We recommend you visit or try out several CrossFit gyms before choosing one, and we hope you'll choose us on this basis: CrossFit Atlanta provides the best quality CrossFit training available. (If you're price shopping, you can leave now.) We're fully committed to CrossFit as the best path to fitness, and we've been doing CrossFit longer than anyone else in Georgia.
CrossFit, Inc does not franchise; they don't grant territories; they operate the basis of licensing the CrossFit brand name to "affiliates." CrossFit does not specify anything about how an affiliate should run their gym. Thus, each CrossFit gym is different. Each has a different vibe. It ain't like McDonald's or LA Fitness. Some will let you bring your dog, some won't. Some won't allow chalk (stay away from those!). Some will allow you to take your shirt off during the workout and flop down and make sweat angels on the floor after the workout, some won't. So choose one that suits you, one where you feel comfortable, where you will stay the course.
Not so long ago the world of CrossFit consisted almost exclusively of folks who truly believed that CrossFit was the best general physical preparation regimen in existence. But that is changing. Many established fitness businesses have felt threatened by the rapid growth of CrossFit. Viewing it as the latest fad, like Tae-Bo, Zumba, or cardio kickboxing, they seek to retain or gain clients by hopping on the bandwagon and adding it to an existing hodgepodge of fitness offerings. Sometimes they do so without much understanding of CrossFit methods or belief in CrossFit's efficacy. So, questions you might want to ask could include "How long have you had CrossFit?" "Is this a CrossFit only facility or is CrossFit just one of many methods you offer?" "If you really think CrossFit is the best path to fitness, why do you offer so many other training options?"
Gyms that are dedicated CrossFit only gyms have a totally different feel, a very different culture, than franchise gyms. In many gyms the people working out are are alone: focused inward with their headphones, watching TV, or checking themselves in the mirror. At CrossFit gyms,there are no mirrors, and the everyone is talking, interacting with each other, encouraging one another, having fun, making friends.
We don't sit on machines that take all the skill out of human movement because we believe that doing that is about the most ineffective way to get fit imaginable. CrossFit involves complex, multi-joint movements, and teaching them involves recognizing and correcting movement faults. We teach people how to move correctly. Consequently, coaching expertise makes a difference. Greg Glassman, the CrossFit founder, has said that even bad CrossFit training is better than almost all other training, and this is true. By comparison, good CrossFit training is remarkably more effective. Most people are not equipped to judge whether they are getting good, mediocre, or bad training. So why do we claim to be the best? One reason is that we have great trainers. The CrossFit Level One certification is currently attendance based. Attend the seminar and you are a CrossFit Level 1 trainer, and you can open a CrossFit gym or add CrossFit to your existing fitness business. But the CrossFit Level 2 certification is test based. It is designed to test the trainer's ability teach correct movement patterns, and to see and correct movement faults. Very soon we hope and expect that it will be the only fitness certification in the world accredited by ANSI. It is a difficult test of coaching competency that has a 40% pass rate. CrossFit Atlanta has 4 Level 2 trainers. Several other Level 2s now at other gyms got their start our gym All the trainers coming out of our gym have a 100% pass rate on the 1st try. Another reason to choose us is the quality of our Olympic lifting instruction. The Olympic lifts are a foundational element in the CrossFit method, [read Foundations, by Greg Glassman], and our O-lift instruction team is led by people who have competed nationally and internationally in Olympic Lifting. We are a USA Weightlifting Local Weightlifting Club, and are the only CrossFit gym in Atlanta that is.
Last, but not least, are the results our people are achieving. Coach Glassman has said that the needs of elite athletes do not differ in kind from the needs of ordinary people, they only differ in degree. What we are doing is proof of that hypothesis. Our members took Gold & Silver for both men and women in the Georgia Sectionals-2010 CrossFit Games. We also qualified a team for the 2010 CrossFit Games and wound up with an 8th place finish out of the 66 teams who had made it through a difficult qualifying process. Our athletes perform exceedingly well in other CrossFit competitions, and on the playing fields in a wide variety of sports. But we take the most pride and get the most satisfaction from watching people without athletic aspirations transform themselves with the very same program. We are producing winners in life and sport.
