When most people hear the word CrossFit, they probably picture barbells, pull-ups, box jumps, burpees, and people pushing themselves through intense workouts. While those things are certainly part of CrossFit, they don’t fully explain what CrossFit is actually designed to accomplish.
At its core, CrossFit is about General Physical Preparedness, or GPP.
That might sound like a complicated fitness term, but the idea is actually pretty simple: we want to prepare you for whatever physical challenges life throws your way.
The goal isn’t simply to become really good at one exercise or one type of workout. It’s not about being the strongest person in the gym, running the fastest mile, or doing the most pull-ups. Those can all be worthwhile goals, but GPP is about developing a broad range of physical abilities so that you are capable, adaptable, and resilient.
In other words, we don’t know exactly what life is going to ask of us. So we train for a little bit of everything.
What Is General Physical Preparedness?
General Physical Preparedness is the development of fitness across multiple physical qualities rather than specializing in just one area.
Think about everyday life.
You might need to carry a heavy box up the stairs. Pick up a grandchild. Hike several miles on vacation. Get up and down from the floor. Carry groceries from the car. Move furniture. Climb stairs when you’re tired. Play with your kids or grandkids. Spend an afternoon working in the yard. Run to catch a flight through an airport.
You don’t know which of those things you’ll need to do tomorrow.
That’s why training only one physical quality isn’t enough.
GPP prepares you to handle a wide variety of physical demands. You may never need to perform a heavy barbell clean in your daily life, but learning how to safely and efficiently pick a weight up from the floor can help develop strength, coordination, balance, power, and body awareness that transfer into countless other activities.
We’re not training for the workout. We’re training for life.
CrossFit Trains Multiple Modalities
One of the things that makes CrossFit different from many traditional fitness programs is the variety of movements and energy systems we train.
CrossFit combines weightlifting, gymnastics, monostructural movements, and constantly varied combinations of these activities.
Weightlifting and Resistance Training
Barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, medicine balls, and other forms of resistance help us develop strength and power.
You’ll see movements such as squats, deadlifts, presses, cleans, snatches, lunges, carries, and Olympic lifting variations.
These movements aren’t included simply because they’re challenging. They teach us how to produce force and control our bodies while moving external loads.
Strength becomes particularly important as we get older. Maintaining muscle and the ability to produce force helps us remain independent and capable in everyday life.
Being strong enough to pick something up is useful.
Being strong enough to pick something up when you’re tired, awkwardly positioned, or in a hurry is even more useful.
Gymnastics and Bodyweight Movements
Gymnastics movements include things like pull-ups, push-ups, dips, handstands, rope climbs, toes-to-bar, and various core movements.
But gymnastics training isn’t necessarily about becoming a competitive gymnast.
It’s about learning to control your own body.
Bodyweight movements develop relative strength, coordination, balance, stability, mobility, and body awareness. Even when a movement needs to be scaled, you’re still developing these qualities.
For many adults, simply being able to get down to the floor and stand back up confidently is an important measure of physical capability.
That’s GPP.
Monostructural Conditioning
Running, rowing, biking, swimming, and other cyclical activities fall into the monostructural category.
These movements help develop cardiovascular endurance and our ability to sustain physical effort over time.
We train both shorter, harder efforts and longer, steady efforts because our bodies need to be capable of working across different durations and intensities.
A five-minute hard effort requires something different from a 45-minute hike.
Both are useful.
Mixed Modal Training
Then we combine these modalities.
You might run, perform some kettlebell swings, do bodyweight movements, and then get back on the bike. Another workout might combine rowing with deadlifts and box step-ups.
This is where CrossFit’s constantly varied approach becomes particularly valuable.
Life doesn’t usually separate physical demands into neat categories.
You don’t get to say, “Today I’m only going to use my cardiovascular system.”
Instead, life asks you to combine strength, endurance, balance, coordination, and movement skills and sometimes you need to do these while you’re tired.
Mixed-modal training helps prepare you for exactly that.
How Do We Measure GPP?
One of the great things about CrossFit is that we don’t have to guess whether we’re getting fitter.
We measure it.
We track things like weight lifted, repetitions completed, workout times, distances, running pace, rowing pace, bike output, and movement skills.
Maybe your deadlift increases from 135 pounds to 165.
Maybe your 1-mile run gets faster.
Maybe you can do five unbroken push-ups when you couldn’t do one before.
Maybe you can row 2,000 meters at a faster pace.
Maybe you can perform more pull-ups.
Maybe you can complete a familiar workout faster using the same movements and loads.
Those are measurable improvements.
We use benchmark workouts and repeated movements to see how our fitness changes over time. When you perform a workout again months later and discover that you can lift more, move faster, complete more repetitions, or recover more quickly, you have objective evidence that your fitness has improved.
But there’s another measurement that matters just as much.
How does your fitness show up outside the gym?
Can you carry your luggage through the airport without struggling?
Can you get up off the floor without using your hands?
Can you hike with your family?
Can you move boxes around your house?
Can you work in the yard without your back giving out?
Can you keep up with your grandchildren?
Can you continue doing the activities you enjoy?
Those are real-world fitness tests.
Why GPP Matters More as We Get Older
When we’re young, it’s easy to take physical capability for granted.
We assume we’ll always be able to run, jump, climb, carry, bend, squat, and get up off the floor.
But physical capacity can decline when we stop challenging it.
That’s one reason strength training, cardiovascular conditioning, mobility, balance, coordination, and power become increasingly important as we age.
The goal isn’t simply to live longer.
The goal is to be capable for as many of those years as possible.
We want to maintain the physical capacity to participate in life rather than gradually narrowing what we’re able to do.
This is especially important for adults over 40.
You don’t need to train like a professional athlete, to chase every personal record, or even to do every movement exactly as prescribed.
You need to consistently challenge your body in different ways.
That’s why scaling is such an important part of CrossFit.
If you can’t do a pull-up, we modify it.
If a particular weight is too heavy, we reduce it.
If jumping isn’t appropriate, we step.
If running doesn’t work for you today, we find another way to train the same energy system.
The goal isn’t to prove something during one workout.
The goal is to develop long-term physical preparedness.
Fitness for Whatever Comes Next
That’s ultimately what GPP is about.
We don’t know what physical challenges tomorrow, next month, or next year will bring. But we can prepare our bodies to handle a wide variety of demands.
We train strength because life requires strength.
We train endurance because life requires endurance.
We train mobility because life requires us to move through different ranges of motion.
We train balance and coordination because life and terrain isn’t perfectly predictable.
We train power because sometimes we need to produce force quickly.
We train gymnastics because controlling our own body matters.
We train running, rowing, biking, and other conditioning because having a strong cardiovascular system matters.
And we combine all of these things because life doesn’t happen one movement at a time.
That is the beauty of General Physical Preparedness.
CrossFit isn’t about becoming exceptionally good at one thing while neglecting everything else. It’s about becoming a more capable human being.
At CrossFit Dwell, that’s what we’re ultimately after.
We want you to become stronger, fitter, more confident, and more capable everywhere your life takes you.
Because the best measure of your fitness isn’t how impressive your workout looks.
It’s how much life you’re prepared to live.
Ready to Build Fitness for Life?
You don’t have to be “in shape” before you start CrossFit. You don’t need to know how to lift weights, do pull-ups, or run a mile. Our coaches can scale movements and workouts to meet you where you are while helping you gradually build the strength, endurance, mobility, and confidence you need.
If you’re looking for a sustainable way to get stronger and stay capable for the long haul, come see what CrossFit Dwell is all about. Sign up for a FREE INTRO and let’s schedule a conversation to talk about how we can help you gain general physical preparedness.
