Crossfit day one: Snider gets back in shape

Eight minutes.

That’s how long my workout lasted on Saturday. That’s right, 8 minutes. It was my first in the Crossfit 9 program, and it took about everything I had to finish the routine.

I had rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder in March, and just recently passed my six-month rehab mark and was cleared for full activity — which is not to say that my shoulder’s a hundred percent. I’ve been back playing basketball for about six weeks, but wanted to add a new component to my exercise regimen, wanted to move away from the standard isolation-style lifting I’ve done for years: bench presses, curls, etc.

Crossfit is a program geared toward overall strength building that comes through multiple-movement exercises. It uses short, high-intensity workouts that build strength, endurance and balance all at once.

My instructor is Steve Ashton, owner of Anytime Fitness at 900 Central Ave. in St. Pete. A former Green Beret, he’s easily the fittest 47-year-old I know. I walked into his exercise room/torture chamber at 10 a.m. with a combination of excitement and fear.

I knew Crossfit was not for the faint of heart. I’m a competitive geezer, but wasn’t sure if I was quite up to this sort of thing. I’d tuned up for my first workout by doing a kettlebell class with Steve, which entails swinging and lugging these large cast iron balls with handles on them. My legs and shoulders were already sore.

Steve outlined my workout, a baseline for Crossfit. It included just two exercises:

• Thrusters: You prop a weighted barbell below your chin, drop into a squat, then push upward and thrust the bar over your head. It’s basically two exercises in one — a squat and an overhead press. Taking a conservative approach, Steve set me up with 65 pounds.

This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2008.