CrossFit comes to the Oval

RICHMOND (NEWS1130) – Imagine swinging a heavy bell, doing sprints while dragging someone, and then topping it off with tire flips! Those are just a few of the exercises CrossFit enthusiasts endure and hundreds of competitors will be sweating it this weekend at the Richmond Olympic Oval.

CrossFit trainer Dave Kitchen runs a gym in Deep Cove; he’s also the Western Canadian regional director for the 2012 CrossFit Games.

“CrossFit’s now being coined as the sport of fitness,” he explains. “[It’s] something that everybody can do. You’re going to see people doing things like jumping on boxes, lifting weights, running, rowing… anything that encompasses movement of the human body.”

It’s a challenging regimen but Kitchen insists you don’t have to be super-fit to start. “Most gyms actually start people off doing an on-ramp program or a fundamentals program, where we start to just take you through the movements with very light weights.”

“Then we bump up the intensity as you become more proficient at the movements,” he adds.

Kitchen tells us people of all ages and sizes can do CrossFit. “[There are] six-year-old in the kids’ program all the way up to my oldest [client at] 63 years old. Tall and skinny, short and wide, everything in between; really, it’s just coming in, learning the movements, and being part of a community.”
    
This weekend’s competition at the Oval is attracting a lot of fitness buffs.

“We’ve got about the top 225 athletes in Western Canada vying for the top two spots in Western Canada. That qualifies them to go the world games in California,” he explains.

“It makes for a pretty good spectator sport,” he adds. “We have some team events too, which are really neat, because you’ve got these teams of six people working together to do things…You might not think of it as a spectator sport but it’s actually quite exciting, especially if you’re into seeing the human body — how it moves, how it works.”

And no, you don’t have to lose your lunch doing CrossFit. But it happens…