CrossFit South Philly runs training primarily through small group classes run by knowledgeable trainers. We have consistently found small group training to achieve better results than one-on-one training. A group environment generally fosters people to push themselves harder and enjoy the experience more. It is a place where people can find camaraderie, inspiration, and friendly competition.

Nutrition is vitally important for performance, as well as body composition. Our nutrition program has been developed to ease people into good habits and to begin thinking more critically and knowledgeably about what they are eating. Those who opt in to our nutrition program will work with our trainers through food logging and gradual adjustment.

Our trainers work with you to acclimate you to classes and teach you proper form. Form, range of motion, and safety are stressed continually during class. Our program also incorporates myofascial release, mobility, and post-workout stretching in addition to our normal CrossFit programming.

Scores are posted to the website and members have dedicated workout logs at our facility. Members are shown how to comprehensively log their performance directly following a workout. You can compare scalings, times, and weights to previous efforts in benchmarks and exercises.

CrossFit is infinitely scalable depending on ability. We have members of all abilities, from the recently sedentary to the competitive athlete.

CrossFit is a training methodology which uses constantly varied functional movement done at high intensity. It is also the sport of fitness (CrossFit Games) and a community of like-minded individuals throughout the world (CrossFit Affiliates Page). Our aim is to build complete fitness and athleticism through skilled training in multiple modalities including olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, basic gymnastic and body-weight training, running, dumbbell and kettlebell training and more. We build endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, and speed in addition to coordination, agility, accuracy, and balance. Movement for its own sake is not what we do – we train to move better in every way.

Sitting down and doing a bicep curl is one of the least athletic movements you can do. Yet it and isolation exercises like it are major staples of gyms despite the fact that they have little application to real world strength. An experienced CrossFitter will be able to perform well at any task, even the unfamiliar. The wide variety of modalities that we train in, in addition to the increased intensity, ensures that we develop all of the ten recognized general physical skills: Cardiorespiratory Endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Coordination, Agility, Balance, and Accuracy. Many programs focus on none of these skills, instead having as their primary goal just calorie burning or muscle building (which is often NOT synonymous with strength building). The rest typically focus on only one or two of these skills. Fitness bootcamps, for example, focus a lot on endurance and develop little else seriously.

Intensity has been shown not only to improve endurance, but also stamina, power, strength, and speed. Doing things slowly and without intensity gets you very little fitness – you haven’t pushed your body out of its comfort zone. Intensity, of course, is an individual thing which depends on your own physical and psychological tolerances – it is about using the maximum amount of your individual capability. CrossFit pushes people to put out as much power as they can – the majority of workouts are timed and push you to get through as much as can as fast as you can (while keeping good form). While many would people think nothing of spending an extra minute to slowly complete their workout while chatting or watching television in a gym, a minute is a large amount of time in a CrossFit workout that no one wastes.

We purposely keep our classes small so participants get quality personal attention. Our trainers hold numerous certifications in Personal Training and CrossFit instruction, including CrossFit specialty certifications in nutrition, kettlebell training, power lifting, olympic lifting, and running and endurance programming. Anyone who has taken a CrossFit certification is likely to tell you that the quality of education easily eclipses that of all the major personal training certifying organizations. Unlike the courses of those major certifying organizations, CrossFit certifications are taught by real coaches that have been involved in real training of serious athletes for years, not by textbooks.

From: The CrossFit Journal (Sept 2002)

“Your average neighborhood health club or gym is predicated on a low to minimum wage, unskilled staff supervising hapless members. The idea is to fill the space with machines, staff it with high school kids and let “Muscle and Fiction” provide the technical guidance. The predominant model in commercial facilities is the bodybuilding model: all machines and isolation work. Machines and isolation movements require little or no knowledgeable instruction or coaching whereas serious Strength and Conditioning requires less equipment and considerable expertise on the part of the coaches.

You can see this in the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s, landmark Essentials of Strength and Conditioning where schematics of a university strength and conditioning facility and a commercial health club are shown. The schematics speak volumes. You’ll notice that the commercial facility is littered with equipment whereas the university strength and conditioning facility is sparse by comparison.”