Carolyn Nagler has witnessed a lot in her year attending CrossFit classes: twisted ankles, torn shoulders, blood. Her own most painful experience happened six months after first wandering into a class, when she cut her legs in missing her target during a “box jump,” which requires hopping from a squatted position onto an elevated board.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the 45-year-old operations manager from returning to her local gym in Astoria, Queens, up to five times a week. “I was bleeding all over, but I got up and kept going,” she says. “If I didn’t, I would never be able to do a box jump again.”
New Yorkers are always seeking new, extreme methods for shedding pounds. And high-intensity interval-training (HIIT) workouts such as those at CrossFit — in which participants complete physically demanding repetitions, including squats, burpees, jumping and sometimes obstacle course components — have unique appeal to New Yorkers’ inherent thirst for competition, culture of one-upmanship and pursuit of novelty.
With these push-to-the-limit workouts, however, come injuries.
“I do think there is a sort of race between gyms to find the next new thing,” says Jordan Metzl, a primary care sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery who also teaches an HIIT class. He says he’s seen a 30 percent increase in HIIT-related injuries at the hospital over the past two years.
“It can kill you,” CrossFit co-founder Greg Glassmantold the New York Times in 2005. “I’ve always been completely honest about that.” (A CrossFit spokesman told The Post, “CrossFit is not HIIT: There are components to that term that describe CrossFit, but it’s dramatically different. There are about 10 different acronyms that health professionals have tried to attach to CrossFit, but the academic world is largely at odds with what we teach. Three studies in peer-reviewed journals have found that the rate of CrossFit injuries is two to three injuries per 1,000 hours of CrossFit.”)
Noel Lozares, an orthopedic and sports physical therapist who often works with Olympic athletes, says with all the hype — and the pressure to keep up with your gymmates — it’s easy for workout enthusiasts to get carried away. He recommends that people interested in HIIT should already be active — whether it’s running, yoga or pilates — three days a week.
“You always want to consult the instructor,” he says. “So many people who have never done any kind of exercise before get into these classes, and that’s when injuries happen.”
The most common athletic ailments include muscle strains, particularly in the lower back; knee and shoulder injuries; and tendon issues.
Still, doctors believe strength training is an important part of any athlete’s workouts — and can make other kinds of exercise, like running, easier and more productive. Before a session, Metzl recommends doing what he calls a “dynamic warm-up” to get muscles and joints moving: two minutes’ worth of 30-second sets of jumping jacks, squats and lunges.
Another important part of staying fit and healthy is allowing the body time to recover, says Lozares. “I am working with athletes who are going to Rio [de Janeiro] this summer [for the Olympics] — none of them do HIIT every day.”