Why I Disagreed with CrossFit 10 Years Ago — and Why I Still Do

I’m not writing this to start a fight. I’m writing it because I think a lot of you already feel what I felt, and you deserve to hear it said out loud.

I started my coaching career inside CrossFit. I believed in it. I put in the hours, earned the credentials, and threw myself into the methodology. And for a while, it was genuinely exciting — community, intensity, functional movement. There was a lot to love.

But over time, I started noticing things that bothered me. Small things at first. Then bigger ones. Cracks in the foundation that I couldn’t unsee. Eventually, I had to make a choice: keep going along with it, or build something better.

I chose to build something better. That’s where MOEfit came from.

Ten years later, my disagreements haven’t changed. If anything, they’ve deepened. So here they are — honestly, and in plain language.

1. Kipping pull-ups aren’t pull-ups

Let me be careful here, because I’m not saying kipping is wrong in every context. As a gymnastics skill, it has real application. Gymnasts use it. It requires coordination and timing. I respect it for what it is.

The problem is what CrossFit turned it into: a substitution for the strict pull-up, and an entry point for people who haven’t earned the shoulder stability to do it safely.

If you can’t do six strict pull-ups, your shoulders and the muscles that support them are not ready to absorb the torque and momentum of a kipping movement. That’s not an opinion — that’s anatomy. Coaching someone into a kipping pull-up before they’ve built that foundation isn’t programming. It’s a liability.

“The kipping pull-up became a shortcut that bypassed the work that actually builds the shoulder. And the shoulder paid for it.“

We don’t do that here. You earn the movement before you advance it.

2. CrossFit is a sport — and that’s the problem

CrossFit became a sport. There’s an Open, a Games, a leaderboard, a podium. And if you want to compete in it, genuinely — more power to you. That takes incredible dedication.

But here’s the question I kept asking myself: do people play full-contact football to get fit? Do people sign up for competitive hockey to prepare for life at 60?

Of course not. Those are sports. They’re pursued for the love of competition, and they come with sport-specific risks. Training like a competitive athlete when your goal is long-term health and fitness is a mismatch that your body will eventually correct — usually in the form of an injury.

MOEfit doesn’t have a leaderboard. We have people who are stronger, more capable, and still training hard at an age when most people have stopped. That’s the scoreboard I care about.

3. They cheat the most important part of the lift

This one might be the one that bothers me most technically, because the research is so clear.

In CrossFit, it is not only acceptable but encouraged to drop the barbell from the top of a deadlift — bypassing the eccentric phase entirely. The eccentric phase is the lowering portion of a lift, the part where your muscles are lengthening under load.

Study after study has shown that the eccentric phase is where a significant portion of the strength and muscle-building stimulus lives. You’re not just skipping a step when you drop the bar. You’re throwing away some of the most valuable adaptation your body would have made from that rep.

“It’s not just inefficient. It’s a philosophy of cheating the work — dressed up as intensity.“

At MOEfit, we own every phase of every rep. The eccentric isn’t optional. It’s the point.

4. The mentality

I’ve heard CrossFit called a cult, and I’ve pushed back on that word — it feels a little harsh. But the mentality behind it? That part I understand.

When questioning the methodology is treated as disloyalty. When outsiders are dismissed as people who just “don’t get it.” When the community becomes an identity so strong that no one inside feels comfortable asking hard questions — that’s worth paying attention to.

Healthy fitness culture welcomes scrutiny. It adapts. It asks why. We try hard to build that kind of culture here.

What we kept — and why

I want to be clear about something: I didn’t leave CrossFit because everything about it was wrong. I left because too much of what mattered was being compromised.

The class format? We kept it. Warm up, lift, condition, go home. It’s clean, it works, and there’s no reason to reinvent it. The METCON? We kept that too — it’s accurate terminology and our members know it.

What we kept was the scaffolding. What we rebuilt was everything inside it.

MOEfit was built on a simple idea: what if you took CrossFit’s best thesis — functional movement, real intensity, genuine community — and stripped out the ego, the shortcuts, and the sport mentality that doesn’t serve regular people trying to be fit for life?

That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve always been.

And ten years in, I’m more sure of it than ever.