CrossFit Criticism and Controversy

CrossFit draws an awful lot of controversy.  The criticisms seem to boil down to a combination of the following:

1. CrossFit only prepares you to be good at CrossFit.  Its training is not transferrable to other "real" activities such as sports, life-and-death situations, or everyday physical demands.
2. Kipping Pull-ups are bullshit and that Clean & Jerk was sloppy.  CrossFit's use of Oly lifts and gymnastic activities in a high-volume, metabolic conditioning framework is sacrilegious.  It is a disgrace to the originally designed intent of such movements.  Additionally, these movements are often performed poorly or unsafely due to fatigue and/or poorly practiced form.
3. CrossFit is an elitist community and ostracizes a lot of people who could fundamentally benefit from CrossFit things.  CrossFit does not offer sufficient on-ramping and progression-based infrastructure to protect its participants and encourage success, especially newcomers and folks with pre-existing conditions.  It demands so much of a beginner that its workouts may easily injure him or drive him away.

I'm not going to defend CrossFit because I feel that it is, at least partially, guilty as charged on all three accusations.

1. Does CrossFit only help me get better at CrossFit?  I haven't attempted any sport other than CrossFit since I started, so I can't speak to this criticism in much detail.  I feel stronger, faster and healthier than I did before CrossFit, but at the same time I can't claim that I feel prepared to run a competitive 10K, swim a respectable 800m, play golf with greater accuracy, or be comfortable and confident in a fist fight.  I'm not looking for a fight, but I'll report back on my sports performance as it compares to my perceived present and prior performance.  CrossFit aims to maximize work capacity in a nonspecific way, so it's very difficult to assess whether it is actively enhancing my ability to do work (in the physics sense of the term) in specific applications such as kicking a soccer ball, carving a ski slope, or running a 10K race.  Time will tell.
2. Does CrossFit misuse Olympic lifts and other movements in its regimen?  Perhaps so...I talked about this in a previous post.  There are a couple good videos in which the father of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, discusses the philosophy and foundations of CrossFit.  In them, he indirectly defends the reasons for high-volume, full-body weightlifting: "work capacity across broad time and modal domains."  In other words, CrossFit aims to maximize work capacity (force applied over distance in various ways) executed over varying time domains (short time, longer time, long times).  His explanations make sense to me and I appreciate a more quantitative approach to defining health and fitness, but I'm not yet 100% convinced that the practice of high-volume Oly lifts and repetitive gymnastic movements are the most expedient (and safest) means to achieve maximized work capacity.
3. Is CrossFit elitist and, regardless of intention, exclusionary?  On this, I really have to agree that it is.  Robb Wolf, a journalist and author, provides a critique here.  Though it is pretty clear from his tone and diction that he himself got ostracized from the CrossFit community and therefore has some beef with CrossFit HQ, I can't help but agree that CrossFit has a tendency, though perhaps unintended, to leave behind beginners and slow learners.  It's not an easy regimen to follow and CrossFit's sense of tight-knit community seems to stem from survivorship bias and elitism, not from a special breed of fitness enthusiasts who happen to be friendly and outgoing.  In my own experience, I have occasionally felt that my classmates only became more interested in me after I had begun showing up more regularly and Rx'ing some WODs.  It could be coincidence or it could be a figment of my imagination, but it is an observation of mine.

CrossFit continues to attract a great deal of attention, both positive and negative.  This post is very unlikely to be my last on its controversy.  In spite of its criticisms and my doubts, I feel more engaged in my fitness than any time in the last few years and I find myself constantly hungry to improve.  If CrossFit has done that for me, I can't deny that it has a place in my world.