Force, Distance, Time

The following is a summary of Greg Glassman's brief lecture of force, distance, and time on 3/16/09 at a Crossfit Level 1 Cert in Brisbane, Australia.

So, basically we want to measure human performance and it has not been done yet thus far in academia (universities, published journals). To start, we need to use the fundamental units of measurements that physicists use to measure any kind of movement. There are only 3 units to measure movement (force, distance, and time). Everything else that measures physical movement (kinetic energy, acceleration, velocity) are derivatives of force, distance, and time. If you want to measure a rocket ship, a rock you throw, galaxies, stars, anything, you must use force, distance, and time.

Academia (and I could speak of my own experience at UBC) has us studying things like the Krebs citric acid cycle (basically what happens to oxygen in a cell). The Krebs f'n cycle hasn't taught us a thing about how to advance human performance! Nobody has ever trained differently because of what they learned about the Krebs cycle.

We want a technology on how to advance human performance, not an understanding. It's purely telological, meaning we need an end state. We want to model our training methodology to reach this end state and our end state is to increase work capacity across broad time and modal domains.

On a side note, a lot of communities like the swiss ball or pilates community is saying that they're functional. We are the most functional fitness program there is because to call yourself functional, you must define what "functional" is. And we could list a set of characteristics explaining what functionality is. We could say that functional exercises induce a wave of contraction from core to extremity, that they're safe, essential, that they're built in our DNA, it's how we're designed to move. Soon enough, we get to the fact that they're efficient in there unique way to move large loads, a long distance, quickly. If that sounds familiar to you, we're back at where we started, in using force, distance, and time to measure functional fitness