“I don’t want to do a CrossFit because I lose my muscles!”

This is probably one of the sentences you hear most often.

But the question is also good: “Can I really build muscle with it? If I only do CrossFit? ”

While some women are more afraid of becoming too muscular (don’t worry girls, this is not so easy and requires a lot of help from the supplement direction), the men are more likely to lose their muscle mass or not build it up at all.

But why do many have this fear? If we look at the top performers on the scene, like Jason Khalipa and Froning, you can see that they don’t have bodies like the top bodybuilders, but their muscle mass cannot be denied.

So is it possible to build muscle mass with the CrossFit Training or do the muscular CrossFitters bring their gain from their previous sports?

CrossFit for hypertrophy

Many misinterpret CrossFit as “that’s just circuit training”. Those who rely on this limited horizon can also logically conclude that this form of fitness training is actually not suitable for building muscle. Compare my men’s fitness article “Isn’t CrossFit just circuit training?”

While you can often build up the Workout of the Day (WoD) as a kind of circle, CrossFit is much more than that. The sport of fitness includes weightlifting exercises from Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting. So squats, bench presses, shoulder presses, pushing, tearing and the like. Depending on the training goal of the coach or the respective box, a different focus is placed. Basically, however, the area of ​​maximum or explosive force is often focused. 

A study by Schönfeld et al. in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 2014 showed that strength training that trains the area of ​​maximum or explosive strength (in this case, 7 sets with 3 reps at 3 RM) showed almost identical developments in hypertrophy as hypertrophy-specific training of 3 × 10 reps on the 10RM as we know it from classic muscle building training.

It is particularly interesting that the two training variants do not differ in terms of increasing muscle mass, but they do differ in the area of ​​strength increase. It was much higher during maximum strength training.

Six-time CrossFit Games athlete Marcus Filly proves that CrossFit can also serve for hypertrophy

What does that mean for you?

Basically, it provides a scientific basis to calm your conscience. If you would like to do CrossFit or would like to do it and were previously afraid of losing your mass or not building up enough of it, you can now read in black and white that this will most likely not be the case.

By the way, I felt the same way when I started CrossFit in 2009. First I continued to pump bluntly and then added a WoD. Until I decided to give it a serious try. And lo and behold. Not only my performance but also my optics improved rapidly. No risk, no fun. In this case, the risk was just a barrier in my head. If you recognize yourself here, I can only recommend you to fully engage in the experiment. You will not regret it.

It depends on the training stimulus

There is one limitation, however, that I don’t want to keep from you. Your training success depends enormously on the quality of your training and the stimulus set. Unfortunately, in addition to those who simply design CF as circuit training, there are also those who structure their WODs differently but usually only train in the area of ​​strength endurance. Although it is of great importance in the pursuit of “Elite Fitness”, it is not the be-all and end-all. A balanced CF training also includes the increase in maximum strength and a sensible periodization. This does not mean that, like in bodybuilding, you do a 2 or 3 split or exercise 12 weeks of hypertrophy and then define it. But that your focus for some time is on building strength and explosiveness – that’s the majority of a CrossFit year – peppered with accessory work such as stability exercises and short quick WODs that are in the area of ​​HIIT training. But there are also days when you just have a hard time lifting, the so-calledHeavy days. The closer you get to a competition, the more you will focus on conditioning. That is the part that many people call strength endurance. CrossFit has become such a buzzword that it is used as often as possible in relation to your own training. Even if you mess it up with it. Unfortunately, you run the risk of meeting people who do CrossFit while actually following Freeletics, really only do circuit training or just train their strength endurance with different exercises. This makes muscle building really difficult.

Hypertrophy needs the right stimulus

To build muscle you either need the appropriate time under tension (TUT), which you can achieve wonderfully by doing more repetitions or fewer repetitions and longer execution time. Compare the article on Tempo Training. 

So it always depends on which training program you follow and what the intended appeal of this program is. CrossFit Endurance sets its goal more to support endurance performance for triathletes and endurance athletes in general, while Marcus Filly with his Functional Bodybuilding or Alexander Thomas with his CrossBuildingfocus precisely on bringing together the best from the world of hypertrophy and CrossFit. In short, anyone who follows a classic structure of their CrossFit training with a warm-up, skill, strength part, and a subsequent WoD – paired with a meaningful periodization that gives the body healing chances and scope for adaptation, has excellent prospects of improving muscle mass and athletics. On the other hand, those who primarily design cardio-heavy training units such as those from Freeletics as CrossFit will continue to feed their misconception that CF is not suitable for building muscle.