You are going to die.  One day, you will be buried, cremated, or otherwise disposed of, returned to the carbon cycle from which you came.  Hopefully, someone will cry, and you’ll leave the world with fond memories of your brief existence.

Odds are, your parting will not be the result of exercise-induced rhabdomyolysis.  This occurrence, in which the rapid breakdown of muscle fibers overwhelms your kidneys with renegade proteins, is rarely fatal.  It is painful, but it will not send your loved ones coffin shopping.

You’re far more likely, epidemiologically speaking, to die of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or one of myriad other ailments impacting our sedentary, insulin-insensitive population.  The trip from the couch to the crash cart occurs far more often than the trip from the platform to the emergency room.

This fact is lost on the folks who rail against high-intensity exercise, convinced that a single exposure to CrossFit is the equivalent of a coin-flip death sentence.  Myopically decrying the danger of our workouts, these detractors fail to recognize that the benefits of CrossFit far outweigh the risks, and the incidence of rhabdo has absolutely nothing to do with chance.

We engage in consistent, high-intensity exercise, and the health of our athletes speaks for itself.  These individuals exhibit vastly superior biological markers to their sedentary brethren:  lower triglycerides levels, improved heart function, and decreased blood pressure, coupled with amazing physical performance.  Given this top-drawer inoculation against death and disease, any sane actuary would accept our injury rate at fifty times its current levels.   Nonetheless, the risk of rhabdomyolysis somehow overshadows CrossFit’s benefits, looming large in the minds of our Nation’s fitness bureaucrats.

These rock stars, ensconced in leather chairs and starched uniforms, forget that rhabdo results from an imminently predictable and wholly preventable chain of events.  Typically, an athlete with unchecked ambition and poor physical condition meets with a stopwatch wielding rent-a-trainer, and a perfect vortex of idiocy ensues.  The trainer screams, “Go, go, go”, the aspiring athlete flails around the gym for twenty minutes.  Totally overextended and entirely insufficient to the task, he spends the next four days in a paper gown.  This scenario, about as consistent with CrossFit as a lap on the Stairmaster, is taken as the norm, and the program is dismissed as deadly. 

This knee-jerk rejection is based on fear rather than fact, couched in the all-too-human tendency to avoid pain at all costs.  Like most people, our critics will mortgage their health for a safe and easy here and now, spreading a dogma of pseudo-safety throughout their organizations and ensuring a future of poor health for their athletes.

The wholesale rejection of constantly varied, functional movement under the pretense of excessive danger makes no more sense than refusing to swim for fear of drowning.  We cannot stay indoors for fear of skin cancer, nor walk everywhere for fear of a car crash. The slightest amount of caution, combined with intelligent increases in intensity, will rhabdo-proof any trainee, removing imminent danger from the fitness equation.

The proponents of high safety, low efficacy programs will likely remain unscathed for their choices, shielded from criticism while their training protocols produce neither harm nor good.  Meanwhile, their charges will enter middle age with an increased propensity for disease and frailty, never aware of what was lost.  They may die of heart disease, cancer, or the slow oxidation of their organs, but they will not die of anything as horrifying as rhabdomyolysis.

Of course, neither will anyone else.

Shawn might be rhabo-proof, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.  Picture courtesy of The Napping Poet.