I have always had a love for lifting weights and have always been curious what type of weight lifting is the best for your body as well as makes you strongest. The two types of lifting that I will be comparing are Powerlifting and CrossFit. According to CrossFit.com, crossfit is a competitive sport. Including high intensity interval training which incorporates power lifts, gymnastics, and plyometrics. Powerlifting is a a strength based sport that includes 3 main lifts; squat, bench press and dead-lift. Many people ask the question whether the fast time interval and short break time movements in crossfit is better for your body and makes you stronger than powerlifting.
CrossFit has many pros and cons. Some Pros of crossfit are the fact that crossfit is very affordable, most of the exercises are all done with the same equipment. All you really need to train for crossfit is a pull-up bar and a barbell. Another advantage of crossfit is that is is very transportable, with very little equipment it is easy to train anywhere at anytime. Even though crossfit is cheap and transportable it is very hard training and to be honest I think powerlifting gets you stronger in the long term.
Powerlifting is based on heavy weights with extended break periods. What I get out of powerlifting verses crossfit is that powerlifting allows you to put more strength and power into each set of lifting as well as putting less stress on your body with longer break periods. According to this article life long athlete Erin Simmons speaks about the many reasons that powerlifting is better in all aspects than crossfit. The article says “how Olympic lifts life cleans and dead-lifts should not ever be preformed at a rep range of 20-30 reps” which is what crossfit preaches, it is not only terrible for your body but also could make you weaker in the long run.
Many people don’t really care about the long term affects that either type of training will have on their body, they care about which will get them stronger. Here is a video where a professional powerlifter competes against a pro crossfitter in a race of who can do the same exact weight for a certain amount of reps in 2 crossfit workouts and 2 powerlifting workouts.
In the video the powerlifter wins by a huge margin beating the crossfit competitor in the strength workouts and the cardio vascular workouts. This was a experiment where the obvious variables being tested were the different sports being put to test against each other where the controls in this experiment were the athletes having the same number of reps and workouts to complete.
All in all, powerlifting shows more strength advantages and less of a risk to your body, for me these 2 factors make it an easy choice to shade away from crossfit and towards powerlifting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erin-simmons/why-i-dont-do-crossfit_b_5411771.html
http://healthyliving.azcentral.com/crossfit-vs-powerlifting-14397.html#
Your topic choice is very interesting in the fact that there truly is a lot of discussion about Crossfit since it is now growing in popularity. In my personal opinion the two can’t really be compared in what the true results of each are. Power lifting is more centered around gaining muscle mass, and strength where crossfit’s high interval training has a lot to do with endurance, strength and speed. Now crossfit in my opinion can be very dangerous due to the high reps and speed involved in its competitions as you briefly mentioned. However, I believe that there is a lack of research as of now. As well as I don’t think that you can compare Crossfit and Power lifting. Deciding between the two is about what your end goals are in your physique. While searching your topic I came across an article on HealthF Fitness Revolution’s website about several health benefits of crossfit, I figured you’d might be interested in talking a look.