I’ll invest in chains anytime soon, as I’m weak off my chest, and my lockout is fairly decent. However, I do see the point of using them for someone with a weak lockout. After all that I worked up to a 365 paused double (another PR) and called it a day.

Friday the goal was for Ben to teach me to clean, and he did that in about 25 minutes. The dude is a hell of a coach, especially if he can teach me. Believe it or not for as long as I’ve been training, I never learned to clean. Back when Justin coached me in 2010 I had a biceps injury that prevented me from learning to clean. But in a short amount of time Ben was able to get me squared away.

Saturday was my final day in Sacramento, and again I jumped in with the SuperTraining guys, this time to squat. After watching Chris Ramos (he weighs 209) obliterate a 645 squat, I said “OK, I’m going to try wrapping my knees”. I worked up to 470×2 with the Mastadon bar (which is extremely thick), and then saw that 505 was loaded on the Iron Wolfe squat bar in the monolift. If you have never seen an Iron Wolfe bar it’s 65lbs, 8.5ft long, 35mm, and has incredibly aggressive knurling. I won’t lie, I was a bit intimidated. Nevertheless, I said “I’ll do 5” unracked the bar and didn’t think twice. Using a monolift was again, a different experience, and I can definitely see why people like it. That bar is intense and would definitely take some practice to get used to that. The set of 5 was relatively easy though, and I decided that at some point I’ll probably experiment with wrapping my knees.

Sorry if that was a bit lengthy, but thanks for reading! Check out part 2 next week.