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The math and physics of cycloids directing accelerating (if falling or otherwise accelerated) objects is related and well comprehended. My mathematical intuition tells me that the Brachistochrone cycloid, Evil Kinevel's jump ramp, the kipping pull-up, and even the kettlebell swing each favors arcs that allow for maximum acceleration and velocity before diverting direction while optimally preserving momentum. This gets you first to the finish line by longer than shortest routes. I'm rejecting Eugene's rejection of Eva's analogy and Eva�s near denial of the applicability of the Brachistochrone solution to the kipping pull-up.
But, the problem with using vector diagrams, free body diagrams, and the like to analyze human movements gets super ugly, and fast. On the exact subject of estimating the muscular work required to perform a pull-up, Richard Burton, Senior Lecturer, Institute of Physiology, University of Glasgow, offers in his book Physiology by Numbers, "The mechanics of human movement would seem to offer considerable scope for quantitative treatment involving muscle tensions and the arithmetic of levers. However, a simple limb movement may call on a number of muscles working together, and the relevant measures may be hard to elicit, even from many shelves of anatomy books."
What Bill and the deadlifters-become-kettlebellers discovered was the potency of more dynamic movement in eliciting a neuroendocrine response. Having seen the KB improve your deadlift, should preview, for you, Bill, the kipping pull-up driving up your strict and 1RM pull-up. What I suspect is that the total effect of the CF hormonal and neurological milieu contain the metabolic mechanisms that allow the kettlebell work to improve the deadlift and are being repeated in scores of instances with nearly all of our movements, tools, and combinations, i.e., constant variation of functional movements executed at high intensity (CrossFit).
Establishing a fitness protocol on first principles - like chemistry or physics - is not currently possible. Doing still trumps thinking, training teaches us more about performance than reading, and experimenting reveals more than comparing theories. We deal here on this board daily with two very distinct communities - one that has done this thing (CF) and another that is analyzing it. The strength and value of CrossFit lies entirely within our total dominance of other athletes and this is a truth that cannot be divined through debate, only competition.
Finally, the notion has been presented to me four or five times in the last week that CrossFit is resting off our ability to improve the performance of elite athletes who are genetic freaks to begin with and that this success portends little for the rest of us who are less well endowed. To this observation I give three responses, 1) any program that can substantially advance the performance of top margin competitors is a top drawer program. 2) Our best performers are not my best natural athletes and by a long shot 3) We've put together a team of local athletes, men and woman, that all live within 5 miles of one another who have been regularly crushing all comers from around the country and beyond.
We do your stuff nearly as well as you do, you can't do ours very well at all, and we do everything that we both don't do much better than you can. Not very humble, I know, but true.
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