CrossFit: You never get bored. It never gets easy.

Source: CARRIE MACMILLAN REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Rich Boucher of Watertown and Becky Trzaski of Waterbury try to catch Mary Boucher of Watertown during a warm-up to their workout at CrossFit of Watertown. The football being used in the game is filled with sand and weighs about 9 pounds. Jim Shannon / Republican-American

They flip giant tires across parking lots and race one another while lugging 18-pound sledgehammers and tubes filled with water. Participants — teachers, former Navy SEALs, attorneys and machinists who range in age from 23 to 63 — bang out a mesmerizing amount of push-ups, pull-ups and dead lifts in 20 to 30 minutes. And they call it fun.

It’s all part of CrossFit, a workout regimen that delivers an ever-changing aerobic and strength conditioning at a frenzied pace.

There are 400-plus CrossFit affiliates worldwide, with seven in Connecticut, including one in the Oakville section of Watertown and one in Cheshire.

In a nutshell, CrossFit emphasizes proper form, full range of movement and “functional” exercises that proponents say will help you lift a 20-bag sand at Home Depot or hang off the edge of a building. (It is popular with firefighters and police officers.)

It is not for specialists, but can be used as a standalone program or as a base for other sports.

CrossFit is part of a fitness movement that eschews sophisticated gym equipment and returns to basics with free weights, dumbbells, calisthenics and gymnastics, said Cedric Bryant, chief science officer at the American Council for Exercise. Although CrossFit is a trademarked program, it one of many fitness regimes that use high-intensity training with minimal rest between circuits.

With CrossFit, participants might run a 5K in one workout and do nothing but lunges and Olympic-style lifting in another. The variety means muscles don’t adapt to one workload or get bored. Most of all, it never gets easy, says Pam Del Negro, a 30-year-old attorney from Hamden who CrossFits at Power Barn at 5:15 in the morning.

CrossFit was created by a former gymnast in the 1970s, but didn’t gain wider appeal until www.crossfit.com launched in 2001. Lisbeth Darsh, who served six years in the Air Force, came across it a year and a half ago on the recommendation of a friend living at a military base in Germany. Darsh, a personal trainer, was immediately hooked and got certified to teach it. She opened her affiliate inside the former pin factory in Oakville last November.

Darsh, 42, is prone to saying things like, “We are a quad-centric society” when sharing her disdain for most Nautilus-type gym equipment and her love for simple squats. Her idea of fun is swinging a six-pound ball at the end of a rope against a wall. The words “brutal” and “awesome” often land in the same sentence. She zealously snaps pictures of her members and spouts fitness-themed encouragement on her CrossFit blog.

“How many times do you really get to test yourself?” she asked, shortly after informing one member, as he gulped from a water bottle, that his five-month pregnant wife hadn’t needed water when she trained earlier that morning. “Here we do it every day.”

Over in Cheshire, Larry Cook began offering CrossFit out of his Power Barn gym about a year ago.

“I had been looking for a real change in my workout routine. I Googled cross training and came across the CrossFit site,” said Cook, 47, a former portfolio manager and lifelong athlete. “I tried a couple workouts and they were very humbling. I realized I was not as fit as I thought I was.”

At a recent workout in Cheshire, three men and three women went through three rounds of the following: 500-meter row, 50 wall balls (throwing a 10-to-16-pound ball up against a 9- or 10-foot line on the wall) and 50 levers (a challenging sit-up variation). The women beat the men by two seconds, finishing in 22:33.

Jackie Canelli, a 23-year-old from Cheshire, said she couldn’t do one push-up when she first started CrossFit in January but can now do them with ease and bench-press 85 pounds. Likewise, Del Negro said she could once only do one push-up. Now, she can do 100 without stopping.

Darsh and Cook teach essential CrossFit moves — from dips on parallel bars to proper sit-ups — in private sessions before moving new members into group classes. A “workout of the day” (WOD) might go by the innocent-sounding name “Fran” or the ominous “Pain Storm.” Since CrossFit is popular in the military, many of the names are in honor of fallen soldiers.

At CrossFit Watertown, there are no mirrors and iPods are banned. Members come for the team work as much as they come for the individual benefits. The traditional CrossFit schedule is six days of exercise a week with one day off in the middle. Watertown’s Sue Lozinski, 40, has lost 70 pounds since she started working out with Darsh 16 months ago.

“Every day, I drive here with a smile on my face,” said Lozinski, who teaches high school English. “The workout just clicks with me, it is always fun and different. We all know each other here, and how many people do you know in a gym? We encourage each other.”

Then there’s 37-year-old Chris Shea, who got hooked on CrossFit while in the Navy SEALs.

“I used to just do standard weight lifting, but it’s just so stupid,” said Shea, now a reservist. “This makes sense, everything in life involves jumping up and doing stuff. You can get more out of this in a half-hour than you can at the gym in two hours.”

Still, some exercise experts are either dismissive or wary of CrossFit.

“I think they market it well, but it’s nothing you couldn’t do in a ‘standard’ gym setting,” said Beau Kjerulf Greer, a sports science professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield. “They claim to have better adherence than more traditional programs, but I have never seen any actual data to support that contention.”

Darsh, however, says that in her four years as a personal trainer, CrossFit has less dropouts than anything she’s done before.

“It’s harder than anything else, but I think the higher retention is because of the sense of community it has,” she said.

Kenneth Kalousitan, a biology professor a Quinnipiac University in Hamden, called it an “interesting phenomenon,” but worried those with underlying cardiovascular or pulmonary pathologies “may be at a high risk for serious injuries” and should first consult a physician before trying it.

CrossFit practitioners add that they carefully screen participants before they join, and introduce new movements properly and slowly.