Dec22

10 Critical Principles Physical Therapists Need to Know About Crossfit for Successful Rehabilitation

posted by admin

1) What Crossfit is:

I field emails every day with questions about crossfit injuries. The biggest complaint I hear from these individuals about other physical therapists is that they don’t understand crossfit. Obviously, understanding what you’re trying to send your patients back to and what they’ll have to be capable of performing is going to be critically important in the rehab process.

To add to that, the amount of misinformation and bias out there in regards to crossfit is staggering. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been wearing a crossfit shirt and I’ll hear negative remarks about crossfit from other therapists who have never even set a foot in a crossfit gym or have any idea of what crossfit even is.

I was at CSM (Combined sections meeting, a very large physical therapy conference) and one of the presenters named Joe Black made a very interesting statement. He sends his patients to crossfit after therapy to address some of the problems he found in therapy. He believes that crossfit can be helpful in the rehab process (With a well designed program I completely agree). This was a very refreshing statement. Many therapists hold the completely opposite opinion. In fact there was a whole presentation at CSM that year talking about the dangers of high intensity programs like crossfit.

After Joe’s statement you wouldn’t believe the gasps from the audience. They sounded disgusted. You would have thought that Joe just took off his shirt and looked just like Edward Norton from American History X.

Obviously there is a lot of negative belief about crossfit in the therapy world. Crossfit is certainly not a perfect system and I don’t mean to raise it up on a pedestal but crossfit is certainly not the demon it is made out …read more