Handstand with a spot: Paul Van Eikeren, of Bend, does a handstand with a spot from trainer Jimmy DaSilva at the Peak Training studio last week.

For some people, a couple of miles on the treadmill and a circuit through the weight machines at the gym seem tough enough. But for those who want to squeeze the most out of every workout, there’s CrossFit.

Designed by Greg Glassman in the late ’90s, CrossFit is widely considered the toughest, highest intensity workout program ever developed.

In spite of that reputation — or maybe because of it — it’s become one of the fastest growing fitness programs in the nation. It’s been the training method of choice for many police, fire and military outfits and has a cult-like following in garages across the country.

Now the CrossFit approach is becoming more mainstream, attracting clients ranging from elite athletes to average Joes of all ages and genders. New CrossFit studios, or boxes as they’ve come to be known, are opening on seemingly a daily basis, including four here in Central Oregon in the past year.

Proponents of the method maintain it will produce better results faster than any other fitness regimen, but only if you’re wiling to pay the price.

“I’m not saying CrossFit is the magic pill. The reality is it’s hard work,” said Thomas Benge, a trainer and co-owner of CrossFit Breakthough in Redmond. “But I have never seen a program deliver the results that CrossFit delivers in the time and at the level it delivers it.”

Total fitness

CrossFit was designed to develop overall fitness through constantly varied, high-intensity, functional movement. It’s based on the notion that true fitness can’t be achieved by doing the same thing over and over again. The human body, Glassman explained, will only respond to an unaccustomed stressor. Perform the same routine each time and fitness gains soon stagnate.

It takes a wide range of activities to prepare the body for all the myriad challenges posed by sports, jobs and functions of daily life, he said.

Sport-specific training, while great for that particular sport, falls short in terms of building overall fitness. Runners might excel at running but often cannot move heavy weights. Weightlifters might be able to power up dumbbells but lack cardiovascular endurance.

CrossFit aims to transcend such specialized training to promote total fitness. “Our specialty is not specializing” has become a CrossFit mantra.

Glassman said he drew elements from the most effective training techniques from various sports. CrossFit employs interval training to boost cardiovascular endurance, Olympic weight-lifting techniques to build strength and power, and gymnastic-type exercises using body weight to build core strength and body control.

The result is a workout program that’s never the same twice. It’s generally an all-out effort that leaves participants gasping from exhaustion yet asking for more.

“There’s no running 10 miles at a regular pace,” said Jimmy DaSilva, a CrossFit instructor at Peak Training in Bend. “If you’re running, it’s usually sprinting to failure then adding something on top of that.”

Like 30 pull-ups, or a series of squats, or a game of catch with a medicine ball while doing push-ups. In fact, the CrossFit Web site is chock-full of exercises that seem as if they’d bring a decathlete to his knees. But, instructors maintain, anybody is capable of completing the routines.

“The Web site makes it look like it’s totally extreme, but it’s totally scalable,” DaSilva said.

Trainers can use a variety of methods to bring the exercises to a level that is challenging for every client but still achievable. Pull-ups can be done with the assistance of a large elastic band, supporting some of the client’s body weight. Advanced clients might do squats with 100 pounds of weights, while beginners might use only a 15-pound bar.

“People’s needs differ only in scale, not in kind” is another CrossFit mantra.

Sense of community

That scalability also allows trainers to work with multiple clients at the same time and to create a sense of teamwork and even competition around the training regimen.

Glassman talked of turning fitness into a sport, in which participants compete to see how fast they can complete various routines. CrossFit gyms often have white boards where they record the times of their clients, taking advantage of their competitive nature. The drive to perform, they’ve found, is ramped up when somebody is keeping score.

“This is very close to the actual sport that I do,” said Roy Dean, a martial arts instructor with Roy Dean Academy in Bend. “It’s more total body, and it’s more compound movements. It makes exercise fun again. After a while, it can get stale if it’s just you, but this is almost like adult play time.” Dean said in the months he’s been working with DaSilva, he’s never done the same workout twice.

“How many people go to the gym and you have a card that says three sets of 15 of bench press,” said Shannah Werner, owner of Peak Training. “You come here and you don’t know what Jimmy is going to give you to do.”

Glassman posts new exercises on his Web site each day, and many CrossFit enthusiasts religiously perform these workouts of the day on their own as part of their training. There are also a series of workouts known as “the girls,” reportedly named after hurricanes because you feel as if you’ve been hit by a hurricane after completing them. These standard workouts allow individuals to measure their progress and see how they stack up against each other.

One of the girls, Fran, pairs pull-ups with thrusters, a move that involves lifting weights from a squat position to a press up above your head. To complete Fran, you must do three sets of thrusters and pull-ups — 21 times the first set, 15 the second, and nine on the third — as fast as you can.

On Saturday, Central Oregon CrossFit School of Fitness in Redmond will sponsor the first Central Oregon challenge. Participants will perform Fran to set a baseline this weekend, then will be retested eight weeks later. (The challenge is a fundraiser for Young Life Ministry to sponsor children to attend the Wild Horse Camp’s fall camp. Spectators can attend for free, starting at 9 a.m. Visit www.central oregoncrossfit.com for details.)

Open access

Benge said Glassman’s decision to post his workouts on his Web site where anyone can access them has helped to create a sense of community among CrossFit enthusiasts.

“What CrossFit has done to take this open market approach is brilliant,” Benge said. “I don’t know that I would have been involved if it were a closed-door community. I wouldn’t have come across it.”

Glassman said part of the reason for the open approach is that he believes that CrossFit represents the most effective way to train. By allowing everybody to see his program, he’s inviting people to poke holes in it or to come up with a better approach.

“There’s sort of a challenge in that,” Benge said. “He’s not hiding anything. Go ahead, try it, do it. Here’s our proof. If there’s something else that’s better out there, let’s see it.”

But he cautions that anyone interested in CrossFit should get some coaching first to learn the techniques.

“Even if it’s just for a month and then they decide to do it on their own, having that foundation is going to be a really important thing for them,” he said. “People go to the CrossFit main Web site and see all these workouts, then they go to the gym trying them without proper instruction, and they wind up aching and hurting. And they go, ‘I hurt myself doing CrossFit.’ I would say, you didn’t hurt yourself doing CrossFit, you hurt yourself trying to do CrossFit.”

Benge said the CrossFit approach stresses learning the proper movement before ramping up the intensity.

Extreme image

Many CrossFit enthusiasts, however, embrace the hard-core nature of their workouts. Some wear T-shirts proclaiming “I met Pukey.” Pukey is a cartoon clown, generally shown vomiting after a tough workout. He’s undoubtedly a buddy of Rhabdo, another cartoon clown named after rhabdomyolysis, a condition in which extreme exertion leads to kidney shut down and even death.

Writing in the CrossFit journal, Glassman said the condition is a real concern for people who jump into advanced CrossFit routines before they’re ready. In fact, he maintains that cases of Rhabdo prove that CrossFit trains athletes to perform at higher levels of fitness than any other training regimen.

Glassman said cases of rhabdomyolysis have occurred mainly in fit athletes, those who had the capacity to push themselves hard enough to complete a CrossFit workout for which they apparently were not prepared. It generally occurred in their first or second CrossFit session, and many had completed their first workout within the previous two days.

“From our perspective, it seems abundantly clear that these folks were exposed to too much work in too short a time,” he wrote.

Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of rhabdomyolysis in 1990, well before the advent of CrossFit, after Massachusetts police trainees and New York City firemen developed the condition trying to pass occupational fitness tests.

According to the CDC, the condition occurs when individuals unaccustomed to such vigorous physical activity exert themselves too hard.

While many CrossFit junkies seem to revel in the notion that they can work at levels that can literally kill other people, those trying to mainstream CrossFit try to downplay that Rambo mentality.

“The largest misconception about CrossFit is that it is just a bunch of potentially puking, hard, gut-busting intense workouts,“ Benge said. “I think what a lot of people miss about CrossFit is the science behind the coaching. CrossFit is more than just really, really hard intense workouts. They are, but there’s a science around moving properly that makes the workouts so effective.”

Hannah Olson, a licensed massage therapist in Bend, has been working with DaSilva using the CrossFit approach for about six months.

“I was just blown away,” she said. “The level of training was way beyond anything I had ever seen. You rarely see girls doing pull-ups and squats.”

In fact Olson admits she couldn’t do any pull-ups when she first started training with DaSilva in the spring. Now she can knock out multiple reps, and she’s seen that benefit translate to her other pursuits: biking, snowboarding and rock climbing. As a licensed massage therapist, she is often called upon to do some strenuous deep tissue massage, and the CrossFit training has helped make that task easier.

“It transfers into self-confidence,” she said.

Examples of the CrossFit way

CrossFit experts have found that a pattern of working for three days, then resting for one day, allows individuals to work out at maximum intensity over a long period of time. Each workout, however, can be drastically different.

Day one might include a warm-up, followed by three to five sets of three to five reps of weight lifting at a moderate pace, followed by a 10-minute circuit of gymnastic elements done at a blistering pace, before ending with two to 10 minutes of cardiovascular training.

Day two might consist of five reps of a moderately heavy back squat, followed by three to five sets of as many pull-ups as you can do.

Day three could involve five or six elements of weight lifting, cardiovascular fitness and gymnastics combined into a single circuit performed three times without a break.

Central Oregon CrossFit Boxes

Central Oregon CrossFit School of Fitness

555 N.E. Hemlock Ave., #105, Redmond

541-923-3433

www.centraloregoncrossfit.com

CrossFit Breakthrough

413 N.W. Fir Ave., Redmond

541-504-0930

www.crossfitbreakthrough.com

High Desert CrossFit

333 S.E. Logsden St., Suite 101, Bend

541-647-2642

www.highdesertcrossfit.com

Peak Training

390 S.W. Columbia St. #120, Bend

541-647-1346