Rhabdo... 4 days after Rhabdo. URGENT

[Katherine Derbyshire]

Originally Posted by Marcus Allen

Doesn't that go for pretty much all the MP WODs?

I just don't get te philosophy that says HQ has to warn everybody about the WODs. Look at the videos, this stuff is hard. I understand that there may be an issue with GHD sit ups specifically, but I've never had one personally, or directly observed it.

Too much of anything will F up some part of you. Kipping pull ups, squats, box jumps, whatever.

You can't out document stupid behavior.

Sure, but the problem is that CFHQ doesn't even try. GHD situps are not only riskier than many other movements, but the risks are not obvious, even during the workout.

Katherine

[Lee A Koboroff]

Would a simple solution be to program GHD situps in smaller numbers and perhaps more frequently? Or do we actually need to do 100+ at a time to see benefits?

[Eric Montgomery]

Originally Posted by Marcus Allen

Doesn't that go for pretty much all the MP WODs?

I just don't get te philosophy that says HQ has to warn everybody about the WODs. Look at the videos, this stuff is hard. I understand that there may be an issue with GHD sit ups specifically, but I've never had one personally, or directly observed it.

Too much of anything will F up some part of you. Kipping pull ups, squats, box jumps, whatever.

You can't out document stupid behavior.

The issue with GHDs is that you won't feel any soreness or muscle failure as you're doing them--you may feel fine as you finish rep 100, but then be crippled the next day. Now if you posted a workout that was 3 rounds of 10x225 squats and 30 pullups, many people are either going to have to scale the weight down or use assistance because they're going to hit muscle failure and be unable to push it far enough to injure themselves. No one is going to get rhabdo from 50 (or even 500, probably) box jumps or air squats, they'll just be sore the next day. And high rep pullups aren't typically a rhabdo risk unless someone is doing jumping pullups and resisting on the way down.

What would be wrong with CF.com posting a "hey, if you haven't built up to this volume, don't do 5 rounds of 30 GHD situps today unless you want rhabdo" footnote at the bottom of a posting like Mr. Joshua? What's with the mindset that "we're tough, we do workouts that can put you in the hospital"? It's ok to throw warnings out there--it's called basic risk management. If I allowed my Marines to do a workout with 100 GHD situps and ended up putting a few of them in the hospital, I'd be relieved (and probably court-martialed) for negligence.

Originally Posted by Lee A Koboroff

Would a simple solution be to program GHD situps in smaller numbers and perhaps more frequently? Or do we actually need to do 100+ at a time to see benefits?

Yes, whether it's in workouts or in telling someone that it would be a good idea to do 10-20 a day as part of their warmups, either of those would fix it.

[Robert D Taylor Jr]

Originally Posted by Thomas Green

Oh stop already. That is just ridiculous.

We can all thank goodness for the SUSAN KOMAN FOUNDATION when it comes to Cancer. Or MDA for Muscular Dystrophy. THE AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY. THE SALVATION ARMY. Are you really saying that Crossfit is to Rhabdo what the American Cancer Society is to Cancer?

No, clearly, I'm not saying that. Read carefully: Nobody heard of exercise induced rhabdo before CF publicized it. Cancer is a real concern, rhabdo is an overblown gimmick, now used to criticize CF. Get a crush or burn injury, get rhabdo and die, get exercise induced rhabdo rehydrate and rest for a couple of days and get back to work. That's what the evidence says. And you'd probably get it from a marathon or boot camp and wouldn't know what it is. CF advertised the risk of rhabdo, and is now some knid of leading cause of it. Bull****, run along now, you can now apparently hang out a performance menu and *** if you want to complain about the evils of CF, I hear there's plenty of room there.

[Robert D Taylor Jr]

Originally Posted by Katherine Derbyshire

I can visualize a great ad campaign in which the National Kidney Foundation and CFHQ team up: train hard, but train smart. Maybe co-sponsor ultramarathon events -- mentioned upthread as another common rhabdo generator. Or, on a smaller scale, get the NKF to help them develop educational materials for certs, and/or do some real research into exactly what the risk factors are. CF has some great marketing minds. If they really wanted to promote rhabdo awareness (again, as opposed to marketing the danger factor) they could find a way.

Untreated compartment syndrome can lead to rhabdo, so either way a trip to the ER is in order.

Katherine

I think this idea would be a win for CFHQ, but wouldn't do anything to prevent most exercise induced rhabdo, and be irrelevant for rhabdo prevention efforts (which don't really exist, anyway for good reason.)

[Justin Z. Smith]

Originally Posted by Robert D Taylor Jr

Read carefully: Nobody heard of exercise induced rhabdo before CF publicized it.

A quick search of PubMed for "exercise induced rhabdomyolysis" yields 181 hits, starting in 1966.

Searching for "exertional rhabdomyolysis" yields 245 hits, starting in 1963.

Searching for "exercise induced muscle damage" yields 778 hits, starting in 1970.
I'm sure the armed forces, marathon, and ultramarathon literatures have quite a few studies on this topic too.

I personally heard of muscle damage due to exercise prior to CrossFit. It doesn't really matter that I didn't know the formal medical name - it sure looks like others did.

Justin

[Rene Forestier]

Originally Posted by Justin Z. Smith

A quick search of PubMed for "exercise induced rhabdomyolysis" yields 181 hits, starting in 1966.

Searching for "exertional rhabdomyolysis" yields 245 hits, starting in 1963.

Searching for "exercise induced muscle damage" yields 778 hits, starting in 1970.
I'm sure the armed forces, marathon, and ultramarathon literatures have quite a few studies on this topic too.

I personally heard of muscle damage due to exercise prior to CrossFit. It doesn't really matter that I didn't know the formal medical name - it sure looks like others did.

Justin

Your making his point...I'm not sure what your intended point was, though. The average layperson has not heard of the term "rhabdomyolysis" before CrossFit, but many people with any common sense are aware that you can suffer "muscle damage due to exercise".

I'm also not sure what the point of posting those inflammatory threads from Perf Menu was...pretty tasteless. There was an entry from a thread I was involved in and only part of the context was given...typical.

[Thomas Green]

Originally Posted by Rene Forestier

Your making his point...I'm not sure what your intended point was, though. The average layperson has not heard of the term "rhabdomyolysis" before CrossFit, but many people with any common sense are aware that you can suffer "muscle damage due to exercise".

I'm also not sure what the point of posting those inflammatory threads from Perf Menu was...pretty tasteless. There was an entry from a thread I was involved in and only part of the context was given...typical.

His point was basically because so many people have gotten rhabdo from doing CF, people are now more familiar with the illness. And apparently that's "spreading awareness" in a good way

[Christie Warner]

Originally Posted by Eric Montgomery

That's part of the problem--you won't see GHD situps for a month, then a workout will pop up that calls for 100 or 150 of them, with no warning that you shouldn't try to do all of them unless you've built up your capacity for them.

Why don't people get this? It is really a simple concept.


Anyway, GHD situps are no more risky than olympic lifting or putting any weighted bar overhead for an exercise. The people who get injured doing GHD situps either do not have adequate coaches teaching them how to properly involve the exercise in their programming or they are too cocky to take it slow and easy for the first tries at it. I'm not going to get into a debate about CF main page programming and what not, but I will say that people need to learn how to modify programs individually. No one should do handstand pushups because "main page says so" if they cannot even hold themselves in the hand stand position for 30 seconds at least. I don't think main page expects everyone to either. I think they expect people to use common sense....WHO would have thought.

[Robert D Taylor Jr]

Originally Posted by Thomas Green

His point was basically because so many people have gotten rhabdo from doing CF, people are now more familiar with the illness. And apparently that's "spreading awareness" in a good way

No, CF discovered that it could cause this condition and began publicizing it within the community. CF exploded exponentially and based on the lack of current research about exercise induced rhabdo, rhabdo didn't ihncrease the same way. I think "so many" is vastly overstating the case, but I'm not surprised you're saying it.

Justin you're right, clearly "somebody" had heard of it. I should've said lay people, regular exercisers or some other more accurate term

And exercise causes muscle damage, man, you just made my case that this rhabdo thing is an overblown piece of "CF is the devil hysteria". Thanks.